"Yes," he said. She hoped that he really did understand. She slipped out the door, not opening it wide, just in case her mother was looking this way, and closed it quickly behind her.

Actually there would be nothing visible inside except darkness now, but it made sense to practice safe manage -- ment. She returned to the house.

Her mother was pretty much out of it by this time. Good. Colene scrounged in the refrigerator for more to eat, and gobbled it down without bothering to sit. Then she went to her room. There was her bed, neatly made, and her desk where she normally did her homework, and her dresser and mirror, and the guitar she hoped someday to leam to play decently. All very conventional. She kept it that way delib -- erately, so that no one could garner any secrets about her by analyzing her living space. There was even a set of standard dolls on the dresser. Ken and Barbie. What a visitor would not know was that she had renamed the male: he was really Klaus. Thus the pair was Klaus Barbie. There had been a notorious Nazi criminal by that name. She flossed her teeth, brushed her hair, changed into her pajamas, and lay down on her bed. She stared at the ceiling.

Sleep didn't come. All she could do was think about Da -- rius, out there in the Bumshed, and her heart was beating at a running pace. She had to slow it to a walking pace before she could nod off. She knew from experience with bad nights.

After a time she got up, went to the closet, and changed into her silky nightgown. She loved the feel of it against her skin. It was long enough so that she wore nothing under it, which gave her a deliciously wicked feeling. It was a good outfit in which to dream. Very good. In fact, too good.

Now her heart slowed, but her thoughts turned darker. She remembered the time a few months ago when her beloved grandmother, one of the mainstays of her young life after the default of her parents, had sickened with cancer and then died. It was as if the last leg had been knocked out from under Colene's will to live. Without Grandma, what was the point? She had not exactly told Grandma about the horrors she had experienced, or how her life had been falling apart, but she suspected that Grandma knew. It was better to go where Grandma was, and have her reassurance again. Colene had taken her mother's pills from the cabinet, one sniff of which, as an Arabian Nights tale put it with suitable hyper -- bole, could make an elephant sleep from night to night. She swallowed three, then another, pondered, and finally two more. Six was a good number.

Six-six-six was the devil's own number. Sick-sick-sick was what these pills would make her. Sick unto death. Then she lay down in her sexy nightie -- the one she was wearing now. She wanted to expire in maid -- enly style.