She'd known this was coming.

"How about after dinner? Meet me at Ellen's and we can go someplace."

"Ellen knows?"

Kara nodded. "Ellen, my mother, and Bert. They're the only ones. And Kelly, of course."

Rob's eyes were intense as they bored into hers.

"Of course. Everyone but me. And Jill. We've got to figure out when to tell her."

"Yes. I know."

Kara wasn't looking forward to tonight's discussion.

Rob hovered outside until she had locked the door behind him, then waved good-bye and hurried off.

As she turned away from the door, Kara felt her arms and legs give way, as if someone had severed all their nervous connections. As she went down, a voice spoke in her mind.

"At last! I thought he'd never never leave!" leave!"

February 26 12:17 A.M.

Rob was cruising Manhattan.

I'm a father! Jill's my daughter!

The two thoughts kept echoing in tandem off the inner walls of his skull. They'd kept him awake, kept him wired. Which was why he was up and out and doing something he never did: driving around the city.

He cruised the avenues, using Harlem or the Park as his uptown boundaries, and Ca.n.a.l Street downtown. Traffic was light. He drove at a leisurely pace, staying in the center lanes to let the cabs and everyone else in a hurry slip by on either side. The street lights glimmered on his windshield and off the pa.s.sing cars, the neon from the various store fronts refracted through the steam rising from the street vents. The city had its own brand of beauty. He felt enough at peace with himself tonight to enjoy it. He smiled. Stopping to smell the roses, Manhattan style.

He wished he could have got together with Kara tonight but she had called around 4:30 or so to tell him that she wasn't feeling well. She seemed to have picked up an intestinal virus or something and was going to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening in bed.

Probably the best idea. She hadn't sounded well at all. Rob had been tempted to drop by Ellen's and hang around with Jill anyway but had canceled the idea. He was afraid he might start crying again.

Christ, hadn't that been a scene this afternoon! He didn't know where it had come from but all of a sudden he'd been bawling like a wimp. And in front of Kara, too. Embarra.s.sing as all h.e.l.l, although it hadn't seemed to bother her in the least.

Anyway, his throat tended to get tight every time he thought of Jill, so maybe it was better if he hung loose on his own tonight.

He was tooling up Sixth into Chelsea when impulse pulled him left onto Twenty-first. He was glad he no longer had to camp out here every night. He came to a complete stop in front of Gates' house.

The lights were on.

That wasn't so strange, really. If Kara hadn't been feeling well, she probably hurried back to Ellen's without bothering to turn them off.

He wondered if she'd locked the door.

Rob double-parked and ran up the steps. He tried the door. Rattled it. Good. She'd locked it behind her. But through the gla.s.s he spotted the green light glowing on the alarm panel. She'd forgotten that. He rattled the door again, then walked back to his car. He'd have to remind her about the alarm. It would be a sin to let vandals get hold of that library, or that fabulous stereo rig.

He put the car in gear and started rolling again, thinking about instant fatherhood.

Kara wanted to scream but had no voice, wanted to run, crawl, claw a path away from here but had no limbs, none at least that would obey her. And what good would blind flight do? The horror was within her, all around her, it permeated her flesh, it encapsulated her like a steel bubble.

Horror, gut-wrenching panic, rage-they'd been her world since this afternoon. And they were with her even now, but they were under control. She could almost say she was calmer now-as calm as a madwoman in a straitjacket. She had to hold on. That was all she could do. She could feel her sanity jittering on its already frayed tether, blindly straining to pull free and flee into the waiting darkness.

After the horrors of the past ten hours it was a wonder that she retained any control at all.

She knew a few things. She knew it was night, and knew she was in the dining room. She could smell and hear, she could taste her dry mouth but could not move her tongue or lips, could see but was incapable of moving her eyes. She'd been a prisoner within her own body since this afternoon.

This afternoon...

Now that her body was in one of its quiet periods, the insane events of the afternoon and evening rushed back in a flood...

At first she had simply lain there on the floor inside the door. The voice didn't speak again. Eventually she became convinced that she had suffered a ma.s.sive stroke; some sort of brain aneurysm had ruptured.

But then she started to move.

First the fingers of the right hand, then the left, moving independently of her volition, without her permission, rippling up and down like a pianist playing rapid scales. Then the arms bent, the knees straightened. She sat up. Kara had a sense of the muscles moving but she was exerting no effort, she felt no strain.

The terror was building inside her. Her body was like a runaway machine. A moment ago she had been pleading with her limbs to move, now she was trying to stop them. Her body turned over onto its hands and knees and began crawling down the hall. Where am I going Where am I going?

Her body crawled into the big dining room. It headed straight for the couch and pulled itself up onto the cushions. She was panting but had no feeling of breathlessness.

And then the voice spoke again.

"There! That's better! A cushion is much preferable to a hard floor any day, don't you think, Kara?"

She tried to scream but still she had no voice.

"Don't be afraid, Kara. You're in no danger."

Panic swirled around her again. She felt as if she were sealed inside a tight cubicle of foot-thick gla.s.s, banging frantically, desperately on the walls with no one to hear her but this disembodied voice.

Where was it coming from? It sounded like...

Then her eyes closed.

Kara panicked. She was in total darkness. It was like being blind. She fought to raise her lids but they might as well have been someone else's for all the response she elicited.

The last thing she remembered seeing was the gold mantle clock over the fireplace. It had read 3:20. Through the darkness she heard faint noises from the street outside-horns, trucks shifting gears. She had always hated the incessant street sounds of New York for keeping her awake, for intruding on her concentration. Now she loved them. They proved that she was still alive. And she heard the clock's chime-once on the half hour, once for each hour of the day on the hour.

When her eyes reopened, the afternoon light was fading and the clock said 4:32.

"I feel better now. Stronger."

Her body sat up, then stood and walked a few wobbling steps around the dining room before stumbling back to the couch.

"Though not strong enough to negotiate the steps, I fear. But that is not important now. What is important is a little phone call we must make."

Kara watched her hand reach out and lift the phone receiver, saw it dial 4-1-1. She heard the operator come on the line.

And then she heard her own voice speaking.

"Manhattan, please. The Midtown North police precinct."

Her own voice, speaking someone else's words. Mentally she jumped at the sound of it, but her body remained still. She heard the recorded answer, then watched her hand punch in the number.

She listened as she asked for Detective Harris, heard herself explain how she wasn't feeling well and wanted to go to bed early tonight. She heard the concern and disappointment in Rob's voice and tried to scream out, Rob! No! It's not me! Not me Rob! No! It's not me! Not me! But instead her voice went on lying, promising that they'd get together tomorrow.

After hanging up with Rob, her eyes closed and she spent another couple of hours in terrified darkness, listening to the clock and the street.

When her eyes opened again she saw that it was almost seven.

"We'll have to call Aunt Ellen."

She thought she had become inured to shock by then, but she was jolted by watching herself dial Ellen's number and listening as her voice glibly informed her aunt that she would be staying at Kelly's again and would explain later.

"There! That should give us a respite." .

Sudden fury blazed up in Kara. She wanted to attack this thing, this voice... but it was only a voice. How did you attack a voice?

And who who was the voice? was the voice?

She thought she knew. Words formed in her mind. A question. Mentally, she spoke the thought.

You're not Janine, are you?

"No."

Something about the voice... something familiar. The rhythm, the choice of words. She was sure now who it was.

Are you Doctor Gates?

"Doctor Gates is dead."

Then who-?

"Quiet! I need to rest."

There came another period behind closed eyelids, a long one during which Kara thought she might have slept-not because she felt safe enough, but to escape the horror temporarily, and maybe to awaken and learn that it was all a terrible nightmare.

She was roused by abrupt movements of her body, and by noises from the front door. Someone was rattling it.

The dining room was dark but light poured down the hall from the chandelier. Her body rose from the couch and walked unsteadily but stealthily to the kitchen where it pulled a long-bladed knife from a drawer.

She waited. The door rattled once more, briefly, then all was silent.

"That, I would say, was your friend, Detective Harris. Even after midnight, when he believes you home and asleep, he is still nosing round. He is going to be trouble."

Kara had no doubts now.

You are are Doctor Gates Doctor Gates!

"I told you: Doctor Gates is dead."

Then who are you? And why are you doing this to me?

"You'll know in a moment. I believe I'm strong enough now." Her body moved to one of the cabinets and she pulled out two jars of junior foods, the kind Kara used to feed Jill when she was a baby. Then she was heading across the hall toward the door to the cellar.

"I'm not being coy. It's simply that it's easier to show you who I am than to explain. And now you will see."

Steadying itself on the banister, her body started down the cellar stairs.

Rob turned downtown on Seventh after leaving the townhouse. As he pa.s.sed the Kramer Medical Arts building, he checked his coat pocket. He still had them: the keys he had taken from Gates' secretary this morning. He pulled into the curb.

Up in the office he searched Gates' desk for keys to the filing cabinets but found nothing. Frustrated, edgy, he sat in Gates' high-backed chair. He realized that it wasn't the files that had drawn him back to the office. It was the other back room-the padded cell. He needed one more look at it.

He propped the cell door open with copies of the PDR PDR and and Dorland's Ill.u.s.trated Medical Dictionary Dorland's Ill.u.s.trated Medical Dictionary-he didn't want to be accidentally locked in here. He'd probably die of starvation before anybody found him. He turned on the overhead light and stood in the center of the cell.

What on earth had Gates used this for? Who had he kept here?

The questions plagued him. Questions existed to be answered. They never went away until they were answered.

He paced the narrow dimensions of the room, tapping on the padding with the heel of his hand and the side of his shoe. It was thick. If you were the sort who was inclined toward such things, you might be able to knock yourself out by banging your head against these walls, but you wouldn't be able to crack your skull. You might even- Something crunched.

Rob's shoe had tapped against a slight bulge in the lower padding. Something else was under the fabric. He reached down and found a split seam along the floorline. Dropping to his knees, he wriggled his fingers up under the fabric. There was paper crammed in there. He vised a couple of sheets between his fingers and yanked them out. Then he pulled more out. The s.p.a.ce was stuffed with sc.r.a.ps from notepads, prescription blanks, used envelopes, all covered with tiny script. And a pencil, short, looking as if someone had sharpened it with his teeth.

Rob studied the script. He was no handwriting expert, but these looked like they were written by the same hand that had sent Kara the warning note. And they were dated.

Rob began setting them in order. He had some reading to do.

He had a feeling one of his questions was about to be answered.

The bas.e.m.e.nt was small, as Rob had mentioned earlier. Had it been less than twelve hours since they'd arrived here together? It seemed ages. After all the high ceilings upstairs, these low-slung pipes overhead gave her a hemmed-in feeling, seemed to press down on her.

Her body took her to a paneled part.i.tion. Her hand reached up among the pipes and pulled a lever. Something clicked inside the wall. She pushed on a panel which dropped back then slid to the left, revealing a small room.

A foul odor wafted out-urine, feces. Had she been in control of her body she might have gagged.

"Unpleasant, isn't it? But if I've got to smell it, so should you. I've been living in that for almost two days."