Кей Хупер - Chill Of Fear

Bishop had warned him not to do this. Enhancing only one sense at the expense of all the others would exact a price, a painful one. Quentin knew. He knew if he kept this up for hours he'd have a pounding headache tomorrow, that his senses of smell and taste and touch and hearing would be muffled, maybe for the entire day. He knew his eyes would ache and be sensitive to the light, strained by being forced to work harder right now.

There was also a danger, Bishop believed, of losing the capability entirely. Pouring extra energy into one's senses to enhance them was one thing; totally shutting down one or more of those senses for an extended period of time was something else again. Balance. It was all about balance.

Quentin knew. He also didn't care.

He needed to watch Diana, so that's what he did. Leaning against the window frame, no longer even conscious of the room he was in, he watched.

And waited.

"If he didn't think so before, the man certainly thinks you're nuts by now," Diana muttered to herself as she got out of the shower and dried off. "Way to go, telling him all the gory details. Everybody knows they don't keep you drugged to the gills for a couple of decades if you don't have a lot of problems."

The worst thing was, Diana wasn't at all sure what Quentin's gut-level reaction had been. Oh, he'd been all compassion and understanding on the surface, saying all the right things, insisting that being medicated for most of her life didn't mean she was sick. Just that the doctors hadn't understood.

Oh, yeah, she believed that. Probably about as much as he really believed it. But she couldn't tell what he thought, not for certain. She didn't think she was very good at reading people's expressions, due mostly to a lack of practice; drifting through life on her medicated cloud, what other people thought or felt hadn't seemed, very often, to matter.

It mattered now. She didn't know why, or at least didn't want to admit it to herself, but it mattered to her what Quentin thought of her. And he undoubtedly thought she was hopelessly damaged goods. It shouldn't have hurt, that, because she'd always known it.

Now he knew it too.

Angry at herself and so tired that her thoughts were going in even more circles than usual, Diana pulled on a pair of silky pa-jama bottoms and a matching camisole. It was still fairly early, but she needed sleep and she needed it badly.

She went into her lamplit bedroom and turned down the bed, then sat on the edge and hesitated for only an instant before opening the nightstand drawer. The prescription bottle rolled a bit with the movement of the drawer, then stilled. She picked it up reluctantly.

This medication remained in her system only a few hours, only long enough to allow her to sleep. Her doctor had promised that, had sworn it, and since he was the one who had taken her off all the other medications, she believed him.

Still... the bottle was full.

Diana resisted taking as much as an aspirin now. Even with the scattered, restless thoughts and inability to focus on anything for very long, the raw emotions and almost painfully sharp senses, she preferred this state to what had gone before.

She had, mostly, drifted through more than twenty years of her life. She didn't want to drift anymore.

But she needed desperately to sleep, and she was afraid of what might happen if she didn't. So she shook a couple of pills into her hand and took them, washing them down with a sip of water from the bottle on her nightstand.

She got into bed and turned off the lamp, then lay back on the pillow. She felt an impulse to go to the window as she had so many nights before, but with an effort ignored it.

Sleep. She needed sleep. All this would make sense to her if she could only sleep.

Her mind continued to chase itself in circles for some time — she refused to look at the nightstand clock to see just how long it went on — but eventually quieted.

And, finally, she slept.

Diana opened her eyes and sat up in bed, oddly unsurprised to find herself in the gray time.

She knew it was still night, even though her bedroom was lit with that oddly flat, colorless twilight she recognized. It was always the same, in the gray time. Never darkness or light, just... gray.

She thought she had slept for hours, but didn't bother looking at the clock on the nightstand. It wouldn't show her anything. One of the truly spooky traits of the gray time was that there was no time there. Here. Clocks, whether digital or not, were faceless, featureless.

Wherever this place existed, it lay somewhere outside time; Diana had figured out that much. Yet she also had the sense that it was a place of movement, a place between the living world she knew and whatever came after it.

Not the spirit realm Quentin had spoken of, not exactly. More like the doorway, the corridor, connecting the two worlds.

She threw back the covers and got out of bed, aware of the chill of the room, a chill that even seeped upward through the plush carpet so that her feet felt like ice. She knew she should find her slippers or shoes, find a jacket or at least a robe, but didn't bother. It wouldn't make a difference, she knew that. It was always cold in the gray time. Cold to the bone.

Diana left her bedroom, vaguely interested to see how featureless the cottage seemed without color or shadows, but not interested enough to stop. There was somewhere else she had to be.

She left the cottage, stopping on the path that led from her door. Waiting. The lights out here looked strange and dull, not bright but merely a paler shade of gray. The shrubbery and flowers planted in pots and beds all around the cottage were eerily still and held that same one-dimensional appearance, like a grayish copy of a picture that had once held vivid color.

Not a breath of air stirred the cold twilight, though a faint, slightly unpleasant smell lingered. It wasn't something Diana had ever been able to identify, though it was somehow familiar. There were no night sounds, no pulse of life. There never was.

"Diana."

She turned slightly and looked at the little girl standing several feet away. A pretty child, with what seemed, in the colorless gray-ness, to be very fair hair surrounding a heart-shaped face.

"Hello." Diana noted the hollow sound of her own voice, the almost-echo. Different from the child's voice, which was perfectly clear. That, also, was normal for the gray time.

"You have to come with me," the little girl said.

Diana shook her head slightly, not negation but impatience. "The last time I followed one of you, it was to a grave."

The little girl frowned. "But Jeremy was on the other side. Your side. You know the difference. And you know the rules."

Diana did know, and quite clearly. In the gray time, her memory was perfect, her understanding absolute. For all its eerie strangeness, the gray time was a place in which she felt in control. But she also knew the dangers involved.

"I know this is not a safe place for me to be, in between two times. Two worlds."

"You can't stay long," the little girl agreed. "Keeping the door open is dangerous, that's one of the rules. And if you close it while you're still inside, you'll be trapped here. I don't expect you'd like that."

"No. I don't expect I would."

The little girl smiled. "Then we'd better hurry."

"What's your name?" Diana asked, because she always did.

"Becca."

Diana nodded. "Okay, Becca. You're the one who called me?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"There's something you need to see." Another frown drew her brows together. "And we really do have to hurry."

"I've spent hours here before," Diana protested, but followed nevertheless as Becca turned and led the way toward the distant stables.