It was mid-afternoon as Corey’s truck coasted past neatly trimmed lawns and bright white fences. “I’ve never seen your mom’s house before,” Corey mentioned to Sig, who road shotgun.

      “You can’t miss it,” answered Sig. “It’s the one with no windows.”

      Sure enough, a couple blocks further, they came to a dreary abode on which the windows had all been covered--not boarded up as if the place were abandoned, but professionally sealed so that no one could see inside. There was an empty cement slab in place of a lawn, which gave the impression that the house was further back than its neighbors, hiding between them. The flat, featureless door looked like it just might stand up to a battering ram. The overall impression was that of a prison more than a home.

      “Yikes,” was all Corey could think to say.

      “Yep,” Sig concurred.

      Corey pulled up along the curb opposite the house, instinctively choosing not to pull into the driveway. He parked and turned to face Sig, who didn’t exactly look thrilled to be dropped off.

      “Do you want me to stick around for a while, ‘til your mom gets home?”

      Sig offered a smile, but shook her head. “No. Thanks. She doesn’t like other people being at the house. I’ll just hang out for a little while. Listen to music.”

      “Okay,” Corey responded. He looked again at the cold fortress across the street and then back to Sig. “You know, if things ever get weird with you and your mom, there’s always the guest room at my house.” His lips curled into a smirk. “Or, you know, my room.”

      “Nice try, Don Juan,” said Sig, though she also smirked. She grabbed her bag off the floor between the seats and leaned over to kiss Corey. Their lips connected and held for a long moment. When Sig went to pull away, Corey hooked the neck of her shirt with his finger and pulled her back. She laughed, and allowed the kiss to be prolonged. Eventually, she had to mumble against his lips, “Mm-kay. Ths ‘nough.” Sig pulled free and slipped out the passenger door, which she shut behind her. She turned back to speak through the open window. “See you tomorrow, hot stuff.”

      “Right.” Corey watched Sig cross in front of the truck and head across the street, up the driveway. His eyes traced her retreating figure. “Tease,” he thought to himself. He drove off.

      Jamie had arrived at the Ford-Mathiasen Psychiatric Hospital in the early afternoon, donned her white coat, shut off her cell phone, and plunged into her work. She reviewed cases with fellow staff, went over reports, updated her schedule with meetings and seminars, and met with patients both chronic and acute. They told her of traumas and phobias, of enemies both real and imagined, and of the nightmares that plagued them. Jamie was glad to be surrounded by these afflicted people. Every tick and twitch had a categorization, every expression of behavior a diagnosis. The patients poured out their troubles, and it was Dr. Jamie Castle’s responsibility to provide guidance and a voice of caring, parental authority. She was in control. Most importantly, the slew of problems being discussed and analyzed were not her own. The only telltale sign that Jamie was not entirely at ease was the occasional quiver of her right hand, which she would curl into a fist and force to be still.

      Evening came. Jamie made a circuit of the hospital, checking in on colleagues and nurses, peeking in the different common rooms at groups of patients. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she dreaded the moment she would cease working and be left with her thoughts.

      She entered a wing of small apartments for inpatients and approached a particular room. She was not scheduled to meet with the person within but knocked on the door anyway. “Come in,” a soft voice consented.

      Jamie entered and closed the door behind her. A woman in her mid-thirties sat propped up on a bed, a sketchpad on her knees. She had dark, waving hair, and her naturally tanned, Sicilian skin had turned a frosty pale from lack of sunlight. This was not because she was kept locked in her room, but because she rarely elected to leave it. Her dark eyes were on her sketchpad, pencil scratching away at the paper.

      “How are you feeling tonight, Olivia?” Jamie asked.

      “Better than you,” Olivia answered without looking up, then added, “Sorry about Tabby.”

      Jamie remained silent a moment, taken aback. Then she responded, “Thank you.” Olivia surprised her from time to time with these little intuitions. Most doctors would call it coincidence, but Jamie’s own experiences had taught her to be more accepting of the alternative. She glanced around the room. The walls were covered with Olivia’s illustrations, pencil and charcoal. Though skillful, they tended toward the morose. There were images of dead bodies and of human organs, of gravesites and stormy skies. One of the few colored illustrations was simply a pair of eyes, wide and hateful, with brick-red sclerae and veins of a dark, forest green. They faced the bed, always glaring at the artist who drew them. Jamie knew those eyes too well, and seeing their portrait always made her shudder.

      Despite the ghastly images, Olivia never showed any tendencies toward violence. She was quite kind in her own way, with a dry sense of humor, though when she conversed she only ever seemed half present. The images she perpetually drew were not fantasies but rather nightmares. Some of the first she had hung on the wall depicted a much younger version of herself and a massive black figure with a warped face. The style was impressionistic, but one could follow the narrative unfolding from one drawing to the next: Olivia leading the pursuer through a wood, to a cliff, and finally watching as the man-beast toppled over the edge into a chasm below.

      Jamie noted several drawings she’d never seen before. One was of an industrial looking machine--like a car with a giant chainsaw on its front--surrounded by water. Another showed what appeared to be a red comet or shooting star streaking across the black sky. A third showed a figure, possibly a woman, who appeared to be at the center of a great blaze. “These are new,” mentioned Jamie. She pointed to another one: it was just the word CYCLONE drawn in thick, stylized letters. “What’s this?”

      Olivia shrugged as she continued to sketch in her pad. “Beats me.”

      “You know,” said Jamie, “if you could just dream us up some winning lottery numbers, we could be living in Barbados right now.”

      “And you’d still be miserable,” was Olivia’s response.

      Jamie cocked an eyebrow as she took a seat on Olivia’s bed. “I thought I was the doctor here.”

      “Once you’re inside the nuthouse, doesn’t really make much difference.” Olivia stopped penciling and turned the pad so that Jamie could see it. “How do you like this one?”

      It was only a rough doodle, preliminary shapes connected to form the outlines of two human bodies. One was seated, the other on its knees, facing the first.

      “What is it?” Jamie asked.

      “Something bad, I’m sure,” said Olivia as she resumed her work. “I only ever see bad things. Pain. Death. Sadness. Loneliness. Me. You.”

      Jamie regarded Olivia solemnly for a moment. She’d long ago stopped seeing her as a patient. Olivia was a friend, one anchored to the past by the same horrid weight that Jamie herself was tethered to. “Why don’t you get out of here, Olivia?” she finally asked. “You could walk out that door whenever you wanted. Go and live a normal life.”

      “Doesn’t matter where I am,” was Olivia’s matter-of-fact response. “The nightmares always find me. This is where I’m supposed to be.” Olivia set the pad and pencil down gently at her side, then covered her face with her hands as though the light of the room hurt her eyes. “Waiting. Just waiting.”

      “Waiting for what?” Jamie asked.

      “Waiting on your front porch.”

      Jamie squinted at her for a moment. “What is that supposed to--” Her eyes widened with sudden remembrance. “Oh, shit!”

      As she leapt from the bed and scurried out of the room, Jamie pulled the phone from her pocket and switched it on. She had six missed calls.

      When Jamie’s car pulled into the driveway, Sig was seated on the stoop, rubbing her legs to stave off the evening chill. Thin cords ran from the phone at her side to the buds in her ears. Her expression wasn’t one of anger or sadness, but of someone used to these disappointments. Jamie cursed to herself.

      A few moments later, they were inside the door, Jamie apologizing profusely. “I’m so sorry, kiddo.”

      “It’s fine,” said Sig flatly. “You know, if you’d just give me a key to the house....” She let the statement end. This was a discussion they’d had before, and Sig didn’t expect to sway her mother on the issue. She just wanted the miniscule satisfaction of pointing out the obvious, normal person’s solution to the problem.

      Jamie closed the door and snapped shut a half dozen locks. “Did you have to walk all the way from school?” she asked.

      “No, Corey drove me.”

      “Who’s Corey?”

      “My boyfriend.”

      “Sig, I don’t like people knowing where I live.” Sig didn’t have a response. “It’s fine,” Jamie said with a wave of her hand. “I’ll make some dinner.” She led Sig into the kitchen.

      Sig set her backpack down by the table and took a seat while Jamie threw some pasta into a pot and ran it under the sink. Sig folded her hands between her knees. She listened to the stream of water from the sink, the clank of the pot touching the stovetop, and the click-click-click of the pilot light. They all emphasized the utter lack of conversation. Jamie and Sig almost never knew what to say to one another. As it so happened, there was a question on Sig’s mind, though she was unsure how approach it. She strained for an icebreaker. As she looked around the kitchen, a thought struck her. “Where’s Tabby?” she asked.

      Her mother didn’t answer. She just stirred the pasta silently. A pang of regret hit Sig in the chest. That had backfired horribly. At the cat’s age, it wasn’t hard to imagine why she was nowhere to be seen, and Sig had liked Tabby. The cat had been around as long as Sig could remember. Moreover, she knew Tabby had been her mother’s only true companion. Sig searched for a new segue into her ultimate question. “Are you going to that thing in Cypress Knolls tomorrow? The reunion for all the Johnny victims?”

      “We’re not victims, Sig, we’re survivors,” her mother corrected. “And no. You couldn’t drag me back to that place with a tank.”

      This was it, Sig thought. Here goes. “Does that mean you’ll be at my graduation tomorrow?”

      Jamie stopped stirring. She turned to face her daughter. It seemed for a moment that she’d grown pale, as if the very thought caused her anxiety. “I don’t know, kiddo. I’m not one for big crowds.”

      Sig nodded. She was aware of this. Normally, she never asked her mother to attend school functions, to chaperone, or anything else that would put her in contact with the living. “It’s just that, with Dad out of town and all, you know, feels like I haven’t really graduated if no one’s there to witness it.” The reasoning sounded stupid out loud, but Sig had thought about all the other students and couldn’t imagine any of them without a single person present to watch them graduate.

      Jamie chewed on her lip. She was unconscious of the hand shaking at her side, though Sig took note of it. “All those people,” her mind protested. “All of them unknown.” She stared long at Sig’s innocent face. “It’s your daughter, for Christ’s sake.”

      “Okay,” she said at last. “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

      “Thanks,” Sig said, and she smiled. She had a very pretty smile, her mother observed. She was a very pretty girl. Jamie wondered if people told her that. She turned her attention back to the pasta.

      Silence reigned for another few moments. Jamie felt it was her turn to try and broach a topic. “So, this boyfriend of yours,” she began.

      “Corey,” said Sig.

      “Are you, um...are you being careful?”

      Sig rubbed her hands, suddenly embarrassed. She and her mother had never discussed the birds and the bees. Ever. “Are we really gonna have this conversation?”

      “I just,” Jamie stammered, “I just want to know what kind of boy he is.”

      “He’s nice,” was Sig’s gentle answer.

      Jamie sneered at the bowl of noodles, her natural cynicism kicking in. “Yeah, they all seem nice.”

      “Can we change the subject?” Sig asked.

      “You know,” Jamie went on, becoming Dr. Castle again, “in most cases of sexual assault, the assailant knows the target personally.”

      “Jeez, Mom!” Sig cried. “You don’t even know him. You don’t know any of my friends.”

      “I know boys. I know the way they act. I know what they think they’re entitled to.”

      Jamie, Sig had learned long ago, loved to bend any topic into one in which she was an authority. But fuck her--she didn’t know a goddamn thing about Corey or anything else in Sig’s life for that matter. “I love him,” Sig declared. Jamie just snorted, which made Sig burn. “What?” she demanded. “What? Are you saying I don’t love him?”

      “Children don’t know how to love,” lectured Jamie, her back still to her daughter. “They just know how to take what they want.”

      The legs of Sig’s chair scraped the floor as the girl shot to her feet. “What the fuck is your problem, Mom?”

      Jamie turned toward her. “I’m just looking out for you.”

      “Too little too late, lady!”

      “You don’t know how many young women I’ve treated who thought they were going out with ‘nice’ boys--”

      “I’m not your patient!” Sig yelled. “I’m your daughter!”

      It was as if someone flipped a switch in Jamie’s brain. She slapped the pot of noodles off the stove, and it clattered to the floor with a splash of water and soggy noodles. “Then listen to me, goddammit! Listen to your mother before you end up in a fucking body bag!”

      The silence that followed was oppressive. Sig’s mouth was agape. Jamie was astounded by her own outburst, and her hand quivered violently. “Sig, I’m sorry,” she began.

      But Sig already had her backpack in her hand and was headed for the front door. She unlatched the six locks and threw it open, storming out onto the cement lawn. Jamie followed her as far as the doorway, calling after her, “Sig, wait.”

      She saw that Sig had her phone to her ear. “Corey? Can you come pick me up?”

      “Just come back inside,” Jamie pleaded.

      Sig turned to her mother, holding the phone against her shoulder. “You only see the worst in people, Mom. You think everyone is going to be a knife-wielding maniac. That’s why you’ve ended up--” Sig cut herself off. Jamie felt the sting anyway. Sig turned and continued toward the sidewalk. “Yeah, I’ll be on the corner,” Jamie heard her say into the phone.

      Jamie squeezed the doorjamb, debating whether or not to go after her. Dealing with Sig was difficult. Not because of Sig, Jamie was well aware; because of her. She didn’t know if there was any point in trying to bring her back. “Sig,” she began to call. But she was stopped by the chirps of her own phone from within the house. Goddamn it. She watched her daughter march away for another moment, then retreated back inside and slammed the door shut.

      She stepped over the puddle of water and noodles that had spread across the kitchen tiles and snatched her phone off the counter. “Dr. Castle,” she answered into it.

      “Doctor, we need you back at the hospital.” It was one of the male nurses. “Something’s wrong with Olivia.”

      Olivia Mancuso had first come to the Ford-Mathiesan Psychiatric Hospital five years ago. She’d had visions her entire life, but had dismissed them as products of a fanciful mind, even when she would later learn that some of her imaginings had manifested in reality. Her encounter with the famed slasher of Cypress Knolls when she was eighteen had seemingly opened a floodgate of these visions, and since that traumatic meeting she had been plagued with waking nightmares, most of them abstract collages of images that she was never able to decipher. She found it helpful to draw them at times. Five years ago, a neighbor had heard her shrieking, and found her gibbering in her apartment, unresponsive to anyone around her. From Olivia’s incessant stream of intelligible noises, the occasional word would form: “no,” “run,” “swamp,” “Adrienne.” She’d been admitted to the psychiatric hospital, and after a few days’ care, during which she seemingly made a full recovery, she had elected to stay. It wasn’t just the connection she had with her doctor, Jamie Castle (though the two had already known one another and had been aware of their shared experience with Cypress Knolls’ most notorious resident). Whereas Olivia had spent her entire adult life feeling out of place, in the hospital she discovered a feeling of belonging. It wasn’t so much a sense of home as it was the sense that she had been assigned to a post, for what purpose she didn’t know nor did she question. The answer would eventually come, she was certain.

      Now, five years after her admittance, Olivia lay convulsing on her bed, again vomiting a melody of unintelligible syllables. She was blind to the nurses and doctors that surrounded her, one of which had summoned Dr. Castle on the phone. She was also ignorant of Jamie’s arrival a half hour later.

      When the fit had first seized her, all Olivia saw were bursts of dark browns and greens. They eventually resolved themselves into the familiar shapes of Cypress trees. A clearing appeared, the ground dusted with pale splinters of chipped wood. Figures milled about. She felt a cold wind on her skin. It rippled the flannel shirt and thick jeans that she felt covering her body, and threatened more than once to knock what felt like a helmet from her head.

      Her lips began to mouth words that her voice only half uttered:

      “The hell’d this storm come from?”

      “Gonna set us way back if it rains.”

      “Hey, that’s buku overtime. I ain’t complaining.”

      Thunder echoed in Olivia’s ears, and her body was wracked by a spasm. She did not feel the caring hands trying to hold her still, nor did she hear Jamie’s voice calling her name. She continued to murmur as someone else’s words flitted through her mind.

      “Shit. I forgot my gloves. You go on. I’ll see you in the morning.”

      “Alright, Tommy.”

      Olivia was now moving through the vast clearing, away from the road. She followed the widening beam of a flashlight that terminated in a circle of luminance on the earthen floor ahead. She could smell the cut wood, could feel the great gusts of icy wind. As Olivia strode down the wide path that had been sliced through the forest beyond the clearing, she pictured someone else’s thoughts: images of warm vegetable soup waiting on a table in a cozy little home, of a dainty, ginger-haired woman with a treasured smile, and the rambunctious shouts of a child excited to see his father.

      Trees passed by distantly on either side of the path, and eventually disappeared altogether. Ahead, thick roots clawed their way out of a putrid muck. Trenches supported by wooden planks cut into the ground, directing artificial streams of dark water downhill. The beam of light radiating from Olivia’s hand caught golden ripples in the receded swamp beyond.

      Olivia’s gaze was forced toward the outline of a dark machine. The flashlight lit up sections of it. There was an open cab astride caterpillar tracks. From the front extended a humungous arm, a chain of jagged metal teeth running its great length. She knew this machine. She had drawn it. Its purpose was to rip through the earth and create the paths through which the swamp could drain.

      The circle of artificial light caressed the machine, ran over the controls inside the cab, and discovered a pair of leather work gloves. Without any desire to, Olivia reached out and took them. As her vision swung back toward the carved path, something glinted in the mud near the water; a flash of silver caught in the electric light.

      One of the nurses gasped as Olivia arched her back sharply and kicked the sheets into a clump at the foot of her bed. The patient seemed to be mumbling the word “No” over and over.

      In her mind’s eye, Olivia was drawn unwillingly and unstoppably toward the metal sliver in the ground. “No, no,” her mind screamed. “Think of the soup, the boy, the red-headed woman! Don’t touch it!” She moved down the muddy bank, toward the edge of the water, and scraped the muck away from the silver object with a thick work boot, revealing a metal blade with a peculiar curve at the end. Olivia was forced by an unwitting consciousness to bend down and inspect the blade, though she recognized it all too easily.

      In Olivia’s room, the patient’s lips peeled back as she hyperventilated, “H-, h-, h-, h-,” like a phonograph skipping at the top of a word.

      The swamp lit up suddenly with a flash of lightning, and something splashed in the water several yards from the extended bank. The flashlight scanned the rippling surface. Someone other than Olivia thought worriedly of the alligators that were supposed to have been cleared out of the area, then rebutted himself with the notion that it was probably just a branch that had been blown loose by the wind and plunged into the swamp. “That’s not what it was,” Olivia thought feebly. “Get out, get out, get out...”

      The beam of the flashlight returned to the blade. Olivia felt herself reaching for it, gripping the muddy hilt, peeling the weapon from the grip of the swamp muck.

      “He, he, he, he,” gasped Olivia.

      There was an eruption of violent motion in the swamp. Something shot from the black water and clamped onto not-Olivia’s wrist with a splintering grip. She felt her arm being bent toward the swamp, bones snapping, and was suddenly choking on water.

      Olivia shot bolt upright in her bed, eyes toward the ceiling, the vision having ended.

      “He’s back,” she whispered.