When they were both finished, Gibson lay on his back, panting, watching red explosions beneath his eyelids. Christobelle rested her arms on his chest and looked down at him in the gloom with a wicked but contented grin on her race,

"Did you like that, Joe Gibson?" He noticed that she had very sharp little incisors. He opened his eyes and smiled.

"That would be an understatement. I feel like a violin that's been played by a master."

"Or maybe a mistress?"

Gibson laughed. "Top-of-the-line, five-thousand-dollar hooker couldn't have done better."

Her teeth were very white in the darkness.

"You really know how to sweet-talk a girl."

"Were you ever a top-of-the-line, five-thousand-dollar hooker? Maybe in another life?"

Although Gibson knew that it was probably the gentlemanly thing to stay awake and talk, he couldn't fight his sinking mind and wilting intelligence. Within minutes, he was fast asleep. His dreams were a procession of ragged fragmented images, weird but not terrifying and certainly not imposed from outside. At one point, he floated on his back in a warm, buoyant sea while an entire armada of stately UFOs, rainbow-colored and in an infinity of configurations, slowly crossed the jet-black sky in multiple formations. Christobelle or someone very like her swam beside him, occasionally reaching out a soft hand to touch his body. There was nothing in this part of his dreamstate to warrant any complaint.

Waking was a whole different matter. Christobelle was gone, replaced by O'Neal and a headache of Godzilla proportions. O'Neal was standing at the end of the bed. He was wearing a zipped-up nylon windbreaker that made him look like a narc.

"You'd best be getting up."

His voice had the harsh rasp of Catholic Belfast. Gibson sat up. For a few moments, he had no idea where he was. Then it all came back to him. It was hardly a pleasant sensation. Even less pleasant was the taste in his mouth. He reached for one of the Cokes on the bedside table. The ice had melted, but it was still cold.

"What's going on?"

"Windemere will fill you in. You'd best get some clothes on. Everyone else is waiting for you in the drawing room."

The White Room

IT WAS THE shrink hour at the small but very exclusive clinic. That is to say, it was shrink hour for Joe Gibson. It was plainly a very self-centered attitude to think that the clinic revolved around him, but there was nothing to give him any greater perspective. They had him completely isolated, and he had absolutely no idea what went on in the rest of the place. Monday through Friday, he spent one hour a day with Dr. Kooning. Indeed, the only way that he could recognize a weekend was by the lack of Dr. Kooning's hour and the change in the TV schedules. Monday through Friday, they came for him in his white cubicle with the ceaseless TV set, put him in a wheelchair, and wheeled him through the bright, sterile corridors of the clinic to the equally white interview room with the garish, orange-and-yellow floral curtains. Gibson couldn't figure the logic of transporting physically healthy mental patients from one part of the clinic to another by wheelchair. Why in hell couldn't he be allowed to walk and maintain some shreds of his dignity? Did the patients being in wheelchairs make them easier to subdue? Gibson had learned more than he really cared to know about subduing procedures at the clinic when he'd made that first futile attempt at a breakout.

Dr. Kooning was a small woman with scraped-back, graying hair, rather prominent teeth, and very thick, circular glasses that she wore balanced on the bridge of her nose. Her face was locked into a permanent expression of distaste. Gibson wasn't sure exactly what she found so distasteful: humanity at large, the nature of her job, or maybe just him. He didn't believe that it was him alone. She'd appeared to have been wearing the expression so long that almost all the lines of her face conformed to it. Dr. Kooning had been viewing the world with distaste long before he'd shown up. That was, however, no reason for her not to make him the focus of it during their sessions. They had clashed immediately. One of Gibson's first ploys was to refuse to lie down on the couch. Another token maintenance of dignity. He would sit on the couch, he'd lean on the couch, he'd sit on the couch hunched in a corner with his legs curled up under him, or in a full lotus position. The one thing that he wouldn't do was lie flat on his back on the couch.

"What frightens you about the couch, Joe?"

"I'd get too anxious and I wouldn't be able to concentrate. I'd be too worried that someone would suddenly jump on my stomach with both feet."

The thing that annoyed him the most about Dr. Kooning was that she always tried to insinuate herself into the picture.

"Do you fear that I'd jump on you?"

"No, but one can't be too careful."

After about a week of sparring, Dr. Kooning had accepted Gibson's attitude regarding the couch. She still brought the matter up at roughly weekly intervals, but the initial fight seemed to have gone out of her. Instead, she had recently taken to challenging his fundamental belief in himself.

"So it was only when you returned to this particular dimension that you began to believe that you didn't exist?"

"I didn't say that I didn't exist. I said that all evidence of my existence had been erased."

"Isn't that the same thing?"

"Only if you take a very Orwellian view of the world."

"Are you angry that you've been erased?"

"I'm not very pleased."

"Do you feel that you're being punished?"

"No, I think something tipped over on its side."

"Or maybe that the world isn't grateful. It took away your fantasy of being a once successful entertainer."

"It wasn't a fantasy."

She'd stay with the same question like a dog worrying at a bone. "Maybe the world isn't grateful enough?"

"Why should the world be grateful to me?"

"For saving the universe,"

"I didn't save the universe. My world has gone."

"Perhaps that's why you're being punished."

When this kind of concentric looping of the subject didn't get anywhere, she had him go over his story in the minutest of details.

"Now, Joe, if I remember correctly, when we finished yesterday, you were about to tell me how you woke up in that house in London."

"The house that doesn't exist anymore."

"Forget about that for the moment and just tell me how you felt when you woke up that first time. You'd briefly felt safe and you'd made love with a woman who'd given you more satisfaction than you'd experienced in a while. Very quickly, though, you began to feel as though it was all slipping away…"

Chapter Five

"GO TO THE window and look out."

Gideon Windemere's drawing room was on the first floor of the house. The big bay windows with their small wrought-iron balcony commanded a perfect view of the street out front. Gibson walked over to the window, pulled aside the heavy blue velvet drapes, and looked out. Windemere was standing behind him.

"Tell me what you see."

A light drizzle was falling on the town. The road surface was slick, and cars hissed by with windshield wipers flicking. Water dripped from the plane trees that lined both sides of Ladbroke Grove. Even in the house, there was a smell of dampness.

Gibson considered the scene in the street below him.

"There's a large black car across the street. An old Hudson, '51 or '52, the one with the small narrow windows that looks like a big turtle."

"Anything else?"

"There's a man leaning against the car. I'd say at a guess that he's watching the house. The funny thing is that he doesn't appear to be getting wet."