She smiled the sort of smile that maybe dead people commonly smile, and said, “You always were a woman of unfounded assumptions, Sarah.”

And around us, then, suddenly there were fireflies, and swirling motes of unidentifiable bioluminescence that seemed to make the darkness no less dark. The ceiling of the basement was draped with more than roots, I saw, with the sticky silken threads of larval glow worms, and I imagined there were zodiac constellations drawn in the arrangement of their deadly lures. Amanda held up her arms, as though she’d summoned this swarm, as though she worshipped or made herself an offering to it. And the basement had, I saw, grown into a cavern, something straight out of A Journey to the Center of the Earth,and forests of oyster-colored mushrooms the size of redwoods towered all around us. I heard the crashing waves of a not-so-distant sea, and Amanda sat down on a rock, and, slowly, she lowered her arms.

“So, what. You think this is usual?” she asked me, or some question very near to that, and I turned, trying to see the way back to the arch, and, past that, the foot of the stairs leading to a place that was only a basement.

“I don’t know what I think anymore,” I lied.“Perhaps you ought to put it back,” and I knew she meant the manuscript, Harvey’s manuscript, without having to ask.

“Perhaps you’re not ready for this.”

“That’s not for you to say,” I told her.

“And the typewriter, too,” she continued, as though I’d not even spoken. She did that a lot, when we were both alive. “It can’t be healthy, Sarah, having it around like this, workingwith it, a thing that has recently borne such strange fruit.” And if her allusion was lost on me in the dream, it’s not lost on me now.

The impala horns abruptly dropped from her head, and where they’d been nothing was left but two bloody stumps. She sat looking at them, the horns, and her expression was not so much sad as wistful, I think.

“Kind of makes you wonder,” she said, nodding at the shed horns. I waited for her to elaborate, but she never did. And I saw then that a variety of pale fungi had begun to sprout from her flesh, from her jeans and T-shirt, not so much devouring as simply augmenting,and I knew that, in this dream, I was neither a knight-errant nor a woods-man who saves lost girls from hungry wolves. nor from parasitic toadstools and yeasts, molds and agarics. I had already told her that, but as I watched Amanda’s body slowly, steadily bloom with the progeny of unseen spores, any doubt I might have harbored in this regard vanished.

There was more, what seems like hours and hours more, a roiling tumble of nonsense and phantasmagoria, a flight through that subterranean forest to the shores of Verne’s Mare Internum,his Liedenbrock Sea, perhaps. It may be I sailed a plesiosaur-infested ocean, or maybe I only sat on that alien shore, gazing up at a sunless, electric sky. But, however it proceeded, I don’t think I’m up to writing the rest. Whatever I might remember of the rest. The compulsion that drove me from my bed to this chair and the typewriter of Dr. Harvey has deserted me.

Since coming here, I have written two dreams, and damned little else, and in each one, of course, I encounter you, Amanda. In each one, I have no say in what becomes of you, so, in that respect, at least these are true dreams. Then again, in each one, you seem somehow imperiled, when I find it hard to believe there was ever any threat to you beyond your own penchant for self-destruction. So, paradoxically, the dreams may also be lies. Or both things are equally true — a particle and a wave, as it were — and I’m only being narrow-minded. A woman of unfounded assumptions, a woman of either-or.

But sitting here, watching the day coming on — a morning pregnant with the promises of yet another scorcher — it occurs to me that perhaps I should consider passing Harvey’s manuscript along to someone. I really don’t know who. Perhaps URI would want it, some former colleague or his department or the library or something, if his daughter in Maine truly has no interest. I surely do not need this new source of morbidity. I brought more than enough here withme. Maybe today I’ll try to call the university. I could drive it over, the manuscript, if there’s anyone there who wants it. If no one at the school is interested, maybe I’ll contact Brown or the Providence Athenaeum. At this point, I’d appreciate what I could deem a valid excuse to blow a tank of gas on the road trip and get away from this place for a day. And I can’t imagine that Blanchard would mind my getting rid of the manuscript. Not that I’ll bother to ask him, not after the way he’s foisted this new impending upstairs neighbor upon me. I googled her, by the by, and got nothing at all.

I suppose I could even try to track down the daughter; I doubt it would be very hard to do. I have her name from the obits. But there’s something, I think, inherently creepy and stalkerish about doing that. Unless Blanchard’s lying, she had a chance to claim her father’s work and passed. Who knows what that relationship was like? Maybe she’s glad the old man croaked himself, and maybe she even has a rightto be. Maybe he was a complete bastard, and the last thing she needs is some stranger butting in. It just seems somehow wrong that this manuscript has languished in the basement of a farmhouse for half a decade. Then again, this all supposes there’s something here worth saving. But I suspect I’m hardly qualified to make that call, and the same is likely true of Dr. Harvey’s disinterested daughter.

I need coffee. I need coffee, and I need to drive into Coventry for groceries. I’m down to my last can of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars soup and a little bit of peanut butter. And I’m awake now, and the sun is shining. I’m bleary as hell, and maybe the slightest bit drunk, but at least the damned dream has stopped feeling like anything more than another permutation of the Nightmare.

The first bad seizure yesterday since leaving Atlanta. In Which Our Heroine is Lulled into a False Sense of Security. Yes, I’ve been drinking since I got here, a little, but I’ve been religious about my meds, and I think I had actually allowed myself to believe that shit was over and done with. Then, yesterday evening, after I got back from the market, after the trip to Coventry, I was washing dishes and. it occurs to me, now, I’ve never tried to describe one of these things. Vincent van Gogh, my favorite fellow epileptic, wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo:

Hell, that makes it seem almost a desirable experience. Me, I have nothing so romantic nor pleasant to report. I was standing at the kitchen sink, setting the coffee cups out to dry on a dish towel, and then I was lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Maybe ten minutes had passed. There was a small cut on my left hand from a broken cup, and I’d bitten my lip pretty badly, so my mouth tasted like blood. I lay there for a while, because sometimes they come in clusters. Sometimes it’s BAM — BAM — BAM. I lay there feeling sick and hungover and disoriented, dazed, stupid. I lay there, thinking about the firsttime, the first time to my knowledge, at least, and how badly it scared Amanda. I think it scared her a whole lot more than it scared me. She cried. It wasn’t the only time I saw her cry, but it wasone of the few times. She told me she thought that I was dying, and then there were all the goddamn specialists and tests I didn’t have health insurance to cover, and that’s what she shouldhave cried over. I spent most of the evening on the sofa, feeling Not Quite Right. I watched television and tried to read. I fell asleep and woke hours later with a crick in my neck, but feeling somewhat less strung-out.