I stopped to chat with the guard on my way out. Then, when everyone else was gone, I put on a ditzy expression and giggled.

"Darn it, I left my keys down in the laundry room. I'll be back."

"I can come with you as soon as Burt comes along to relieve me," he offered.

"Oh, don't worry about me," I said gaily. "I'm not afraid of ghoulies in the dark."

"But I don't want you walking outside by yourself." I thought fast for a good excuse.

"A friend from school is picking me up. We're going clubbing." God, that sounded stupid even to me. Not only had I never for the briefest moment entertained the notion of going clubbing, I hadn't even made any close friends at school, unless Al counted.

He let me go, though. That was all I needed.

I went straight to the washing machine nobody else would touch, the one right next to the boiler room door, and helped Al out of it.

"Took you long enough," she said irritably. Just then, someone let out a piercing scream from directly behind us. We both dove for cover, and I said something not very ladylike. Then I started laughing.

There was no one there, of course.

"This place is even spookier at night. I hope we don't have to stay here too long."

"We can't go upstairs until we're sure Dr. Crane has gone home," she reminded me.

Fair enough; to pass the time, I told her some of the stories of Ward 5. The next time the pipes carried a scream, we nearly knocked each other down racing up the stairs.

"I think…it's time we got to work," Al said when we had our backs firmly pressed against the door.

Those old, familiar hallways were different at night, without the hum of quiet conversation, without the taunting little glimpses of sunlight, without Frank the Tank and crotchety old Bob to back me up.

If Al hadn't been there, I would have cut and run. But she didn't give in to her fear, so neither did I.

In some places, the harsh overhead lights flickered like another bad horror movie, but most of the lights were turned off to conserve power. The hallway outside Dr. Crane's office was as black as sin. Al still managed to pick the lack, but it took longer than we'd expected. Luckily, Al knew where he kept an emergency flashlight in his desk. I held it for her while she worked on the lock to the inner office.

"I can't do this," she decided after an hour of fumbling. I was almost glad to hear it. My arm was tired.

"Tell me we haven't completely wasted all that effort," I begged.

"Not quite. We can still do a nice, thorough search of the current files. Let me have the flashlight; you see if there's anything useful in his desk."

I rifled through the drawers and found nothing more interesting than a large collection of shining black feathers. Al rifled through the files and found about the same. Then I found the locked drawer.

I took another bobby pin from my hair and inserted it in the lock. Hearing the rattling, Al turned the light on me.

"You're turning a lock, not stabbing it in the eye," she said. "Here, let me." In seconds, she had the drawer open. The flashlight reflected off a dozen brown glass bottles, each hand-labeled. I picked out one and held it to the light.

"Scarecrow," I read. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It's Dr. Crane's handwriting." I opened the bottle, revealing a thick white powder. "Looks like flour," Al said.

Stupidly, I leaned over and sniffed it.

First there was the smell of blood and Al's voice irately snarling, "Moron!"

Then no sensation at all, no sight, no sound, no sense that I had a body at all.

And then, within the space of a breath, I was back in the water on my fourth birthday, heavy skates stopping my baby legs from kicking, my ratty wool coat doing nothing against the cold, just more weight dragging me down.

Feel: cold like knives in my limbs, pressure crushing the air from my lungs.

Hear: rushing water, slowing heart.

Taste: ice and bile and coppery fear.

See: my own mother, viewed through a sheet of ice, young, sane, screaming, hacking at the ice with one of her own skates.

I screamed bubbles and reached up for the wavering image of safety, shrinking with every second as I sank deeper and deeper into the water.

A part of me remembered this, that here I lost consciousness, and soon I was rescued. That part of me also knew that this time there would be no rescue, not even unconsciousness to relieve the grasping terror. Only the cold, airless depths. Forever.

…and then I was lying on the floor in Dr. Crane's office, my head in Al's lap, trying to scream against her hand as she held me still.

"Y equals mx plus b," she said firmly. I drew a shuddery breath, and she took her hand away from my mouth. "Quadratic formula: x equals…"

"N…negative…" I took a deeper breath. "Negative b plus or minus, um…the square root of…the square root of b squared minus four ac over two a."

"You okay now?"

"F-f-fine." I curled up into a ball, shivering.

And then, I was fourteen and my mother was breaking down, and my father's voice spoke in my ear: "It runs in the blood, you know." He continued, speaking aloud what he had only implied before: "you did this to her and she'll do it to you and that's why I'll never love you, and you—"

"Seven times twelve!"

"Eighty…four," I said, and wiped the tears from my eyes. "I guess now we know what it does."

---

Al must have gone through hell getting me home that night. I don't remember. The waking nightmares kept hitting me, though decreasing in frequency, duration, and intensity as the night went on. By the end of the night, I could hear Al over the voices of my childhood demons, prompting me with math problems and formulas, forcing my rational mind to focus on something other than the fear.

When I was lucid, I still found myself gripped by the memory of my mother when she lost control and began to see things that weren't there. At those times, Al was still with me, reminding me that every light in the apartment was blazing, that I was cocooned in blankets to keep out the cold—mostly, that I wasn't alone.

At the end, I dreamed that she got fed up and abandoned me. Then I heard her voice calmly repeating the Pythagorean Theorem. After that I fell asleep and didn't dream.