Her eyes blinked and then blinked again and she had the most unnerving sensation that they had been open for some time, perhaps peering around the room and watching the play of shadows along the walls as her mind continued to drift along in dream. Her lips felt dry. She licked them with a tongue that felt thick and ungainly. She could see the digital clock. The numbers flickered from 3:02 to 3:03.She felt paralyzed.It was the vodka and the Valiums. They always said not to mix them and she rarely did except on those nights when her mind would not shut down and her body remained tense from the day.The sense of invasion did not lessen, it deepened.There was a foul odor in the room that she associated with dankness, with subterranean crypts, with corpse-orchids rotting in mortuaries. It was a high, sweet smell and it did not belong in that room in the dead of night.She tried to move, to reach over to the lamp and turn the light on, but her arms were leaden. Just the effort of lifting even one of them two or three inches left her feeling exhausted.Listen.Terror began to expand in her throat and she could not swallow it back down.
