The problems were the worst at night.
At night, she feared closing her eyes. She didn't know what would happen when her conscious defenses were down, leaving her subconscious—or whatever was responsible for the visions that plagued her—to take over like an unruly child left without supervision. So she spent a number of nights lying in bed, all the lights in the apartment on, trying to will herself to stay awake. For a short time, it worked. She sat up through the night, her eyes growing increasingly bleary and strained, and come morning she'd doze off, only to snap awake convinced that she was on the brink of slipping into a vision. Eventually, exhaustion won out, and she had no choice but to sleep at night or even during the day, and when she did, she dreamed, and the dreams were almost worse than the visions.
She remembered a particularly vivid one that occurred shortly after the vision in Dan's yard. In the dream, she encountered a middle-aged woman, someone she had never seen before. The woman approached Diana in the parking lot outside her apartment just as Kay Todd had. And just like Kay, this woman approached Diana confidently, with assurance, as though she knew things about Diana that Diana didn't think this strange woman could know.
The woman placed her hand on Diana's arm. Her touch was cold, like something that had been refrigerated for weeks. Ice cold.
Diana tried to withdraw from the grip, but the woman wouldn't let go.
Diana looked into the woman's eyes and recognized her sister.
With the twisted logic of dreams, Diana knew that the woman didn't really look anything like Rachel, either as a young woman or as a projection of what Rachel might look like as an adult, but still, Diana knew it was her sister. And still, she wanted out of the grip, perhaps all the more because it was Rachel, and Diana knew Rachel shouldn't be there, and she shouldn't be that age.
"What do you want?" Diana said to her sister.
"It's okay," the Rachel said.
"What's okay?"
"It's okay that you stopped looking and caring."
A stronger sense of panic gripped Diana. She didn't want to be misunderstood.
"I didn't. I swear I didn't."
"You did, and it's okay."
"I..." Diana started to repeat the lie but she couldn't. She knew in the dream that Rachel could see through her and knew her. She couldn't hide.
"You lost me. You let me go. It's okay."
"I'm back now. I'm looking. I'm back for you."
The Rachel woman let go.
Diana's arm burned from the cold, and the woman's touch had left a red mark behind. Diana stared at the mark, and when she looked up again, the woman was changing.
The sun grew brighter and hotter. The wind picked up. The edges of the woman's body became indistinct and blurry, as though she were fading away before Diana's eyes. But she wasn't disappearing, Diana realized. She was decaying. Her skin shriveled, pulling in tighter against the skull. Her eyes disappeared and shrunk back into her head. Her hair coarsened and turned brittle, some of it snapping off and flying away in the increasing wind. Diana watched as maggots squirmed and crawled just beneath the surface of the woman's skin, and then her horror increased as the maggots slipped and slithered through her nostrils and into her now vacant eye sockets. Diana couldn't look away. It was as though her neck were locked into place, forcing her to witness the spectacle of her sister's decaying and disintegrating body.
Like watching a time-lapse movie, it took a matter of seconds for the woman to be stripped of her flesh and clothes and be reduced to a crumbling pile of bones. Soon the bones became dust, scattering in the wind, but even then Diana heard the voice of her sister, only now it delivered a different message.
"You let me down," it said. "You should have kept coming for me."
*
Diana knew she was spending too much time alone, so despite her frayed nerves and difficulty sleeping—or, more accurately, because of them—she vowed to get out of the house more and mingle with the world. She hoped that doing so would make a change in her life, the kind of change she had been waiting years for. Like a fever breaking or the tide receding, she wished for something new to come along and replace what already existed.