The semen was the only evidence that she had been with a man, but it did not absolutely confirm rape.
Besides, presenting her stained panties to the authorities — or, worse yet, submitting to a vaginal swab in a hospital emergency room — would involve more embarrassment than she’d be able to endure in her current condition.
Indeed, her condition, the agoraphobia, was the primary reason she had been reluctant to confide in Martie, let alone in the police or other strangers. Although enlightened people knew that an extreme phobia wasn’t a form of madness, they could not help but regard it as
Now, after checking the dead bolts yet again, Susan impatiently reached for the telephone. She couldn’t wait a minute longer for Martie’s considered response. She needed to be reassured that her best friend, if no one else, believed in the phantom rapist.
Susan keyed the first four digits of Martie’s number — but hung up. Patience. If she appeared fragile or too needy, she might seem less believable.
Returning to the marsala sauce, she realized she was too nervous to be lulled by culinary rituals. She wasn’t hungry, either.
She opened a bottle of Merlot, poured a glassful, and sat at the kitchen table. Lately, she was drinking more than usual.
After sipping the Merlot, she held the glass up to the light. The dark ruby liquid was clear, apparently uncontaminated.
For a while, she had been convinced that someone was drugging her. That possibility was still troubling but not as likely as it had once seemed.
Rohypnol — which the news media had dubbed the date-rape drug — might explain how she was able to remain unconscious, or at least oblivious, even during rough intercourse. Mix Rohypnol into a woman’s drink, and she appears to be in an advanced stage of inebriation: disoriented, pliant — defenseless. The drugged state ultimately gives way to genuine sleep, and upon waking, she has little or no memory of what took place during the night.
In the morning, however, after her mysterious visitor ravaged her, Susan never experienced any symptoms of Rohypnol hangover. No queasy stomach, no dry mouth, no blurring of vision, no throbbing headache, no lingering disorientation. Routinely, she woke clear-headed, even refreshed, though feeling violated.
Nevertheless, she had repeatedly changed grocers. Sometimes Susan relied on Martie to do her shopping, but for the most part she ordered groceries and other supplies from smaller family-owned markets that offered home delivery. Few provided that extra service these days, even for a charge. Although Susan had tried all of them, paranoically certain that someone was lacing her food with drugs, changing vendors didn’t bring an end to the postmidnight assaults.
In desperation, she had sought answers in the supernatural. The mobile library brought her lurid books about ghosts, vampires, demons, exorcism, black magic, and abductions by extraterrestrials.
The delivering librarian, to his credit, never once commented upon — or even raised an eyebrow at — Susan’s insatiable appetite for this peculiar subject matter. Anyway, it was no doubt healthier than an interest in contemporary politics or celebrity gossip.
Susan had been particularly fascinated by the legend of the incubus. This evil spirit visited women in their sleep and had sex with them while they dreamed.
Fascination had never become conviction. She hadn’t descended so far into superstition that she had slept with copies of the Bible at all four corners of her bed or while wearing a necklace of garlic.
Ultimately, she ceased researching the supernatural, because as she delved into those irrational realms, her agoraphobia intensified. By sitting down to a banquet of unreason, she seemed to be feeding the sick part of her psyche in which her inexplicable fear thrived.
Her glass of Merlot was half empty. She refilled it.
Carrying the wine with her, Susan set out on a circuit of the apartment, to ascertain that all possible entrances were secured.
Both windows in the dining room faced the residence next door, which crowded close to Susan’s house. They were locked.
In the living room, she switched off the lamps. She sat in an armchair, sipping Merlot, while her eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Although her phobia had progressed until she had difficulty looking at the daylight world even through windows, she could still tolerate the night view when the sky was overcast, when no deep sea of stars awaited her contemplation. In weather like this, she never failed to test herself, for she worried that if she didn’t exercise her weak muscle of courage, it would atrophy altogether.
When her night vision improved and the Merlot lubricated the little engine of fortitude in her heart, she went to the middle pane of the three big ocean-facing windows. After a brief hesitation and a deep breath, she raised the pleated shade.
Immediately in front of the house, the paved promenade lay under the false frost of widely separated streetlamps. Though the hour was not yet late, the promenade was nearly deserted in the January chill. A young couple skated by on Rollerblades. A cat scurried from one drift of shadows to another.
Thin tendrils of mist wound between the few palm trees and the streetlamps. In the still air, the fronds hung motionless, so the creeping mist seemed to be alive, advancing with silent menace.
Susan couldn’t see much of the night-cloaked beach. She could not see the Pacific at all: A bank of dense fog had advanced as far as the shore, where it could be glimpsed only intermittently — high, gray, like a towering tsunami flash-frozen an instant before it would have smashed across the coast. The lazy mist writhed off the face of the fog bank, as cold steam rises off a block of dry ice.
With the stars lost above the low clouds, with darkness and fog partitioning the world into small spaces, Susan should have been able to stand at the window for hours, insulated from her fear, but her heart began to race. Agoraphobia was not the cause of her sudden apprehension; rather, she was overcome by a sense of being watched.
Since the night assaults had begun, she was increasingly plagued by this new anxiety. Scopophobia: fear of being watched.
Surely, however, this wasn’t just another phobia, not just an unreasonable fear, but an entirely rational one. If her phantom rapist was real, he must at times keep her home under surveillance, to be sure that he’d find her alone when he paid a visit.
Nevertheless, she was concerned about acquiring new layers of fear atop her agoraphobia, until eventually she would be bound up like an Egyptian mummy, wrapped by smothering shrouds of anxiety, paralyzed and effectively embalmed alive.
The promenade was deserted. The palm boles weren’t wide enough to conceal anyone.
For three nights in a row, Susan hadn’t been assaulted. This all too human incubus was due. He exhibited a pattern of need, more regular than — but as reliable as — the pull of the moon on the blood tides of a werewolf.
Often she had tried to stay awake on the nights she expected him. When she succeeded, exhausted and grainy-eyed by dawn, he never showed. Usually, if her willpower failed her and she dozed off, he paid a visit. Once, she fell asleep fully dressed, in an armchair, and she woke fully dressed, but in bed, with the faint scent of his sweat clinging to her and with his hateful, sticky issue clotted in her panties. He seemed to know, by some sixth sense, when she was sleeping and most vulnerable.
On the generally flat beach, a few low dunes rose at the outer limit of visibility, curving smoothly away into darkness and mist. An observer might be watching from behind one of them, although he would have to be lying prone in the sand to remain hidden.
She felt his gaze upon her. Or thought she felt it.
Susan quickly lowered the pleated shade, covering the window.
