There. She grasped it and held on tight, before it slipped away again. She’d seen it on TV. Watson and Crick. The Double Helix.

DNA – that was it. Building block of life. Ascending chain of being. Descending stair of existence. She could feel the rungs under her feet, the gravity that drew her down and down, round and round.

She’d never dreamt such a dream before. She’d never been so aware of dreaming, either. Would she remember when she woke? Usually, she didn’t want to. This wasn’t frightening, nor particularly weird as dreams went. It was interesting. Words flitted past her, whispers, murmurs in a language she didn’t know, yet felt – strangely – that she did. How odd, she thought in passing. How wonderful. How deliciously strange.

Maybe after all it was the waking she wouldn’t want to remember. Maybe she wanted to stay inside the dream. She’d dream it to the hilt. She promised herself that, far down the spiral stair, the endlessly turning helix of her own and only self.

Still dreaming but starting to swim out of the long spiraling dark, Nicole rolled over in her bed.

The mattress was lumpy. Her eyelids were still asleep, but her brain roused slowly, taking count of the individual senses. Yes – there were lumps under her. Hard ones. She hissed. Damn those kids! They knew the rule. No hiding toys in Mommy’s bed. Whichever one had done it, it was going to cost. Early bedtime for Kimberley, no Teddy Grahams for -

She drew in a deep, would-be calming breath. Her eyes flew open. She gasped, gagged, almost puked all over the bedclothes. Jesus Christ! What a stink! The last time she’d smelled anything even close to this bad, the septic tank had backed up at Cousin Hedwig’s house in Bloomington. But this was a richer, more complex odor, compounded of sewage and barnyard and city dump and locker room and apartment-house fire. It was a stench with character, a stench to be respected and admired, even a stench to be savored. If you were going to build a stench to order, these were the specs for the very finest, luxury model.

It was such a stench, in fact, that for a couple of seconds her nose overwhelmed her eyes. Even as she decided that a garbage truck must have overturned on the front lawn, she realized something more immediately important.

This wasn’t the room she’d gone to bed in, or any room she remembered, anytime, anywhere.

Wan daylight seeped in through a wood-framed window. There was no glass, only wooden shutters thrown back. Flies danced in the shaft of pale light and buzzed through the room: the window had no screen, either. An enormous hairy black fly landed on the wall near the bed and perched there, rubbing its hands together. The wall was roughly plastered and even more roughly whitewashed. Dark spots here and there suggested that a good many flies had met their death on it.

Aside from the bed, the room was sparsely furnished. A battered chest of drawers stood against one wall, its yellowish pine looking as if it had been the victim of an amateur refinisher. There was no chair, only a pair of stools like – well, like milking stools; they were more or less that shape and about that size. No TV. No photos of kids; no radio, no alarm clock, no lamp on the nightstand. For that matter, no nightstand. No closet, either. Just the bare box of a room and narrow lumpy cot of a bed and the chest and the stools.

On the chest sat a pitcher, a two-handled cup, and a bowl, all of pottery glazed the same gaudy red as the sticks of sealing wax Nicole had affected in her brief but passionately romantic phase, between thirteen and thirteen and a half.

Terra sigillata, she thought. The words shouldn’t have made any sense to her; she knew she’d never known them before. And yet she knew what they meant: sealing-wax ware. That was the name for the crockery on the chest.

A lamp squatted next to the bowl. Another sat on a stool. She’d seen the genie emerging from one just like them in Aladdin. But Aladdin’s lamp had been bronze or brass or something like that. These were plain unglazed clay.

Nicole sat up carefully, as if her head might rock and fall off her shoulders. She wasn’t hung over: she didn’t drink. She wasn’t on anything – no drugs, prescription or otherwise. She might be dreaming, but she could never have dreamt that monumental stink. Which only left -

“I’ve gone crazy,” she said.

Sitting up, she could see the floor. It was no more reassuring than any of the rest of it. No beige shag carpeting here, only bare, well-rubbed boards. Carefully, almost fearfully, she ventured to look up. Boards again. Rough boards, and low, too.

She couldn’t, quite, touch the ceiling, but she could brush her hand across the blanket that covered her. She remembered vividly, distinctly, the touch and feel of her own comforter, its soft down-filled thickness, the faintly wilted but crisp and brightly printed cotton. Its pattern was called Cinnabar. She’d admired the colors when she bought it, deep green to match her eyes, rich dark purple, terracotta, and a touch of red and gold. This wasn’t her comforter. It was a blanket, rough wool worn thin and threadbare, dyed a sad, faded blue.

She itched just looking at it. She scrambled it away from her, thrusting it aside with a hand that -

A hand that – was not her hand.

The fingers twitched when she told them to twitch. The arm lifted when her mind said Lift. But it was not her arm. She knew what her arm looked like. How could she not know what -?

She throttled down hysteria. Look, she thought. Look at it. Study it. Make sense of it.

It wasn’t her arm. It was thinner – a great deal thinner. There were muscles on it, hard ropy muscles, no softness, no deskbound flab. Her arm was smooth-skinned and round and dusted with pale blond hairs, not these rougher and thicker dark ones. The skin was darker, too; not the darkness of a California tan but a warmer olive tone that had to be its natural shade. There was a scar above the wrist, a good two inches long. She had no scars, not on her arms.

This was not her arm. Nor her hand. Her hands were smooth, the nails filed and rounded and painted a light and unobtrusive shell-pink.

This was – these were, as the right emerged from the blanket to join the left – battered, callused. The nails were short and ragged. They had black dirt ground in under them. If these hands had ever seen a nail-file or an emery board, let alone a bottle of nail polish, it hadn’t been in years.

Hysteria yammered still, not far under her hard-fought calm. She looked around, not wildly but not what you’d call calmly either. No mirror on the wall. Mirror, mirror, she thought dizzily. Who’s the craziest of us – ?

Calm. Be calm. She raised those stranger’s hands, those hands that answered when she called, and laid them shaking against her cheeks. Like a blind woman, she explored the face that, it seemed, she had come to live behind. Not her face, of course not. No soft, faintly sagging curves. No blunt German nose. This was leaner, longer, with cheekbones standing sharp in it, and a nose with a pronounced arch. She had to look – God, she couldn’t giggle, she’d break down completely – she had to look something, maybe a little more than something, like Sheldon Rosenthal.

Calm. Calm. Focus. Explore. Make this make sense. She ran her tongue over her – someone’s – teeth. They weren’t hers, any more than the rest of it. No years of orthodontia here. No caps, no crowns, no carefully cleaned and regularly brushed and flossed tributes to modern dentistry. These are crooked. One in front was broken. Two uppers and one lower, a molar, were gone, long gone, the gaps healed over, no sign of a wound.

One of those that hadn’t vanished still made its presence felt. It was broken, too, and ached, not horribly but persistently, as if it had settled in and meant to stay. She prodded it with a finger. It twinged. Her finger jerked away. Dentist, she wrote in a mental file. Find. Make appointment. Soonest.