“Mabel, is it possible that you walked in your sleep and…” I started to say, then shut up again. “No, never mind. It’s not important.” I had been going to ask whether she might have knocked over her parents’ oil lamp by accident, or even lit a match, tried to light a fire, and all without knowing it. But I realized as I said it that this was a burden I couldn’t lay on her. She was already carrying enough guilt because she had lived and they had not.
There was another awkward silence that seemed to go on forever.
“Tell me about your mother, Mabel,” Sid said. “You must miss her dreadfully.”
Mabel pressed her lips together and I could tell she was willing herself not to cry. “Mama was so soft and gentle. She always used to braid my hair for me. Aunt Minnie never does it right and she jerks my head with the hairbrush. Mama never did. And she let me come into her room and sleep on the daybed when I had bad dreams.”
“Have you always had bad dreams?” Gus asked.
“I’ve had them sometimes, you know, the way one does. But not like this. These are so vivid and horrible, and when I wake up I don’t know whether I’m awake or asleep, or what is real and what is not.”
“Can you tell me about any of them?” Gus asked.
“It’s hard.” Mabel looked flustered now. “They are so real at the time, but when I try to remember, it’s all so unclear.”
“Tell me about the first one,” Gus said gently. “What is the one thing you remember—the one thing that made you afraid?”
“The snake,” Mabel said firmly. “There is always the snake.”
“You dream of a snake?”
“A giant snake,” Mabel said. “So big that it fills the room and looms over me.”
“What does this snake look like?” Gus asked.
Mabel shuddered. “It’s shiny and it has eyes like slits and it rises up over me, and…”
“Is it red?” Gus asked.
Mabel shook her head. “It’s all black, and I see these eyes looking down at me, and it bends nearer and nearer and…” She stopped, shuddering. “I don’t want to go on,” she said. “It’s too horrible.”
“Does the snake try to bite you?” Gus asked.
“I said I don’t want to go on,” Mabel said, more firmly now.
“I know this is upsetting for you, Mabel, but I am trying to help. So tell me, is the snake always in the nightmares?” Gus asked.
Mabel frowned. Then she said, “I think so. Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I can see his eyes. They are just slits, but they glint when he looks at me, as if he is pleased.”
“I would like to help you,” Gus said, “but I can’t unless you describe the dreams in detail to me.”
“No.” She was shaking her head violently. “No. I don’t want to remember.”
“I’m afraid the nightmares will continue until we can decipher what they mean,” Gus said gently. “Usually once we unlock the symbols in such dreams, they go away. You want that, don’t you? You want to be free of them.”
“Yes, but I can’t…”
“I have an idea,” Gus said. “Why don’t you write down what you remember of the dreams, at your leisure, when we’re not here? When you have another dream, write it down as soon as you wake up, when it’s still real and vivid to you. Because, you see, we now think that our dreams are symbols. So any small detail that you can remember may be the key.”
“The key to what?” Mabel asked.
“To what happened on the night of the fire.”
“We know what happened,” Mabel said. “There was a fire. My parents got burned up. I escaped and they didn’t.”
Gus stood up. “We should go now,” she said. “But I’d like to come back again, if I may, to see what you’ve remembered and written down. It might be very helpful, Mabel. I suspect you’ll go on having the dreams until we can figure out what they mean.”
We were about to leave when we heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. Mrs. Hamilton came in, looking rather flustered. “Mabel, dear, you have another visitor,” she said. “I tried to tell him that you weren’t well enough to receive visitors today, but…”
And a big, blond-haired man wearing the New York police uniform pushed past her into the room. He looked absurdly young to be a policeman, like a chubby, overgrown schoolboy.
“Hello, Mabel,” he said. “I’m back again for another little chat. Wanting to see if you’ve anything more to tell me. If your memory has returned.”