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finally they faded into a bad memory. Edith had attributed their slow disappearance to the lack of a reassuring masculine presence in the house. Shirley’s father had died before her first birthday.
    This nightmare— No! This was far worse than a nightmare. It was an evil that possessed her. These things, these awful, malevolent things had steadily destroyed her personality and devastated her life.
    Shirley’s jerking gradually diminished and then stopped. Edith gently pulled the blanket down. Shirley looked up, her eyes searching Edith’s face. Recognition slowly crossed her features. “Mother?”
    As Edith put her arms tightly around her daughter, she decided, gripped now by guilt that she had waited too long. She had abided by Shirley’s fearful avoidance long enough. It was time.
    Edith wrapped the blanket securely around Shirley and tenderly tucked it in around her neck. “I’ll be right back, Honey.” She ran into her small kitchen and dialed the telephone.
    “Nine-one-one emergency.”
    “My daughter is very ill.” Edith choked up. It was several moments before she could speak again. “Please send an ambulance.”
    She hung up and went back to her daughter’s room to wait for the paramedics. Shirley sobbed quietly, hugging herself as she rocked back and forth. She let her mother sit next to her and after a little coaxing, she laid her head in her mother’s lap.
    Edith wept, gripped by the helpless frustration of a parent with a sick child. What was happening? As she tenderly stroked Shirley’s wet face, she prayed that the doctors would know how to make her daughter well.



Chapter 11
    “W hat in the hell is that?” Steve’s finger touched the large MRI display screen.
    Dr. Walker pulled up a rolling chair next to Steve and filled it with his considerable bulk. “I don’t know,” he said after a minute.
    Steve and Dr. Walker stared at a pair of 30-inch computer screens, their faces bathed by the cool bluish light, and examined Captain Palmer’s brain images, arrayed like rows and columns of thinly sliced walnuts.
    “It’s like a bulldozer, no, a pair, plowed right through his brain,” muttered Dr. Walker. He hunched closer to the screen and frowned at the pair of parallel white bands that cut through the brain images. “M.S.?”
    “Can’t be,” Steve replied, pointing. “Look. It involves the gray matter, too.” He sat back as a strange déjà vu feeling came over him. He had seen a scan like this before . . . but where?
    “Herpes encephalitis?” Marty speculated, interrupting Steve’s thoughts. “But it doesn’t really fit that either.”
    Steve turned back to the scan and mentally reconstructed the series of two dimensional brain slices into a 3-D image. “It looks like it starts here.” He pointed with his finger. “See, the orbital-frontal area is brighter than the rest. From there, it tracks to the midbrain, then the temporal lobes, and to the cingulate gyrus, here.” He straightened up. Yes, this was a pattern he had seen before.
    “You’re right, it’s following the olfactory radiations,” said Dr. Walker. “It must have wiped out his smell, then spread to his memory and emotional centers.”
    Steve’s face knotted in thought, “Let’s put this together. We’ve got an airline pilot who has a disease affecting his frontal lobes, with a loss of judgment. His temporal lobes are affected, and somehow are recreating his Vietnam experiences.”
    “Right,” Marty added, “memory’s stored there, triggered by this thing somehow. That would explain his flashbacks.”
    “And,” Steve continued, “his limbic centers are involved, either increasing the intensity of his flashbacks or maybe making them seem credible. Otherwise, he would have felt like he was just dreaming or remembering things. Instead, he acted as if it were really happening.”
    “I see what you’re driving at. He found himself in the middle of his memory, having to act it out all over again.”