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having serious head rushes. Usually one head rush was enough to make you slow down, but these kept coming. I needed to lie down. Or wake up. Or something. I reached for the doorknob.
    It was locked.
    I tugged at it, then remembered. It had self-locked when I’d left.
    Wait, what was I talking about? This was a goddamned dream, so it shouldn’t matter if it self-locked. I yanked on it even harder, kicked the door, screamed at it. Come on, dream door. Open. Up. Now. Erna? You in there? You mind removing yourself from Mitchell’s lap long enough to answer the door, maybe?
    The early-morning sun found the east-facing window. Light prismed all the hell over the place. My skin felt unreasonably hot, Hiroshima-afterblast hot, ready to melt at the slightest touch.
    I threw a shoulder at the door, hoping the dream construction crews who dealt with 1972 used cheap flakeboard. But the door held firm.
    I slammed my shoulder into it, then again, and again, throwing an increasing amount of body weight with every blow.
    Still nothing.
    The sun was blazing through the window at the end of the hall in earnest now. I raised my left hand to shield my eyes and immediately felt a searing pain, like I’d grabbed the wrong end of a hot curling iron. I glanced up through watery eyes just in time to watch a beam of light burn away two of my fingers.
    First the ring finger.
    Then the pinky.

     
    A scream forced its way out of my mouth, and then I jerked my hand away from the light. Pressed my back up against the door. Did a beam of sunlight really just slice through my fingers like it was a light saber?
    I forced myself to look down. My ring and pinky fingers were on the floor, at my feet.
    They weren’t severed. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. There was no blood, no ripped flesh or exposed bone. They were Play-Doh fingers, detached from a Play-Doh hand.
    After a few seconds they begin to fade away and disappear completely.

III
     

     

The Thing with Three Fingers
     

     
     
     
     
     

I woke up on a hospital gurney with a skull-crushing headache and a raw throat. People in blue smocks brushed against my bed, which was jammed up against a wall in a busy hallway. Every time the bed jolted it sent another sledgehammer tap on the spike slowly inching its way to the center of my brain. My mouth tasted like dirty pennies. I wanted to throw up.
    After a while I rolled over and used the metal rails to pull myself up to a sitting position. I ran my fingertips across my five-day stubble, patted my chest, my belly. All there. I was still wearing my nylon shorts and T-shirt. The ring and pinky fingers were still attached to my left hand.
    But both were dead numb, like I’d fallen asleep on them. They wouldn’t bend either. Not unless I cheated and used my other hand, which I noticed was now hooked up with an IV needle. Good Christ, what had happened last night?
    Somebody blew past my gurney, flipping through papers on a clipboard.
    “Hey,” I called out, and the guy stopped midstride.
    “Yeah?”
    “Where am I?”
    “Frankford Hospital, man. You O.D.’d.”
    “I what ? How did I get here?”
    “Girlfriend brought you in. She was pretty freaked out. I were you, I’d think about help. But I can’t be the first person to tell you that.”
    And then he continued on down the hall. O.D.’d?
    I needed to get out of here. I grabbed the IV needle with the three good fingers of my left hand, yanked it out, sat up. Some blood shot out, so I pulled up the tape and recovered the puncture. I hated needles.
    So this was Frankford Hospital. I hadn’t been inside this place in years—and that had been the old building, which had been razed and replaced by this one.
    My grandpop was here somewhere, on one of these floors. For a moment I thought about stopping up to see him, just to get the obligation out of the way. I could kill two birds with one stone—recover from overdose, check; visit grandfather, check. But then I remembered I was