THE SUBWAY COLLECTION-A Box Set of 8 Dark Stories to Read on the Go by Billie Sue Mosiman Page B

It was large. It was deadly. It was like a fat hand with extended claws reaching out into all areas of the brain.
                  Jake was going to be taken away from her.
                  She must set it all straight again if she could. That first fear had turned her heart to stone and now there was volcanic lava scoring her, leaving her racked with tremors, her cheeks wet with tears. She rushed home to the apartment house, ran up two flights of stairs to the third floor, to Apartment 311.
                  She knocked, banging on the door with both fists, screaming with the terror and dread of losing all that she had ever loved, all that had ever loved her in return.
                  The battering went unanswered. Dessy called and no sound came from within 311.
                  Down the stairs again, racing, leaping down them three at a time, staggering, she hit the first floor and banged on the super's door. "Let me in! I have to talk to Vera. Let me in now!"
                  The door opened on a chain and Mr. Caramini looked out at her, concerned and not a little frightened. "What's all this about?"
                  "Where's Vera? Three-eleven!"
                  "Dessy Mitchell? What's wrong with you? You look a mess, crying that way. There ain't no one in three-eleven, you know that."
                  Dessy's voice rose an octave. "Vera, the woman in three-eleven who put the sign in the lobby door..." She turned to point and only then did she see there was no sign. But it had been there just the day before, she was certain of that. She swallowed past a lump in her throat and put a cap on the panic that was trying to shatter her mind. "Vera." She said it just as plainly and unemotionally as she could so he could understand. "She had apartment three-eleven, third floor, down the hall from my apartment.
                  She kept a sign in the window. Right there." Now she did point. "It was there for months."
                  Mr. Caramini closed the door, undid the chain, and stood facing her. "Honey, you're mistaken.
                  Three-eleven's empty. Been empty for a couple years. You never heard from the other tenants about the murder happened in there?"
                  Dessy felt her knees go weak. She sagged against the door frame, her breath whistling out of her like steam from a kettle.
                  "That was before you moved in. I'd have thought someone would have gossiped about it to you by now, though I do see you and your young man tend to stay to yourselves a lot. Was a terrible thing, messy. I had a time, I tell you, getting folks to take the other apartments for a while. Bad karma, you know."
                  "What happened? In three-eleven?" she asked. Not that she cared. It didn't matter, did it, what happened; what mattered was that she had struck a deal with a mirage, a phantom, and there was blood to pay.
                  "It was a middle-aged couple, devoted you would have thought them, like lovebirds. Always holding hands, or he'd have his arm around her shoulder or waist, always kissing in the lobby when they thought no one was looking. Well...sort of like you and Jake."
                  Dessy saw the hospital room in her mind, the doctors ringed around the bed like white vultures, hanging over their patient they could not save, but intrigued by the claws of destruction in his brain.
                  They had sighed and exchanged guilty glances and told her how it might turn out all right, you never could tell with these things, it could stop growing, there had been miracles, they'd seen them. Lies. Lies to keep her from cursing them, from falling apart and making a scene of such grief it would bring down the walls.
                  Mr. Caramini's voice was like a glass chime, tinkling in