Curled into this was a dollop of fur the size of a tablespoon and the colour of sherry.Įlena tapped her fingers against the icy bars of the cage. On the wide sill stood a cage with a small bottle of water hanging on its side, an exercise wheel in its centre, and an athletic-sock-turned-nest in its far right-hand corner. It was still dark outside, and the fog which had lain upon the city like an oppressive miasma for the past five days seemed even thicker this morning, pressing against the casement windows and streaking them with a lacework of moisture. She padded across the room to her desk and pulled open the curtains. It felt like velvet against her bare skin. Certainly not at home in London with her mother, and never here in college. Her father had presented her with a fine silk dressing gown upon her matriculation into Cambridge a year ago–indeed, he had presented her with an entire wardrobe which she had mostly discarded–but she had left it at his house on one of her frequent weekend visits, and while she wore it in his presence to appease the anxiety with which he seemed to watch her every move, she never wore it at any other time. The material was old, worn down to a feathery softness. Rolling out of bed, she thrust her feet into fuzzy slippers and quickly drew on the green woollen bathrobe that lay in a heap next to her jeans on the floor. No wonder she'd thought she was elsewhere. She'd come in just before two, torn off her clothes, dropped exhausted into bed, and managed about four hours' sleep. This last item, as well as the telephone beside it, brought everything sharply into focus. Nor should it have been strewn with papers, notebooks, several open volumes, and a large word processor.

In fact, there shouldn't have been a desk in here at all. They were drawn across a window which was itself in the wrong place. She hadn't started out the previous night in this bed or even in this room, so for a moment she blinked, perplexed, wondering when the plain red curtains had been changed for that hideous print of yellow chrysanthemums and green leaves lounging on a field of what appeared to be bracken.

When it broke into her dream–an unwelcome interloper, considering the subject matter her subconscious had been pursuing–she bolted upright in bed. The second light, however, positioned to shine directly in her face from an angle-lamp on the bedside table, acted as efficiently as a blast of music or a jangling alarm. The first light, twelve feet away on her desk, managed only to rouse her moderately. Elena Weaver awakened when the second light went on in her bed-sitting room.

For the sake of elena elizabeth george