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M egan lay in bed, her window cracked with the chill of midnight whispering over the pane to cool her room.

Under the covers her legs twitched as her mind flashed—dark, then bright—with images of the cellar.

There were reasons not to venture too far into hypnosis.

Her previous sessions, which ended smoothly in Dr. Mattingly’s office under his guidance and tutelage, had never gone beyond the lush armchair that was her home while her mind explored the deeply buried memories of her captivity.

But since the last session, when she unleashed herself from his voice and journeyed off on her own, her mind had been restless with images from the cellar.

Dr. Mattingly had expertly prevented these suppressed memories from surfacing outside the controlled environment of his office and the isolated time frame of a single hypnosis sitting.

But now, since Megan’s rogue therapy session, every time her mind slipped into the unconscious state of sleep her thoughts and dreams were wild and saturated with the happenings of her captivity—disjointed thoughts and phantasmagorias loosely rooted in the facts she had established with Dr. Mattingly, but also rich with exotic pictures and fictitious characters.

In her current dream, Megan’s ankle was still shackled to the wall, but the plywood was gone from the windows and the sunlight bright when she rose from her bed, springs echoing as she stood.

Outside, she looked up to see the sky streaked with the jet stream of crisscrossing planes, white scratches against a blue sky.

A loud whistle startled her as a freight train raced past the cellar.

She felt its vibration as the long freight cars passed in a blur, one after the other, until they transformed into a commuter line—the windows spilling the blue glow of interior lighting.

The sun was gone now in her dream and it was dark but for the passing train and the aqua-lit windows.

It sped past her cellar, and in the train’s window Megan noticed an isolated figure profiled by the light.

Each passenger car displayed the same image of the same person.

Megan moved closer to the cellar window and squinted her eyes.

The person in the train turned, as if sensing Megan’s presence.

In bed, Megan’s head and neck moved back and forth as she followed the saccadic motion of the train in her dream.

She let out small whimpers as she slept, her mind straining to identify the person on the train.

Then, the woman raised a hand in an easy wave and Megan saw clearly the face in the train’s window, highlighted in the soft light. It was Livia Cutty.

“Don’t go!” Megan cried.

But the train continued until there were no more cars. Until the night was black and quiet, with no planes and no stars and no moon. When Megan put her hand to the cellar window, the plywood was back .

“Don’t leave me!”

She heard a voice and Megan shot her eyes open.

“Honey!” her father was saying as he woke her, shaking her shoulders. “Megan, wake up. It’s just a dream.”

Megan finally woke. She stared at her father, disoriented.

“It’s okay, honey. I’m here. Daddy’s here.”

He held her close as she breathed heavily.

“This is why I didn’t want you to start this again. This is what I wanted to save you from.”

Megan wrapped her arms around her father, rested her head on his shoulder, and cried as the image of the blurry train passing the cellar window pulsed in her mind.

Livia Cutty’s easy wave as the final car passed.

The feeling, again, of being alone in the dark cellar.

And something else, too, that dug at the inner reaches of her brain, something difficult to identify as her mind fought fact from fiction.

But eventually, as her mind settled and the images of her dream faded, one thing remained.

A sound. It had not been present in her dream, but without doubt this noise was the missing element she’d worked so long to identify.

It had been there in her last therapy session.

She’d heard it just briefly before Dr. Mattingly forced consciousness upon her.

And now, a week later, it finally manifested.

It was no longer dancing and elusive in the foggy memories of her subconscious but, instead, clear and vibrant and ringing in her ears.