But as she stepped forward, ready to be welcomed, they departed. They vanished, disappearing like dust-motes when a curtain is drawn against the sun, and Leigh cried out in loss and anger.

One child turned to her--face disturbed but guarded. It might have been her own face. The other child, asleep until now, woke with a whimper and began crying noisily.

Leigh withdrew hastily into the next room--which was, fortunately, the bathroom. She stared at the face in the mirror: eyes wider and darker than usual, skin flushed and slightly puffy with kisses and fatigue. But still her own, still Leigh's face.

She looked around the bright, tiled room and suddenly everything was unnaturally clear, sharply defined: the Donald Duck drinking cup, the dry pink soap lying in a porcelain swan with chipped wings, the stars of light winking off the polished taps, the faint traces of mold between the white tiles.

What am I doing here? Leigh thought suddenly. What must Sammy be thinking? He must be worried sick. What possessed me, that I should fly off to New York City because of some silly hallucination? There's something thing wrong with me; I'll go to a psychiatrist and he'll tell me why...

The ragged, hiccoughing breath of a child controlling his tears dripped against her thoughts, dispersing them. Leigh clenched her fists. I will not look around, she thought. I will not admit it. No use even in pretending she was hearing one of Callie's children. The sounds she heard were not coming from the next room, but from infinitely farther away; and she was not hearing them with her ears.

Leigh raised her eyes from her hands to the mirror, and there he--or his reflection, if an illusion could be reflected--was, lower lip sucked into a trembling mouth, hurt eyes shining with unshed tears.

Sammy and Elizabeth would have to get along without her. Her duty now was to find this boy, her first child, and to give him the love she had denied him all these years.

Her world was defined by four, slime-green walls. Roaches came and went, moving spots on the dirty walls, and the floor was littered with someone else's cigarette butts, someone else's kleenex. It was a very cheap hotel room.

At first Leigh went out for meals, eating in dark, narrow grills where the air smelled thickly of old grease, sweat and ashes, or in fast-food restaurants where the piped-in air and music were as bland and dependable as the food. But her son's visits were so unpredictable that she took to staying in more and more often. She was trying to communicate with him--sometimes she thought she was succeeding--and she couldn't risk a scene in public. She bought jars of peanut butter, cans of tuna fish, boxes of crackers and cartons of warm soda to store in her room against the days when she didn't want to go out, not even for a quick run down to the corner frankfurter stand.

She slept more and more, because there was nothing else to do, and sometimes he came to her in her dreams. Waking merged into sleeping for her as the summer grew hotter and she sat sweating and staring at the flaking walls, hoping to see her son.

An explanation had crystalized in her mind, seeded by observation, by wish, by dream, and by the books she now read in search of an answer.

She had never had an abortion--that much was obvious. The child she was seeing was her own child, removed from her womb as a foetus and grown to term in an artificial womb.

Who had done it? The same people who had visited her as a child. They might be gods, angels, devils, people from another planet or spirits. It didn't matter what she called them--she believed they belonged to some race other than human, and came to the earth from a planet beneath another star.

Why had they done it? It was beyond her comprehension. She could only wait for the explanation they offered when they finally came to her.

What she saw now, and what she had seen as a child, were astral projections. Soon she would be with them, she would hold her son in her arms. She would wipe away his tears at last.

But meanwhile, she waited, When the vigils were too long and lonely, without a visit from her son, and when the tight, ugly room became too oppressive, Leigh went out walking in the city.

She hated it, this decomposing carcass of a city. She hated the smells--New York was like a stifling room, filled with people breathing their sour hopes, bad dreams and stinking fears at each other. The thick smells of grease, oil and exhaust claimed the air and the sweet, rotting stench of garbage carpeted the littered sidewalks.

But above all it was the people of New York that she hated and feared. She tried not to look at them, to thread her way through them on the street as if she were walking through a forest of malevolent trees, who would attack her if provoked. Men often called out to her, but she made it a point never to hear what they said, never to allow any of the sounds of the street to penetrate. None of this had anything to do with her.

But she did look at some people--the little ones, the children. She scrutinized their faces, occasionally wheeling around to look again when something--some motion or trick of light--reminded her of her son. He might be here now, on the street, looking for her, and she could not bear the thought of missing him. But always, when she looked again, she saw only the face of a tiny stranger.

The elevator as usual, was out of order. Leigh grimaced, hefted her heavy purse higher on one shoulder and glanced at the desk clerk, thinking of complaining to him about it. He was picking his nose and staring without interest at the black and white photographs of fleshy nudes in a wrinkled and torn magazine. Leigh took the stairs up.

There was a man in the hallway, leaning against the wall, reading a paper. Leigh saw him from the comer of one eye as she emerged, out of breath, from the stairwell.

"Mrs. Ward?" A hand touched her shoulder as she put the key in the lock of her door. She froze, then looked over her shoulder at him. Trapped.