Free Puzzle for Fiends by Patrick Quentin Page A

off my bed. Before she got into her own, she gave a little laugh, pulled open the drawer of the table by her bedside and took out a revolver. She dangled it for me to see.
    “There, darling, your own gun. Next time you see an old hag, scream and I’ll shoot.”
    She threw the gun back in the drawer and slid into bed, yawning: “ ’Night, Gordy.”
    “’Night, Selena.”
    She had confused me. After she had left, I lay trying to think. I was sick. I was full of drugs. It was just possible that the whole scene had been some bizarre illusion. I forced myself to remember every detail of that moment when I had awakened and seen the face looming over mine. I knew just how terrifically important it was to decide once and for all whether there had or hadn’t been an old woman.
    If there had been an old woman, the old woman had said I was not Gordy Friend. If there had been an old woman, Selena had deliberately lied to me. And if Selena had lied to me, then the whole situation surrounding me was a monstrous tissue of lies.
    The faintest scent of lavender trailed up to me. I glanced down. Something white was gleaming on the spread. I picked it up.
    It was a woman’s handkerchief, a small, plain, old woman’s handkerchief.
    And it smelt of lavender.

Chapter 8
    I put the handkerchief in the pocket of my pajama jacket, hiding it under the big one Jan had brought me. I knew I had to keep steady. That was about the only definite thought I had at that moment.
    You—whoever you are—keep steady.
    The room, washed in moonlight, seemed particularly beautiful. Selena, blonde and insidious as the moonlight, was lying in the next bed, asleep or pretending to be asleep. Part of me was rash and yearned to call her name, to have her come over again, to feel the warmth of her bare arms around me. But I fought against it. I didn’t even look at the other bed. Because I knew now that Selena was false.
    That was how this new, huge anxiety first came to me. The old woman had existed. Selena had tried to make her into a dream. Selena had lied. Selena had lied because if she had admitted the existence of the old woman then I would have demanded to see her and the old woman would say again what she had already said:
    You are not Gordy Friend.
    I repeated those words in my mind. With the ominous clarity that comes to the wakeful invalid at night, I knew then quite definitely that I was not Gordy Friend. My instincts had always known it. But there had been nothing tangible to support them until the arrival of this flimsy, lavender-scented handkerchief.
    I was not Gordy Friend.
    Strangely calm, I faced this preposterous truth. I was lying in a beautiful room in a luxurious house which I had been told was my own. It was not my own. I was nursed and petted by a woman who said she was my mother. She was not my mother. I was treated to reminiscences from an imaginary childhood by a girl who said she was my sister. She was not my sister. I was lured and made love to by a girl who said she was my wife. She was not my wife. My vague suspicions had been lulled whenever I voiced them by the plausible psychiatric pretenses of a doctor who said he was my friend.
    Friend. In that calm, moonlit room, the word seemed inimitably sinister. They called themselves Friend. They called me Friend. They were constantly soothing me with the sickly sweet sedative of their sentence: We're your friends.
    They weren’t my friends. They were my enemies. This wasn’t a calm, moonlit room. It was a prison.
    I was sure of that because there could be no other explanation. At least four people were banded together to persuade me that I was Gordy Friend. Mothers, sisters and wives do not embrace an impostor as a son, brother and husband, doctors do not risk their reputations on a lie—except for some desperately important reason. The Friends had some desperate motive for wanting to produce a make-believe Gordy Friend. And I was their