Julie popped her head round the kitchen door.
'Hi, Mum, is it okay if Marcus comes to dinner tonight?'
'Oh, Julie, not tonight,' Sara answered quickly.
'You say that every time,' her daughter exclaimed angrily, 'When will it be all right?'
'We'll talk about it some other time,' Sara answered a mite too casually, 'Meanwhile I've got the baby to feed and the twins will be in soon. Unless of course, you want to feed Timmy?'
'Can't. Got a phone call to make.'

Julie's head disappeared from view. Sara blew out a breath of relief, she knew that would close the subject. Julie had no time for babies, she had been the baby for far too long. Sara looked around at Timmy sitting amiably in his high-chair.
'Don't take it personally,' she said, ruffling his silky-soft hair. Timmy gave her an angelic smile which showed off his four teeth to perfection. He was a round dumpling of a child and incredibly sweet tempered.

Later on at dinner, Julie asked, 'Dad, what's an isosceles triangle?'
'You should know that, my girl. It's when two sides of a triangle are of equal length.' Ken laughed, 'What on earth do you want to know that for?'
'Oh, Marcus is so absorbed in geometry. It's all he ever talks about. He's got lots of old books on the subject.' 
'Hasn't he any new ones?' her brother asked.
Julie sighed, 'These have been in his family for years,' she replied, 'He treasures them. All he goes on about are solids, surfaces, angles, ratios, parallelograms, and so on and so on. I just thought I'd like to learn a bit more about it.'
'Well, if you paid as much attention to your school work as you do to your dancing classes, you might have remembered what it was all about.'
'Now Ken,' Sara put in, 'You know she excels at dancing. What good would geometry have done her?'
'Doesn't hurt to learn these things. When I see the opportunities that kids waste today...'
A chorus of protesting howls drowned him out.

They had finished dinner and Sara was loading the dishwasher when she heard the bell ring. She listened. Usually they left everything to her, but the murmuring of voices told her that somebody had actually got up to answer the door. It was her own fault, she spoilt her family, but she had unbounded energy so she didn't mind.

When everything was tidy in the kitchen, she ran upstairs to look in on Timmy. Sara grinned. Timmy's bottom was in the air with his knees tucked under him. Sara straightened him out and gently kissed his rosy cheek. How she loved her latest child.

As she entered the living room, Marcus rose to his feet. Hugely built, he towered over her. A shiver went through Sara. His eyes were so dark, there was no apparent difference between pupil and iris. Black, hypnotic eyes which radiated a cold, implacable intensity.
He scared the hell out of her!
Marcus bowed slightly, never talking his eyes from hers, 'Good evening Mrs Kennedy.'
His English was impeccable, with only a faint trace of his Rumanian beginnings.
'Oh! Hello, Marcus.'

Sara sat down suddenly. Marcus always had that effect on her. She knew there were people like that. People who deplete you. Psychic vampires who drain you of energy rather than blood! Of course, coming from Rumania, Marcus had a head start!
Sara sucked in a deep breath and picked up her knitting, letting the flow of conversation eddy and swirl about her. She concentrated on her pattern knowing, with a dreadful certainty, that if she looked up those black, hypnotic eyes would be fixed on her.

A cold thread of fear prickled along her spine. She pursed her lips impatiently, she was being ridiculous and letting her imagination run away with her. As if to prove herself wrong, she flicked a glance in his direction. Just as she thought! Her heart gave a lurch and started to, accelerate. Couldn't Julie see that every time she brought Marcus to this house, he would sit with his eyes fixed on Sara?
Ken had noticed but he'd only laughed.

When they went up to bed that night, Ken told her that young men always fall for an older woman at some point in their lives. He teased her about going into competition with her own daughter, and dismissed her misgivings about Marcus with an airy wave of his hands.
'Most women would be flattered,' he said, 'Especially if they'd just turned forty!' He turned and gave her a kiss, 'Let's face it, you are rather gorgeous...for your age!'
Sara took a swipe at him but frowned and shuddered, 'I just don't like him. He gives me the creeps. I do wish she wouldn't bring him home.'
'Oh, come on, love, there's nothing in the boy to dislike. He's charming.'
Ken climbed into bed, 'Let's face it, when you think of her last boyfriend...whew! Better to be hooked on geometry rather than booze or drugs.'

Sara had to agree. Marcus had perfect manners. Too perfect, she thought resentfully. Why couldn't he be gauche sometimes like normal people? But it wasn't that. It was the taut, controlled but all-consuming energy behind those black eyes that frightened her. Those watchful all-seeing but somehow empty eyes.
'Goodnight, love,' Ken settled down and was fast asleep in two minutes flat.
Sara lay there, her uneasy thoughts spinning around Marcus. She would never agree to Julie marrying him, and hoped it would never come to that. Desperately, she tried to think of other things, to shut him out of her mind, but even from the lounge he imposed his will on her.

Imposed his will!

What the hell was she thinking? Nobody could impose their will on her without her say-so. She had always been strong-willed, hadn't she?

She started to suck in deep breaths, willing herself to relax until Marcus left the house.

In a short while she heard Julie come up the stairs, and Sara sighed with relief. Now she could get off to sleep. It was only as she drifted off, just tipping over the edge of consciousness, that the thought intruded. She hadn't heard the noisy old banger that Marcus drove.

Too late, she was asleep and dreaming.

In her dreams she was lost in a terrifying, geometric landscape. Frantically running from triangles, spheres, oblongs which were slowly closing in on her. The really terrifying thing was that she knew these shapes had once been human. And...she too...very soon...
 

Sara leapt up in bed, nerves jangling, soaked in perspiration. Gulping in deep breaths, trying to calm herself from the aftermath of the nightmare, she sat with head in hands in the dark willing herself to relax.

Finally, as the dream receded, she blew out a long relieved breath and quietly got out of bed. Walking to the window she pulled aside the heavy curtain and gazed up at the full Moon. The silver sphere looked oddly malevolent as triangles of cloud passed over its face.

Sara gasped in horror. Triangles of cloud! She rubbed her eyes. Must be fragments of the dream still clinging to her vision. She blinked rapidly and looked down into the garden. A dreadful coldness clamped around her heart.
Her beautiful birch tree was a pole with a cone atop it. Beneath it, a sight which filled her with abject horror. Her neighbour's cat was a small grey oblong of fur, with flattened eyes still glinting in the moonlight!

'No-o-o-o!' the gurgling cry broke from Sara's lips, as a screaming hysteria threatened to overwhelm her. She clung to the curtain, gasping. She was still dreaming, that was it. Somehow she had awoken in that alien geometric landscape. If she went quietly back to bed and relaxed she would wake up in the morning, as she always did.

She climbed quietly into bed and reached out for Ken. He wouldn't mind if she woke him.
'A-h-h-h...' the choked scream died on her lips, as she gazed wildly at the long slim rectangle that lay beside her. Ken's features were no longer three dimensional but spread over the surface of a flat plane.
Sheer mind-numbing terror raced through Sara as she sat staring, until she thought her eyes would start from her head, and her heart would burst, so frantic was its pace.

For long moments she was unable to move, turned to stone, petrified. But then, at last and moving very slowly so as not to disturb the 
'thing' that was once her husband, she slid out of bed.
Trembling violently, her body filled with ice she moved like an automaton across the room, to the cot. Pain knifed through her. Timmy was a sphere! Her darling boy, her precious baby was nothing but a ball of blue and white. Sara turned blindly away, she couldn't bear to look at it.

Wildly, she ran into Julie's room only to find a triangle in the bed. The twins were hexagons. Sara tore at her own hair hoping the sheer physical pain would wake her from her torment. But to no avail. Somehow she had been precipitated into this nightmare dimension. Fourth, fifth, sixth, she had no idea which. All she knew was that she had to get back into her own dimension, her own reality.

She had to wake up!

'S-a-r-a,' her name was called softly, persuasively, in that impeccably precise accent.

Her head jerked up, the blood freezing in her veins. Her mouth formed into a rictus grin of pure terror.