With Friends Like These... by Gillian Roberts

had indeed happened.
    “Dizzy.” Lyle canvassed the room the way a drowning man might look for the disappearing horizon. I could not believe that the self-confident man who’d stood up a few minutes back had so thoroughly and swiftly become this disoriented, terrified creature. He even looked different—bloated and sallow.
    “Who—”
    I stopped where I was. His breathing was loud and rough, like sticks over heavy metal grating. He was disintegrating in front of us as if he’d been seized by something alien and inhuman. Now, in addition to the breathing, the pallor, the bloat, the buckling legs, and disorientation, his eyes had lost their moorings.
    “No!” Hattie screamed.
    He lurched forward. I made my way toward the dining room door, past the lace-clothed side table where the dark and white chocolate dream of a birthday cake waited.
    “Who—” whooshed out of Lyle, “—kill me?”
    Hattie screamed. The room buzzed with the single word as question and exclamation. “Kill. Kill! Kill?”
    Wheezing like a fireplace bellows, Lyle forced more words out. “Who…poison me?”
    I ran like hell for the phone.

Six
    “POISONED?” TIFFANY SCREAMED at the top of her lungs. Her words reached all the way down the hall to where I stood at the small front desk. “What are you saying?” she howled. “ I ate the same food!”
    I dialed 911. “A man’s been poisoned. I think.” It was embarrassing making an emergency call with caveats and small print. Perhaps there’d been a poisoning—no guarantees. But there was definitely a sick person and, strengthening my case, fifty other people who had eaten the same food. If, of course, the food was at fault.
    Nine-one-one didn’t remark on my quibbling. Instead, they said to stay calm, that help would be there any minute.
    I tried to follow their advice and remain collected, although I was having trouble remembering how, particularly given the commotion in the dining room.
    The scene was out of Breughel by way of Vanity Fair. Lyle Zacharias, breathing with obvious difficulty, braced himself on the long table that held his ornate birthday cake. Smartly attired party guests wavered between blasé seen-it-all sophistication and a visible desire to stampede. The repeated motif—whispered, shouted, questioned, in deep basso tones and cultivated soprano—was the word poison echoing like the dull pulse of mass hysteria.
    People futilely sought comfort and reassurance from one another. “Is sweat on my forehead?” a man demanded of his dinner companion. “Wasn’t Lyle sweating?” “But what about me?” his tablemate answered. “I feel sick.”
    And so did lots of others. People complained of dizziness, or weakness, or trembling—including me. I hoped I was suffering a simple old-fashioned anxiety attack.
    En route to my mother, I passed Hattie Zacharias, who looked almost as ill as her nephew did. Her wrinkled skin was even looser, as if it were falling off. She mouthed the word poison, although no more than a hiss of air emerged. She repeated the motion, as if practicing it, working to get it right. It was even more frightening that way, like a silent scream.
    Poison. It finally, thoroughly, hit me, and as dreadful as I felt for Lyle Zacharias, I felt even worse for me.
    Fear buckled my knees, and then, of course, I worried that this sudden muscle weakness was an early symptom. Had Lyle’s legs weakened or simply cramped?
    My core temperature dropped. I was freezing. Had Lyle been cold? No—he’d been sweating. Good, good. But I felt lightheaded, too. Was that the same as Lyle’s dizziness?
    While these idiotic brain waves skittled about, Lyle let go of the table and made a staggering lurch in the direction of the doorway. However, he didn’t even make it past the cake before he stumbled and again grabbed the table.
    People moved between us, so I couldn’t see clearly, but it was obvious from the sounds and the sudden general recoil that the man was now violently