Got you! he yells triumphantly. Got you, me proud beauty!

At first she thinks the eclipse must not have been total yet after all, because the day has begun to grow still darker. Then it occurs to her that she is probably fainting. This thought is accompanied by feelings of deep relief and gratitude.

Don’t be silly, Jess-you can’t faint in a dream.

But she thinks she may be doing just that, and in the end it doesn’t matter much whether it is a faint or only a deeper cave of sleep toward which she is fleeing like the survivor of some cataclysm. What matters is that she is finally escaping the-dream which had assaulted her in a much more fundamental way than her father’s act on the deck that day, she is finally escaping, and gratitude seems like a beautifully normal response to these circumstances.

She has almost made it into that comforting cave of darkness when a sound intrudes: a splintery, ugly sound like a loud spasm of coughing. She tries to flee the sound and finds she cannot. It has her like a hook, and like a hook it begins to pull her up toward the vast but fragile silver sky that separates sleep from consciousness.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The former Prince, who had once been the pride and joy of young Catherine Sutlin, sat in the kitchen entryway for about ten minutes after its latest foray into the bedroom. It sat with its head up, its eyes wide and unblinking. It had been existing on very short commons over the last two months, it had fed well this evening-gorged, in fact-and it should have been feeling logy and sleepy. It had been both for awhile, but now all sleepiness had departed. What replaced it was a feeling of nervousness which grew steadily worse. Something had snapped several of the hair-thin tripwires posted in that mystical zone where the dog’s senses and its intuition overlapped. The bitchmaster continued to moan in the other room, and to make occasional talking noises, but her sounds were not the source of the stray’s jitters; they were not what had caused it to sit up when it had been on the verge of drifting placidly off to sleep, and not the reason why its good ear was now cocked alertly forward and its muzzle had wrinkled back far enough to show the tips of its teeth.

It was something else… something not right… something which was possibly dangerous.

As Jessie’s dream peaked and then began to spiral down into darkness, the dog suddenly scrambled to its feet, unable to bear the steady sizzle in its nerves any longer. It turned, pushed open the loose back door with its snout, and jumped out into the windy dark. As it did, some strange and unidentifiable scent came to it. There was danger in that scent… almost certainly-danger.

The dog raced for the woods as fast as its swollen, overloaded belly would allow. When it had gained the safety of the undergrowth, it turned and squirmed a little way back toward the house. It had retreated, true enough, but a great many more alarm-bells would have to go off inside before it would consider completely abandoning the wonderful supply of food it had found.

Safely hidden, its thin, weary, intelligent face crisscrossed with overlapping ideograms of moonshadow, the stray began to bark, and it was this sound which eventually drew Jessie back to consciousness.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

During their summers on the lake in the early sixties, before William was able to do much more than paddle in the shallows with a pair of bright orange water-wings attached to his back, Maddy and Jessie, always good friends despite the difference in their ages, often went down to swim at the Neidermeyers'. The Neidermeyers had a float equipped with a diving platform, and it was there that Jessie began to develop the form which won her a place first on her high school swim-team and then on the All-State team in 1971-What she remembered second-best about diving from the board on the Neidermeyers” float (first-for then and for always-was the swoop through the hot summer air toward the blue glitter of the waiting water) was how it felt to come up from the depths, through conflicting layers of warm and cold.

Coming up from her troubled sleep was like that.

First there was a black, roaring confusion that was like being inside a thundercloud. She bumped and yawed her way through it, not having the slightest idea of who she was or when she was, let alone where she was. Then a warmer, calmer layer: she had been caught in the most awful nightmare in all of recorded history (at least in her recorded history), but a nightmare was all it had been, and now it was over. As the surface neared, however, she encountered another chilly layer: an idea that the reality waiting ahead was almost as bad as the nightmare. Maybe worse.

What is it? she asked herself. What could possibly be worse thanwhat I’ve just been through?

She refused to think about that. The answer was within reach, but if it occurred to her, she might decide to flip over and start finning her way back down into the depths again. To do that would be to drown, and while drowning might not be the worst way to step out-not as bad as running your Harley into a rock wall or parachuting into a cat’s cradle of high-voltage wires, for instance-the idea of opening her body to that flat mineral smell, which reminded her simultaneously of copper and oysters, was insupportable. Jessie kept stroking grimly upward, telling herself that she would worry about reality when and if she actually broke the surface.

The last layer she passed through was as warm and fearful as freshly spilled blood: her arms were probably going to be deader than stumps. She just hoped she would be able to command enough movement in them to get the blood flowing again.

Jessie gasped, jerked, and opened her eyes. She hadn’t the slightest idea of how long she had been asleep, and the clock-radio on the bureau, stuck in its own hell of obsessive repetition (twelve-twelve-twelve, it flashed into the darkness, as if time had stopped forever at midnight), was no help. All she knew for sure was that it was full dark and the moon was now shining through the skylight instead of the east window.

Her arms were jumping with a nervous jitter-jive of pins and needles. She usually disliked that feeling intensely, but not now; it was a thousand times better than the muscle cramps she had expected as the price of waking her dead extremities back up. A moment or two later she noticed a spreading dampness beneath her legs and bottom and realized that her previous need to urinate was gone. Her body had taken care of the problem while she slept.

She doubled her fists and cautiously pulled herself up a little, wincing at the pain in her wrists and the deep, Sobbing ache the movement caused in the backs of her hands. Most of that pain’s aresult of trying to slip out of the cuffs, she thought. You got nobody toblame but yourself, sweetheart.

The dog had begun to bark again. Each shrill cry was like a.Splinter pounded into her eardrum, and she realized that sound was what had pulled her up and out of her sleep just as she had been about to dive below the nightmare. The location of the sounds-told her the dog was back outside. She was glad it had left the house, but a little puzzled, as well. Maybe it just hadn’t been comfortable under a roof after spending such a long time outside. That idea made a certain amount of sense… as much as anything else in this situation, anyway.

“Get it together, Jess,” she advised herself in a solemn, sleep-foggy voice, and maybe-just maybe-she was doing that. The panic and the unreasoning shame she’d felt in the dream were departing. The dream itself seemed to be drying out, taking on the curiously desiccated quality of an overexposed photograph. Soon, she realized, it would be gone entirely. Dreams on waking were like the empty cocoons of moths or the split-open husks of milkweed pods, dead shells where life had briefly swirled in furious but fragile storm-systems. There had been times when this amnesia-if that was what it was-had struck her as sad. Not now. She had never in her life equated forgetting with mercy so quickly and completely.