All the villagers have been plagued with nightmares in recent nights. No one appears immune. Even Alice has wrapped her Kawasaki around a tree, time after time, in her dreams. The man who sleeps beside her, kicked by her flailing feet, finds himself running through a forest in which all the trees are howling. At Glebe Cottage, all the children can do is scream about monsters; all their parents can do is to scream at each other. Victoria McEwan dreams once more of a single night of infidelity. It starts pleasantly enough: a nice dinner, good wine, an attentive, charming man; but by the time they have retired to an illicitly booked hotel room and she is waiting for him to emerge from the bathroom, it becomes skewed; then awful. Each time she dreams it, something different and more disturbing wakes her in a sweat; this last time when he removed his robe, his body was covered in tiny red Crustacea, ravenous for her flesh. She picks up a magazine, tries to stay awake.
The widow Lippincote is visited by her dead husband, and not as she prefers to remember him. Reggie Candleton dreams he is working in a nuclear plant and that the sirens have just gone off.
Even the old Hewett sisters, who as far as anyone knows them is concerned, have never done a bad thing in their lives, are afflicted with broken sleep. In her narrow single bed with its tight, white sheets, Eliza finds herself subjected to a harrowing ordeal involving a hooded man she is sure she knows; while in the room next door Catherine struggles in a terrible cocoon, as a great black spider, with the word ‘Mother’ spelled out in speckled markings on its forehead, leans over and wraps another thread around her.
Anna, meanwhile, unsurprisingly dreams of damaged creatures. Three-legged dogs, voiceless monkeys and eyeless cats trail her endlessly around a huge, dark house. She is searching, running down corridors, driven by the terrible conviction that unless she finds the right room soon, something will be lost forever. She opens one door and a gale of laughter banshees out; another door gives back a reflection of herself and her motley followers, replicated to infinity through a myriad of reflections. A third door opens and skulls and bones come tumbling out, throwing up great clouds of dust. The creatures that follow her crawl patiently through the charnel heap, sniffing and tasting. Their snuffling disgusts her, and on she runs. Most of the remaining doors are locked, until at last, the corridor comes to a dead end. There are no doors left to open. Beyond the final wall, though, she can hear someone – a man – calling her name. His voice is full of fear. Desperately, she tears at the wall. It is softer than a wall should be: its textures clog her fingernails, it gives to applied pressure. She digs, she bites at it: and the tortured animals rip and tear at it as well.
The wall starts to bleed...