In Ardmore, Oklahoma, in the motel room dimly lighted by one lamp draped with a towel, where the four exhausted young girls lay as stone-still as if sedated, Jane hoped for dreamless sleep. But alone on the rollaway bed, she melted into worlds conjured by the unconscious. She wandered a menacing nightscape of city streets, searching for Nick, every resident a hostile somnambulant figure of shadowy substance. And then she was in an infinite factory and could not find her way out of a maze of abandoned machinery and decades of trash from which Randall Larkin was repeatedly resurrected and borne toward her on a tide of rats. And then a sniper on a hilltop fired down into a plain across which a great herd of horses stampeded, the shot animals screaming when wounded and tumbling in ghastly mists of blood and billowing dust, Jane on foot among the frantic rush of horses, searching for something in the tumult, the horses having become ponies, Exmoor ponies, and ahead of her came a shape upon the hoof-beaten ground, the shape of some rider shot from the saddle and fallen and trampled and rendered ragged, and she was almost able to identify the torn and broken rider seen through the dust, was almost able to see him, approaching through the chaos, approaching the rider, perpetually approaching….