In a way, she was grateful. It had not been a conscious thought, but clearly she’d felt the need to talk about what was happening, and when her brother commented on her haggard appearance for the third time and sat her down, demanding Laurie tell him what was wrong, she did. She told him everything, beginning with her encounter with the girl in the alley, giving detailed descriptions of each and every dream, explaining how she’d lain awake as long as possible, not wanting to fall asleep. She was not embarrassed discussing the sexual nature of the dreams with Josh, but she did tone down her reaction, ashamed of how much she had enjoyed the encounters with the child.

The dreams had changed since the first one, evolved. It had happened slowly over the past two weeks, and at first she wasn’t even aware of it. The girl had sucked her in with sex, had used intimacy to gain her trust, but the dreams had become increasingly nonerotic, increasingly grotesque and chaotic, and they were now to the point where she considered them nightmares.

Last night, the girl, wearing the same dirty shift she’d had on in the alley, had taken Laurie’s hand and led her through a blighted urban landscape, past the rubble of demolished buildings, past trash-can fires warming dirty homeless men, to a tarpaper shack that housed a butcher shop. Inside, a muscular tattooed man in a bloodstained apron was passing a monstrous rat through the blade of his band saw. On the floor were scraps of fat and muscle, the teeth and toes of children. The butcher looked up from his work, smiled at her. “Glad you’re home, dear. Take off your clothes and sit on the stump.”

And then she’d been in a dark forest, sitting, legs spread, on an upended log, as the girl crouched before her and painfully inserted twigs into her bleeding vagina. “Almost done,” the girl kept saying. “Almost done.”

The dream had made no sense on any sort of rational level, but there was something about it that rang true to her, that frightened and at the same time spoke to her, and while she did not exactly feel that this was something that had happened or would happen, Laurie thought it could happen, and that was what disturbed her the most.

Josh frowned at her, concerned. “Dreams are not just manifestations of the subconscious,” he said. “Sometimes they’re the means used to communicate with us, a portal between this world or this plane of existence and others.”

It was a cliché, the same type of New Age claptrap she’d made fun of all these years, but it was exactly what she’d been feeling, put into words.

Only it sounded so frightening spoken aloud like this, its implications huge.