The needles swung wildly across the graph paper. Sarah remembered the hippocampus from her studies. It is one of the deepest brain areas. When it is stimulated electrically, patients sometimes relive their past in every detail, as if it were happening again. It is the seat of ancient senses, the most hidden country of the mind. It is perhaps the place where the unconscious stores the remembrances by which we are ruled. Certainly dragons march there, and deep creatures crawl. When it is destroyed by injury or disease, the victim’s past disappears and he lives forever in that disoriented state that is felt upon waking from a particularly terrible nightmare.

The graphs hissed in the silent room. Geoff dropped a yellow sheet of paper on the desk space before the computer console, his new workup on the blood.

“The woman must literally be reliving her life,” Tom said. “It must be a thousand times more vivid than a normal dream.”

“I hope it’s been a nice life.” Geoff was fingering his workup sheet.

“It hasn’t,” Sarah said. She knew that it was true.

7

7

JOHN SAW DIM PATTERNS against his closed eyelids. He could not tell exactly when he had become conscious, but he knew that he had ceased to dream in the past few minutes and returned to the agony of his body.

What a fool he had been to stand over her like that, savoring his victory, waiting for her to awaken. But he had wanted her to know.

He could still hear the carbon steel blade of the cleaver ringing on the slates.

He had to move! He longed to stretch out, to feel fresh movement in his joints. Panic started again, but he quelled it. He felt his tomb’s walls and low ceiling, touched the mud beneath the puddle of water he was in. And he heard that dripping, steady, echoing, as if it were in a larger space.

He shouted. Also an echo. He took a deep breath. The air was fresh and cool. In such a small space as this even a few minutes would have made the air heavy.

Unless there was an opening.

He couldn’t turn around, there wasn’t enough room. His feet rubbed along solid stone, however. Plunging his fingers as deep into the mud as they would go also brought no results—until he clawed at the place where the wall before his face met the water. Here there was no mud.