Then it was Richard Storm who had her, his hand in hers. He was pulling her along over a Rhinehart terrain: ground mist and half-discerned crags against an anemic sky, leaning gravestones, looming ruins. Storm drew her towards the moldering fragment of a wall. She didn’t want to go with him. She was supposed to be angry with him, she knew. But she found somehow she trusted him, trusted him completely. And he was laughing, urging her to come along, calling back to her gaily over his shoulder, “Tick-tick! Tick-tick!” Cowled figures in the mist moved, like the mist, around them. One raised its head to watch as they passed. Sophia caught a glimpse of eye sockets drooling blood onto decaying flesh. Then Storm pulled her on. She dug in her heels, but lightly, girlishly, laughing too, unable to resist him. “I was never happy like this in real life,” she said. He grinned and nodded and tugged at her. “Tick-tick,” he called. They were in vaults—a dream transition. They were in an underground passage. There was dazzling brilliance at the exit to her left, but in here there was only the dark. There were effigies of the dead in niches, crawling with spiders, hung with webs. One effigy was Sophia herself—no, her mother; it must have been her mother because she herself was standing there with Storm beside her, with his arm strong and warm around her shoulders, his body so hot it nearly melted into hers. And they went forward together, approaching the hidden cavity behind the stone. “Do we have to do this?” she asked him. “Won’t it be dead?” “Tick-tick,” he said. It scared her but she trusted him. Then the climax came in a rushed jumble. They removed the stone. A fanged cobra sprung at her, filled her vision.

She gasped, woke, breathless. Looked. And almost gasped again.

There was Richard Storm. In the flesh. Sitting in the armchair where Peter had sat, hunched forward, his elbows on his knees. A cowboy in faded denim and jeans. His face blunt, rocky, handsome.

Sophia shut her eyes tight and opened them again but, no, unfortunately, he was still there.

He lifted his chin to her. “Hiya, kid. How you feeling?”

For another second or two she could tell herself that she was still confused, still caught between sleep and waking. But she noticed that the drip was gone. And time had passed, night had come; the window was dark, the plane tree branches a black latticework against a perse sky. And her mind was getting sharper every second. The drugs had all but worn off.

And she could no longer delay her rising awareness of a richly excruciating sense of embarrassment.

Storm gave her a lopsided smile. “I came for a rematch,” he said. He pointed to his nose. “Go on. Throw that right again. I bet I could block that right if I was ready for it.”