She nodded. “I won’t. Wait,” she added as he started to walk away. “I didn’t get a chance to thank you.”

“You don’t need to.”

“I’d probably be dead if you hadn’t come along.”

Because you can die in a dream, right?

“Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “You were handling yourself pretty well.”

He started to turn again.

“Wait,” she repeated. “At least tell me your name.”

“You don’t need my name.”

“But—”

“You want my advice, you get in that car. You go home or wherever else it is that you need to be, and you forget about all of this.”

“God, how am I supposed to do that?”

“Not my problem.”

“Look, I—”

But she was talking to an empty road. As suddenly as the mysterious stranger had appeared, he was now gone. He’d vanished, just like the little men had—the bogans, as he’d called them. Here, then, poof. Gone. Not even poof. Just . . . not here anymore.

She looked around herself. Everything seemed so damned normal.

But it had happened.

The soft murmur of her car engine proved it. She walked slowly around to the back of the car. The car’s engine running, and the meat the little men had dumped in her trunk, because it was still there, raw and bloody.

Enough, she told herself. Wake up already.

But the dream wasn’t going to let her go that easily.

Fine. She’d play it out, the way you did with a tune that you couldn’t get out of your head. She’d get back in the car and return to Sweetwater. And maybe then she’d finally wake up.

Except, dream or no dream, she couldn’t drive with that meat in her trunk.

Her first impulse was to simply dump it on the side of the road. She actually had a piece in her hands, meaning to do just that. It felt horrible, slick and bloody, hard to hold. A dead weight.

She let it fall back into the trunk and picked up her collapsible shovel. Unfolding it, she locked the two halves of the shovel in place, then crossed the road and went back over the ditch until she was standing under the naked boughs of the elm tree once more. She pushed around in the dirt until she found a spot that didn’t have a big root and started to dig.

Ten minutes later she was ready to start hauling the deer parts from her trunk to the hole she had dug. When all three pieces were in the ground, she shovelled the loose dirt back on top, patting the rounded mound with the flat of the blade to tamp it down. It didn’t seem right to stomp on the loose dirt with her boots.