He was back in the field, but the landscape had changed. No longer did it stretch away for ever. Instead it was encircled by high dark woods, reaching up towards the sky and blocking out most of the lights.
He was moving, but very slowly, looking around him at the filth and the carnage. Once again he saw the doll that was not a doll. He tried to avert his gaze, but his eyes moved slowly also.
At last it reached out beyond that fearful relic, to the centre of what had become an arena.
There in the dreamscape, a dark ' looming shape rose up from the ground. In the distance, it seemed to have a face, twisted into a grotesque grin, leering at him, exulting in the knowledge that he was its captive. He tried to look elsewhere, but he was held firm, as if in a beam. He tried to squeeze his eyes shut, but knew as he did so that he was seeing not with any conventional sense. The dark vision remained.
He felt it call him onwards and he obeyed, although he did not want to go. This was a dream from which, he knew, there was no escape. In it he knew who he was. He remembered his run through the streets. He remembered the three men. He remembered the unnoticed girl. And he remembered the blow, and the pain; the sinking, the feeling of drowning, and at last his passage through the blackness that had delivered him to this place.
`Perhaps I am dead and in Hell,' he thought. 'Perhaps this is what Hell is: to be trapped for ever in your worst nightmare?'
He was drawn towards the grinning shape in the distance; his movements seemed to gather pace. He fought against it, but it was until suddenly he stumbled over something which had no use…until suddenly he stumbled over something which had gone unnoticed as he looked ahead.
Managing to hold himself upright he looked down at his feet. There, collapsed on its back, lay the body of a man, a look of utter surprise on his face. He was in his early thirties, neatly dressed and clean-cut, with two small exceptions. Just right of centre in his chest, and through the centre of his forehead there were dark, ragged bullet-holes.
It was a face Skinner knew, from life and from a score and more of earlier dreams. As he stared down at it, the look of surprise faded, to be replaced by one of recognition. Slowly and stiffly the apparition began to rise from the ground with a mixed smile of welcome and anticipation. 'Well, hello again,' it began.
He recoiled from it in horror, feeling his hands clench with tension…
… and suddenly, upon his left hand he felt an answering pressure, something that was not of the dream. He held to it tightly, afraid to let go in case he was holding on to life itself, and as he did the apparition faded. He remained trapped in the dream… there was no escape from there… but he was held still and motionless, held back from the horrible grinning shape.
Other sensations came to him. In the distance he heard whispery voices. On the back of his hands he felt the softest of moist touches. A scent reached him, not one of the blood and oil and burning which filled the dream, but something fragrant, a scent that he knew.
There he lay, in his own private darkness, grasping the unseen fingers which had rescued him from the spectre, and another that had come to take his right hand. There he lay, suspended from life, dead but undead. There he lay, and held on.