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walked the sleeping hours of men on four strong legs like this.
    It had ridden through their dreams, spreading terror.
    It was the Night Mare.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Death at the Beach
    D eath came for Edie on the beach, but he didn’t come immediately. To start with she was alone, and she was running, not a panicked run, but a solid and unrelenting jog across the shore.
    The beach was divided by low walls, long barriers of weathered wood marching down from shore to sea at thirty-yard intervals. She knew she could run better if she got off the beach and ran on the track along the shore, but some kind of repellent magnetic force kept her as far from the track as possible. The tide was out, so every now and then the pebbles gave way to hard sand, ribbed by the current. When she hit these patches she picked up speed, but the ribs made it painful and uneven going, and she was always in danger of turning her ankle. Whenever she came to a short wall, she scrambled up and tumbled over it and kept on running.
    As she ran, something gnawed at the back of her mind—not a thought so much as a sense of need. She was missing something, but she couldn’t spare the time or the energy to figure out what it was. She knew it was important, but not as important as keeping on running.
    As she thumped down on an unexpected stretch of sand on the other side of a particularly high barrier, her ankle did finally turn, and she stumbled and fell.
    Something small and powerful and gray was surprised by her dropping out of the sky, and started running at a fast lope up the beach away from her. It was a hare. She watched it crest the pebble ridge, where it stopped and stared back at her, long ears outlined against the sky. For a long moment the world seemed strangely still and silent as she stared back at it. Then there was the sound of a distant bell, tolling once only, and the hare twitched its tail and was gone. Edie hauled herself to her feet and made herself keep going.
    The sea to her left was the same expanse of dark water she’d drowned in before. It lapped back and forth gently and relentlessly at her side, and though she was apprehensive about it, she was less scared of the water she could see than whatever it was that she couldn’t quite catch sight of up on the shore to her right.
    Because, of course, although she couldn’t see it, she knew that it was death she was running from.
    On the edge of her vision, a great gray seabird flew parallel with her on the seaward side, as if keeping distant company. Other than that, the beach, the sea, and the shore were empty.
    The walls were, she realized, getting taller. Each one was higher and harder to get over. And they were increasingly covered in limpets and seaweed and ever sharper barnacles, which scratched and cut her legs and hands.
    But she climbed them all.
    And still she ran.
    Strangely, she was both exhausted and yet never exactly tired enough to stop. She felt every lurch from leg to leg, and her feet were sore, but there was also something comforting and familiar about the rhythm of running and breathing hard. She knew she was sobbing for breath, but that didn’t hurt anymore either, not in an important way.
    She seemed to be able to run and run forever.
    And just when she felt she really would go on like this forever—she couldn’t.
    The next wall was an unscalable cliff of vicious shell-shard barnacles and treacherously slippery bladder wrack. To her right the beach slanted sharply in an upsweep of pebbles, shortening her horizon so that she could no longer see the shore behind it. The wall looked climbable at the top of the incline, but anything could be waiting for her up there, just lurking over the lip of the slope. She decided to wade around the seaward end of the wall rather than risk meeting it.
    As soon as she was ankle-deep in the inky water she knew she’d made a bad mistake.
    Her foot was sucked into the beach beneath the water, and when she pushed with the other one to get