“Your dream . . . tell me more, Miriam,” the Dream Healer cooed at his computer. “Tell me more.”

He sat cross-legged in the darkness of his shed atop the Stratten Building on Grand Avenue. His face was bathed in the bluish light of his laptop. The teenager on the screen was speaking quickly, her face vibrant with a mixture of fear and relish—as if she were talking to a best girlfriend.

“I’m asleep,” the girl began. Speaking to a computer was as natural to this new-millennium teenager as speaking on the Bakelite phone had been to her great-grandparents in the forties.

“It’s like . . .” She hesitated, her eyes gleaming at the exquisite remembered dream of personal violence. The Dream Healer could see her clearly, debating how best to describe her sado-sexual feelings. He knew she wanted to shock him. “It’s like someone’s dropped this tiny burrowing insect into my ear. I’m totally freaked!”

The Dream Healer smiled. This nightmare, like the insect, had legs.

The girl’s pupils dilated at her extreme thoughts. “I can feel it scratching inside my head. And the noise . . . You know what I mean? It’s awesome. Gross!”

The Dream Healer could imagine. So very easily.

The girl paused, closing her eyes. Her remembered sensations were beginning to scare her. The memory had stalled her breath. It was as if she was remembering reality, not a nightmare.

“Tell me more,” the Dream Healer encouraged quietly, like a hypnotist.

The girl reacted immediately to his purring voice. Her eyes flicked back to the camera mounted above her computer screen. The faintest smile creased her cheeks as she opened her mouth to continue—the Dream Healer’s voice was so very reassuring.

“It’s like the sound of cornflakes. You know what I mean? When you eat them before they get soggy. Like . . . when they’re still crisp and crunchy?”

“Mmmmm. Just the way I like them, too, Miriam. Crispy.” He paused a second, then continued. “Tell me more.”

The Dream Healer never ate cereal. Never had—he preferred oatmeal. Soft and warm, smooth and reassuring. But the girl’s aural imagery intrigued him. The thought of an insect feasting on fresh brain tissue that crunched, crispy as a cornflake, was very original. Almost arousing, in fact.