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When lightning flares again, it is born and comes to ground in the bedroom, not in the night beyond the window. Many-legged, nimble, slowed from the speed of light to the speed of a cat, the bolt hisses out of the ceiling as it usually sizzles from a cloud, springs to a metal picture frame, from there to the television, and finally to the floor lamp that serves as an IV rack, spitting sparks as it gnashes its bright teeth against the brass.

Immediately behind the leaping lightning swoops the big heron, having entered the bedroom through a dosed window or a solid wall, its swordlike bill cracking wide as it shrieks. It's huge, at least three feet, head to foot: prehistoric-looking, with its pterodactyl glare. Shadows of wings wash the walls, fluttering feathery forms in the flickering light.

Leading its shadow, the bird darts toward Dusty, and he knows it will stand upon his chest and pluck out his eyes. His arms feel as if they are strapped to the bed, although the right is restrained only by the pressure cuff and the left is weighed down by nothing but the bracing board that prevents him from bending his elbow while the needle is in the vein. Nevertheless, be lies immobile, defenseless, as the bird shrieks toward him.

When lightning arcs from television to floor lamp, the dear-plastic glucose bag glows like the gauzy sac in a pressurized gas lantern, and a hot rain of brassy sparks — which ought to set the bedclothes afire but does not — showers upon Dusty. The shadow of the descending heron shatters into as many black fragments as there are sparks, and when the clouds of bright and dark mites swarm dazzlingly together, Dusty closes his eyes in terror and confusion.

He is assured, perhaps by the invisible visitor, that he need not be afraid, hut when he opens his eyes, he sees a fearsome thing hanging over him. The bird has been impossibly condensed, crushed — twisted — squeezed, until it now fits inside the bulging glucose bag. In spite of this compression, the heron remains recognizable — though it resembles a bird painted by some half-baked Picasso wanna-be with a taste for the macabre. Worse, it is somehow still alive and shrieking, a/though its shrill cries are muted by the clear walls of its plastic prison. It tries to squirm inside the bag, tries to break free with sharp beak and talons, cannot, and rolls one bleak black eye, glaring down at Dusty with demonic intensity.