It was all sort of a jumbled dream. The pictures she remembered the pictures and the bed; the nakedness; the binding on her wrists; the fat, smelly body. She swirled in a surrealistic landscape of fractured images. Vaguely aware of the rape, she tried to resist and was rewarded with vicious blows full in the face that folded and bent her nasal cartilages but weren't of sufficient strength to break them. Her brain, seeking protection from this abomination, allowed the backwaters of Lethe to engulf her. At one point during the brutal attack, Jason thought that he had killed her. Lying perfectly still and as a while as a ghost, the girl seemed to be hardly berating. Overcome with both fear and exhilaration, he dressed the floppy doll girl and, without bothering to place the hood over her head, he draped her unconscious body over his shoulder and carried her to his car. Time had become suspended. But, for a brief moment, as she was being carried across an open breezeway, Laura's eyes flickered open and her retinas became tattooed with the distant image of a Satan's sleigh and a blue-nosed Rudolph put in front.