The idea that he was dreaming wasn’t something Lyle questioned in the least. The odor of fetid water and decaying rodents was nonexistent. The lights flickered, as they always did, but the dampness wasn’t making his bare skin bump up with goose flesh, and the soles of his feet were dry and warm even on the litter-slicked, mold-spotted surface of the concrete. He also wasn’t following the anxious pleas of a…well, whoever it had been that Lyle had heard earlier that morning in the tunnels. He was following a song. Sung by a woman. In a voice he knew.
I left my darling lying there, a-lying there, a-lying there; I left my darling lying there among the swaying grasses…
The lines were sung very quietly, and the echoes that followed the words seemed to dance around him like the gentle puffs of
