Leon Hutchinson lay awake gazing up at the ceiling.   He was tired as hell and could hardly keep his eyes open, yet was determined to stay awake.   No matter how badly he felt in the morning, he would stay awake all night.   Must stay awake all night!   He had had the Dream again last night and now he was afraid to fall asleep.

Leon had first had the Dream when he was eleven years old.

Leon lived in East Merridale, in the Victorian countryside, with his parents Desmond and Elizabeth Hutchinson, who owned a small Merino sheep station.   When he was eleven he would often traipse across country, wading his way through bushes and wild grasses that were almost as tall as he was, until he was tired and scarred after trekking the three kilometres that separated the Hutchinson station from its nearest neighbour Cherrytree Farm, owned by a middle-aged couple named Horne.

Young Leon would stand at the boundary fence of the Horne property and gaze in fascination at the fields of trees laden with juicy red cherries, and bushes covered with strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and just about every other kind of berry a boy’s heart could desire.

Often Helen Horne, a titian-haired beauty, or her husband Clement, a tall, powerhouse of a man, two metres in height and one hundred and forty kilograms of solid muscle; would notice the fair-haired young boy standing away in the distance and would beckon him over with a wave of an arm and a cry of, “Hey, boy!” from Clem, or “Come on over!” from his wife; to sample their tasty crops.

These treats had ended unexpectedly shortly before Leon’s twelfth birthday.   That time he did not meet either of the Hornes, but as he approached the boundary fence, Leon could hear the sound of chopping, so he detoured around to the back of the farmhouse, where the Hornes used an old tree stump as a chopping block.

When he was a hundred metres or so away from the metre-high woodpile, Leon could see a dark-haired man of about thirty using the Hornes’ axe, chopping up something behind the woodpile.   Thinking the man must be a hired hand cutting up logs, Leon headed across toward the young man.   However, seeing the long red hair blowing in the wind, and hearing the crunching of bones each time the axe descended, Leon realised it was not a log that the man was chopping up, but the body of Helen Horne, which he had already virtually chopped in two.