Instead I'm standing in a desert, I turn around to see that the door through which I came has disappeared. All that I can see on every side of me is an endless panorama of desert, each compass point bordered by mountains. I seem to be as far from Mabon as that city is from the place where my body sleeps.
"What is this place?" I say.
My voice startles me, because I didn't realize I was speaking aloud. What startles me more is that my rhetorical question gets answered. I turn to see the oddest sight: There's a rattlesnake coiled up under a palo verde tree. The pale color of the tree's branches and twigs awakes an echoing green on the snake's scales which range through a gorgeous palette of golds and deep rusty reds, That's normal enough, What's so disconcerting is that the snake has the face of a Botticelli madonna— serene smile, rounded features enclosed by a cloud of dark ringlets. The Virgin and Child With Singing Angels comes immediately to mind. And she's got wings— creamy yellow wings that thrust out from the snake's body a few inches below the face. All that's lacking is a nimbus of gold light.
"A dreaming place," is what the snake has just said to me.
For all her serenity, she has an unblinking gaze which I doubt any of Botticelli's models had.
"But Mabon's already a dreaming place," I find myself replying, as though I always have conversations with snakes that have wings and human faces.
"Mabon is your dreaming place," he says. "Today you have strayed into someone else's."
"Whose?"
The snake doesn't reply.
"How do I get back to Mabon?"
Still no reply— at least not from her. Another voice answers me. This time it's that of a small owl, her feathers the color of a dead saguaro rib, streaks of silver-grey and black. She's perched on the arm of one of those tall cacti, looking down at me with another human face nestled there where an owl's beak and round eyes should be, calm madonna features surrounded by feathers. At least wings look normal on her.
"You can't return," she tells me. "You have to go on."
I hate the way that conversation can get snarled up in a dream like this: Every word an omen, every sentence a riddle.
"Go on to where?"
The owl turns her head sharply away then turns back and suddenly takes off from her perch. I catch a glimpse of a human torso in her chest feathers— breasts and a rounded belly— and then she's airborne, wings beating until she catches an updraft, and glides away. A stand of mesquite swallows her from my sight and she's gone. I turn back to the rattlesnake, but she's gone as well. The owl's advice rings in my mind.
You have to go on.
I look around me, mountains in every direction. I know distance can be deceiving in the open desert like this, in this kind of light, with that immense sprawl of sky above me. I feel as though I could just reach any one of those ranges in a half-hour walk, but I know it would really be days.
I find my sense of direction has gone askew. Normally, I relate to a body of water. In Newford, everything's north of the lake. In Mabon, everything's south. Here, I feel displaced. There's no water— or at least none of which I'm aware. I can see the sun is setting toward the west, but it doesn't feel right. My inner compass says it's setting in the north.
I turn slowly in place, regarding the distant mountain ranges that surround me. None of them draws me more than the other, and I don't know which way to go until I remember the sound of the flute that brought me here in the first place. It's still playing a sweet low music on the edge of my hearing that calms the panic that was beginning to lodge in my chest.
So I follow it again, hiking through what's left of the afternoon until I don't feel l can go any further. The mountains in front of me don't seem any closer, the ones behind aren't any further away. I'm thirsty and tired. Every piece of vegetation has a cutting edge or a thorn. My calves ache, my back aches, my throat holds as much moisture as the dusty ground underfoot. I don't want to be here, but I can't seem to wake up.
It's the music, I realize. The music is keeping me here.
I've figured out what kind of flute is being played now: one of those medicine flutes indigenous to the Southwest. I remember Geordie had one a couple of years ago. It was almost the size of his Irish flute, with the same six holes on top, but it had an extra thumb hole around back and it didn't have nearly the same range of notes. It also had an odd addition: up by the air hole, tied to the body of the flute with leather thongs, was a saddle holding a reed. The saddle directed the air jet up or down against the lower reed, and it was adjustable. The sound was very pretty, but the instrument had next to no volume. Geordie eventually traded it in for some whistle or other, but I picked up a tape of its music to play when I'm working— medicine flute, rattles, rainstick and synthesizers. I can't remember the last time I listened to it.
After carefully checking the area around me for snakes or scorpions or God-knows-what else might be lurking about, I sit down on some rocks and try to think things through. I'd like to believe there's a reason for my being here, but I know the dreamlands don't usually work that way. They have their own internal logic; it's only our presence in them that's arbitrary. We move through them with the same randomness as the weather in our world: basically unpredictable, for all that we'd like to think otherwise.
No, I'm here as the result of my own interference. I followed the sound of the flute out the door into the desert of my own accord. I've no one to blame but myself. There'll be no escape except for that which I can make for myself.
I'm not alone, here, though. I keep sensing presences just beyond my sight, spirits hovering in the corners of my eyes. They're like the snake and the owl I saw earlier, but much more shy. I catch the hint of a face in one of the cacti, here one moment, gone the next; a ghostly shape in the bristly branches of a smoke tree; a scurry of movement and a fleeting glimpse of something with half-human skin, half-fur or -scale, darting into a burrow: little madonna faces, winged rodents and lizards, birds with human eyes and noses.
I don't know why they're so scared of me. Maybe they're naturally cautious. Maybe there's something out here in the desert that they've got good reason to hide from.
This thought doesn't lend me any comfort at all. If there's something they're scared of, I don't doubt that I should be scared of it; too. And I would be, except I'm just too exhausted to care at the moment.
I rest my arms on my knees, my head on my arms. I feel a little giddy from the sun and definitely dehydrated. I came to the desert wearing only sneakers, a pair of jeans and a white blouse. The blouse is on my head and shoulders now, to keep off the sun, but it's left my arms, my lower back and my stomach exposed. They haven't so much browned as turned the pink that's going to be a burn in another couple of hours.
Something moves in the corner of my eye and I turn my head, but not quickly enough. It was something small, a flash of pale skin and light brown fur. Winged.