Josephine descended the stairs with a grace and surety born of familiarity. I descended at a slower pace, still thinking about how I got here. If I focused on that, I couldn’t focus on how high up we were and how small each step was. I was still within my office. But, somehow, I was also in a hypnotic state. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Was I lucid dreaming? I tested this.
Looking down and to the left, I asked, “Am I awake?” I looked up and around. I was still upon the wooden stairs. I felt awake. I looked at my wristwatch. 3:11. I looked away and at it again. Still 3:11. In dreams, I had never been able to read my watch a second time. Ergo, I was awake. I looked at my blue skirt and thought, I should be wearing pants. I need pants for an adventure. Before my eyes, my skirt shimmered into pants. Rather than being startled, I relaxed. I was in a hypnotic dream state—both dreaming and awake. It accounted for the conflict of visual clues. My will was strong enough to control it if I could just remember the truth of the reality I was now in.
Movement caught my eye. The robed figures below crossed their weapons before Josephine. How had she gotten so far ahead of me? I promised to stay by her side. Heart racing, I descended the stairs faster than was comfortable, almost stumbling. A fall would be disastrous. There was nothing except an endless chasm below. Even as the robed figures straightened and allowed Josephine to pass, I wondered if it was this fall that made people on the edge of sleep jerk awake.
Pushing the thought away, I hurried down the stairs. “Josephine, wait…”
She paused, a beige-clad black woman on the other side of gold barred gates. “You have not been here before. You must show Nasht and Kaman-Thah that you are strong enough to survive the Seven Hundred Steps of Deeper Slumber.” Although she was far away, she didn’t yell. I could hear her as if she stood by my side.
“How?” I ran in an uneven gait toward them, keeping my eyes on the landing. I refused to look elsewhere.
“You will know.” Josephine turned her back to me and waited.
I slowed as I reached the guardians—for they could be nothing else. They were huge, at least twice as tall and twice as wide as a man. Up close, the robes were identical except for the color. Both had similar beards, but I couldn’t see their faces. The beards—brown, long, and evenly trimmed, hung to their chests. The hoods that obscured their faces stood irregular from their heads, as if they wore crowns beneath the fabric. They crossed their weapons, a halberd and a scythe, before the gate and remained silent.
I waited, keeping my own silence.
“Time is of the essence.” It was Josephine. The words were whispered in my ear even though she had not turned around.
Mustering my courage, I raised my chin. “I will pass. I have a job to do.”
In response, each guardian held out a closed fist. “Which hand revives the dead?” Although neither guardian spoke, the voice was all around me. Both robed figures opened their fists just long enough for me to see a crushed butterfly within before closing them again.
I bowed my head in thought. It was a test. One of mental fortitude. It was a trick as well. It had to be. Some part of my subconscious created this challenge to show me how difficult Josephine’s case would be and to prove to her that I was up to the challenge.
I concentrated and held out two closed fists as I raised my head. “These hands revive the dead.” With that, I opened my hands and released two butterflies—both very much alive.
The guardians, Nasht and Kaman-Thah, opened empty hands before they straightened their weapons and allowed me access to the gate. Holding my breath, I approached and pulled on the gold bars. The gates didn’t move. They seemed rooted deep within the rock. I peered close. Glimmering, gold, and just far enough apart that I should be able to slide through them.
As Josephine said, time was of the essence—perhaps she feared that the longer she spent in the asylum, the more likely Dr. Mintz would turn her into one of his experimental subjects. I pushed through the bars. It was tight, but they bowed, allowing me to pass.
Josephine waited at the head of another impossibly steep set of stairs that had no rail and disappeared into the darkness below. They looked exactly like the stairs I’d already traversed. I didn’t want to go down another set of stairs like that again. I looked back at the gate. The bars were tightly spaced. I shouldn’t have been able to fit through there. My mind gnawed on this.
Josephine touched my arm. “We must go.”
“Where?”
She nodded down the steps that terrified me. “The Seven Hundred Steps of Deeper Slumber. At the bottom, we will reach the Enchanted Wood.”
Josephine continued to improve. Her cheeks flushed with exhilaration and the darkness beneath her eyes had all but disappeared. Her speech had returned to its normal formality. “How do you know this?”
Josephine shrugged as she looked around. “I have been here before. This is the beginning of every journey.”
“Tell me what you see.”
She glanced at my face, searching for something, before she turned to our surroundings. “The stairs spiral down. They are marble. The handrail is wrought iron. All around us the sun shines and puffy clouds drift through. Within the clouds, pupperflies play.”
As she spoke, I imagined what she described. Before my eyes, the straight, deeply plunging stairs became a marble spiral with a wrought iron handrail. They reminded me of the marble stairs within the university library. I seized upon this and focused to make the stairs I saw match the stairs I was familiar with. As I did so, the encroaching darkness receded and fluffy clouds appeared. I didn’t see anything playing within the clouds, and I didn’t know what “pupperflies” were, thus they weren’t important.
What was important was the fact that this was a shared dream-state hallucination—mostly. As long as the two of us agreed upon what we saw, all would be well. It would make for a fascinating research paper in the future. I gestured for her to go ahead. “Lead on. This is your adventure.”
Josephine hesitated before beginning her descent. “You believe me? You see what I see?”
“I forced my mind to see as you see. For me, so many stairs is dangerous. But as you said, you’ve been here before. I knew they wouldn’t seem dangerous to you. I needed to see things the way you see them. Does that make sense?” I followed her, keeping close behind. The iron railing was a comfort and I kept my hand on the cool metal. It was not the wood of the university library staircase, but it was a banister and that was worth everything. This control meant I could continue on and help Josephine like I had been unable to help Malachi.
“Is that part of your anomalous thinking?”
“A little. I’m not in a childlike state, but I am willing to entertain what comes to your mind.”
We both laughed at that. Our laughter trailed off at a sound. Josephine and I stopped on the stairs and listened. For a long moment, we could only hear our own breath. Then it came again: a cry for help.
Josephine gasped, “Oh no! I forgot. How could I do that? I’m late. Oh, poor kitty.”
Without waiting for me, Josephine sprinted down the winding staircase. Whatever was happening was bad. She’d lost control and used contractions again. I ran after her, slower and less sure, but sped up as another cry for help came from below.
I fell just as Josephine disappeared from view.
Tumbling down the stairs, I banged against the railing and rebounded, rolling over and over. My head struck the corner of a marble stair. Lights flashed before me. The pain was enormous. Dazed, I continued to fall. It was too much. I was about to go over the railing. If I did that, I would fall to my death. Or worse, I’d never stop falling.