Ahead of us the forest grew thick, and though sunlight still sparkled on the shallow streams and dappled the hill sides with the outlines of trees, a darkness hung over our souls.

I drew my companions close, and admonished them to silence. With my finger to my lips I pointed to the faint markings painted in red upon the dark bough of a spreading oak. Those markings proclaimed the immemorial ownership of the forest. My friends could not read them, but I knew what they said... and, in any case, there was that about their shape and outline that indicated they were of no human tongue or alphabet, which was, after all, warning enough.

Nevertheless, our quest was urgent, as quests always are beyond the veil of sleep. The forest stretched across the world, and one could not skirt it and still come to the far side. Necessity is the mother of invention, but desire is the father of both bravery and foolishness. We entered into the forest.

As is the way in dreams, we traveled a great distance in a short time. In the land of dreams, your stride is long and your foot is light, so long as nothing is happening... And, at first at least, it seemed that nothing was to happen. The grass was soft beneath our feet, the sun was bright and the sky was blue.

Nevertheless, I stepped soft and light, and moved in caution and silence from tree to tree. Many things beyond the veil of sleep are beautiful, but not all are sane or safe or friendly. I did not like the forest, nor did I trust the silence and the warmth. I walked softly, in caution and silence.

Alas, my companions were less skilled in the art of dreaming than I, and the warmth and the silence of the deeper woods set them at their ease, even as it set me on edge. They murmured quietly to one another, and to me, and they heeded not the fingers that I pressed against my lips.

And then, with a start, I realized that other voices could be heard in the forest... voices low and soft and dark. Unlikely shapes crept out from between the trees on the edges of our vision, and padded closer.

Now my companions grew pale and silent, and hurried their steps, but it was too late. Behind us a throng of shadowed shapes loped up a hill and padded toward us. They were fast, and they were dark, and in their outlines I saw the shape of the doom that was to befall us, chuckling and grim. We turned to face them.

And so things stood when the tinny ringing of the telephone (a paltry metaphor in stories about dreams, but a magic most potent and fell in dreams themselves) drew me out of that ethereal wood. I opened my eyes in my own bed, in my own apartment, and I left my companions to face alone the dark forms creeping up the hills and out of the trees in the ancient forest I had led them to.










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