There is no way of knowing if it happened or not. I was just sitting in my room when I heard a noise. It was dark outside, drker than I had ever known, with only occasional moments of moonlight. The noise did not seem particulary significant at first. It was just one of many noises, and at night there are so many that it is impossible to pay attention to all of them at once. But this noise was sufficiently different from the rest that it kept creeping into my thoughts. I wanted to understand the noise, to know what was creeping out there.
I went outside to have a look. There was nothing that could make that noise in the front yard, so I walked around to the back. There weemed to be nothing there either—until I turned around. Then to my horror I saw an old woman with wrinkled face and hooked nose. One could call her a witch, but she seemed more terrible than that.
I turned and ran, the wind whipping my face, my breath screeching from my lungs. Every now and then I glanced behind me, but the woman was always there. Then suddenly the woods changed and I knew that I was no longer anywhere near my house. I thought to myself how fast I had run.
There was no time to think. Up ahead was a cave, and it was the only place that was left to hide in. The cave was lighted after I walked through, with torches all along the sides. Suddenly she was there again. further back into the cave, the light grew more dim. A spider web grabbed me. Trapped, wildly looking around, I saw nothing that could help me. The spider was there on the edge of my vision, and so was the woman.
Suddenly something came shooting toward me, growing and growing. It consumed me, caressed me. Fear was all around me, but so too were joy and excitement. Finally it receded, looking like a big luminous ball, and leaving me in nothingness.
I was falling, falling, and I knew that death was near me. It was something that filled me with a cold chill. My mind, however, was sharply alert, perhaps more than ever before. But all that was happening was that I was falling. I turned upward, sloped downward, right, left.
It was great to fly faster and higher than I could ever have imagined. My stomach was all butterflies, my mind all pleasure. There was nothing else in the sky or on the ground, yet everything was there, and nothing had been left out.
Up like a swan, up like an eagle, up as fast as light. Now the only light was from the stars. The stars soon became streaks that turned into tunnels of light different ways, any way, all ways. The hard and the easy all were there; all went in different directions with the same end.
And when I woke up, the moonlight was shining gloriously on my bed.
© Copyright 2002 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.