“You okay there?” Lexi asked. She was out of breath. Must have run to catch up with me.
“No. I was just—I was…”
Moonlight flooded down, illuminating Lexi’s hair so it gleamed like polished brass. I noticed that my stomach was also starting to get fluttery and nervous. “Am I hallucinating?”
Lexi gently touched my arm, but I yanked it away, stumbled, and fell into the dirt.
“Stay away from me,” I said. “You put something in my drink, didn’t you?”
“Jesus, Robin, I was just trying to help. You looked like you were going to fall… which you did.”
“I’m fine,” I said, and the words came out strange and garbled and required too much effort.
“You don’t look fine. Let me help you up.”
The more I tried to speak, and the more I tried to stand up, the more out of control I felt. I started crawling forward, closer and closer to the edge of the woods.
“The tea,” I mumbled.
“The tea is fine. Aspen knows what she’s doing. Your dose was exact.”
I pushed myself up to stand, my feet unsteady, but at least I was somewhat vertical. Still, I stumbled toward the woods.
“Don’t go that way,” said Lexi, and I could detect a note of fear in her voice. “We should head back.”
But I didn’t listen. I just kept heading toward the woods.
“Robin, come back. It’s not safe!”
“I’m fine,” I said like a defensive alcoholic.
She called after me, but then I was in the trees. There were branches or fingers or something sharp, and they were clawing at me as darkness whispered in my ears. I moved through, navigating as if by intuition, but with a vague memory of having been in these woods some time in the primordial past. Or maybe it was the future.
Lexi’s voice began to fade, and then I thought I could hear others, a chorus of voices rising up through the night calling my name. Or someone’s name. Nothing is my name, is it? Or is it that my name is nothingness? Soon, though, other sounds began to muffle those voices. Old sounds, old voices, deep and eldritch, as if issuing from the ground itself, booming, sometimes shrieking. Those other voices were pulling a velvet cloak over reality as I knew it, muffling it, silencing it. Best to keep moving. Because I knew I needed to get somewhere. I just wasn’t sure exactly wheretherewas.
Up ahead, the moon shone down with aggressive brilliance, and soon it led me through the tree line and I stumbled out in afield with an enormous temple at its center. Standing there in the open, moonlight streaming down on me, I noticed that my shoes and the hems of my pants were soaking wet. How had that happened? Was I losing time? My head was beginning to clear up a little. I noticed a figure standing on the steps of the temple. I’d taken it for a statue initially, but now that it moved, I saw that it was in fact a man—a familiar man. Up ahead of me, standing in the middle of a clearing in the Rocky Mountains, stood none other than Charles Danforth.
“Charles?” I said, stepping toward him, my voice breaking with emotion. “Is that really you?”
I was so relieved to see him that any residual antipathy was eclipsed by pure elation at the prospect of a reunion. I raced toward him, met him halfway up the steps, and flung myself into his arms. Only he wasn’t really there, was he? It was a ghost of a memory, wasn’t it? It had to be. Still, he smelled the same—exactly the same—and I began to cry.
“Please help me. Please get me out of here.”
“I will,” he said. “I’m here to help. But first I think you should look inside.”
“Inside where?” I asked, my eyes clouded with tears as I gazed up at him. “Oh god, I can’t tell you how good it is to see you again.”
“You look terrible,” he said, laughing a little at the state of me.
I clutched his shirt. “I get it now,” I said, feeling all dreamy. “I really do. I understand what plants do. They open up the other realms. They’re spells. That’s why they’re so dangerous. They open you up to the things that want to use you for.”
“If you say so,” he said.
“Charles, where are we? Where are we really?”
In the depth of the night, the trees seemed to be moving in our direction. Or was it something else?
He kissed my forehead. “Oh, sweetie, we’re in the place monsters come from.”
