SUSAN of NARNIA

Chapter 2: The Dream

The trip from then on was a blur of days and nights.

Susan read and reread the short clip again and often pinched herself very hard each time that she awoke. Her appetite also became very small, and she settled into a state of numbness. When she finally got to Boston Susan was warn thin, but she arranged to take the earliest ship from Boston to England.

On the following voyage Susan had a dream in which she stood in almost complete darkness. It was also very cold, colder infact than she had ever been, even in the days when she and her siblings had first come to Narnia when the white witch had ruled over it. Susan tried to take a step and found that the ground below her feet was covered with a layer of ice. The only light that she could see came from a doorway behind her back and she wondered how she could have made it so far out into the darkness.

For in a dream one does not believe or disbelieve, they just know and wonder.

And looking back through the doorway Susan saw her brothers Peter and Edmund and her sister Lucy, along with Professor Kirke and Aunt Polly and her cousin Eustace standing with some others looking out into the darkness, though they obviously couldn't see her standing there.

Then there came a Voice, which Susan thought she should remember but couldn't place who it belonged to), "Peter, High King of Narnia, Shut the Door." And with that she saw her brother, shivering with the cold, lean out into the darkness and start pulling the Door closed.

From where she stood, the sound of the door scraping over the ice was deafening.

Susan tried to make a run for the Door and called out to her brother to wait for her, but no sound came out and her legs would not move, as often happens in dreams. Susan slipped on the cold ice and fell as the light from inside winked out as the Door came to and latched shut. With that the ground began to tip and sway as she heard the sound of a key being inserted and turned in the lock.

And with that Susan awoke with a great start and found herself back in her bunk on board the ship. Unable to go back to sleep she arose, put on her coat and stepped out on the deck of the ship.

The pale light of dawn had just begun to show as she reached the ships railing.

Who was the voice that had told Peter to close the door and not let her come into that beautiful place? It frustrated her that she new the voice but couldn't put it together with a face or a name.

Her family was gone. That much she knew. Susan couldn't bring them back. Just then she looked up and saw land on the horizon.