My feet stopped obeying me. I wanted them to rise and swing and plant but they refused. I just stood there, sleet slapping at my cheeks, until there was nothing else to be done but sit down and make myself comfortable.
I settled into a patch of soggy grass, and I as I sat there, the chill transformed itself into a mild burning, as if I had rubbed Ben-Gay all over my body. I told myself that the rain splatting my face had turned warm, although specks of sleet continued to sting my cheek.
My panic had subsided. I was sure everything was going to be okay. I just had to wait out the storm till morning. I suppose I should have pulled one of the plastic bags out of my pack and fashioned a poncho, but I let the precipitation have its way with me.
I slid off the stone I had been perched on and hunched into a ball, unable to sustain any posture. As I stared into the darkness, a yellowish glow suffused the landscape, and it seemed to come from nowhere in particular. It was if my eyes had spontaneously acquired the ability to pick up light intrinsic to the stone and heather.
And then down the trail, a string of lights came around a rise and made its way towards me, bobbing and swaying as if borne by legged creatures. Hikers with head lamps? But the lights were dim and they flickered like flames.
I smiled, cozy in my newfound warmth and looked forward to the parade. As they threaded through the boulders I could see I was way in my estimates of scale. The things approaching were Barbie-sized, their lights not much brighter than burning matchsticks. Little people, on foot or riding in carts pulled by goats. A faerie caravan.
Those in the vanguard wore armor of tree bark and nut shells. Jagged crystals gleamed at the end of hollow reed pikes twice their height. Glowing orbs dangled from twists of vine. Grim-faced, they lowered their pikes as they passed me, worried I might attack. But I just smiled and waved as they went by.
Families rode in wagons made of gourds and wicker. Elders and cute, little faces huddled under blankets against the sleet, marveling at my gigantic form. Haggard parents walked alongside the goats in blinders and saddles, leading them by tethers or guiding their reins from benches.
Something clattered in the dark of the boulder fields behind me. A band of squat and shaggy bipeds hopped between boulders, converging on the faerie’s path. One of them, some kind of imp I would guess, saw me look. It came over to investigate, its face bearded like a Yorkie dog’s but bearing a monkey’s inquisitive eyes. It carried a club fashioned from a knotted branch and studded with blackberry thorns.
It studied me from behind a cairn, pressing gnarled fingers to its lips as if telling me to keep silent. I never intended to heed its warning, but I couldn’t move and I couldn’t. I just lay there, paralyzed, unable to do more than watch.
The imp came up to me and grinned.
“On the way out, are you?” it said, in a raspy whisper.
I struggled to respond, barely able to manipulate my lips and tongue, and somehow managed to find and form words. “Out? What do you mean?”
“Die in peace,” it told me. “And mind your own business.” It hopped off into the darkness, rejoining the rest of its band.
My arms flailed and my legs kicked out. I rose to my feet, teetering, and called out to the faeries.
“Imps! It’s an ambush! Watch out!”
Something stung the back of my knee. It felt like sharp, little teeth clamping down. I swatted but found nothing there.
The faeries whirled into action, taking refuge behind their wagons, the children protecting the goats with pikes, while the adults male and female sending off flights of pencil-long arrows from bows half again their height.
The caravan crept along past me, taking with it its glow and the imps retreated back into the darkness. I collapsed back into the heather.
What was this? An illusion? A hypothermic hallucination? Or was it a window into yet another ante-afterworld visible only to those humans who skirted the fringes of death, like Root but having no connection to suicide?
Did these domains go serve more than merely the suicidal and hypothermic? Did the drowned, the gut-shot and cancer-ridden own their own custom portals to death?
I sank against the rocks, my mind going fuzzy again, unable to rationalize what I had witnessed any more than I already had. What the imp had told me was true. I was never going to see Karla again. Ever. I was never going to leave this mountainside alive.
And with that realization, the stubby branches of heather dropped their leaves and blooms and transformed themselves into wiry roots that twisted around my wrists and ankles and dragged me deep beneath the boulders.
