Vaguely she shimmered in and out of his dream’s eye, an elusive, haunting apparition of tantalizing beauty. No, she was not a Greek goddess or a Nordic nymph whom to behold stirred up only erotic sensations. Hers was rather the softer beauty of a compassionate heart, of a pure heart overflowing with love and an intense concern for others—including Steve, the ants, and the whole wide world. She hovered at a little distance from him, never looking him straight in the eye but yet encompassing him somehow within her aura. Her golden shoulder-length hair, her full brown eyes, and her slender form slightly stooped as in sorrow, all of her, yes, all of her seemed to be shimmering and wavering behind a thin veil of tears, tears he sensed were there because she was seeing into his heart and feeling the pathos which the ant war had plunged him into. But it was clear that her tears were not just for him. They were also for the ants and for the world, tears of love and, in a most mysterious way—as Steve later struggled to describe it—tears of unrequited faithfulness, leaving him to wonder if he was in fact the faithless one over whom she wept. Hers seemed like a love as faithful as King’s, but infinitely deeper. Even in the dream his heart broke because he knew that from her point of view he was closer to the ants and the world than he was to her, detached from this heavenly Maiden and yet tenderly touched by her. There she stood before him, fading in and out, alone but illuminating everything, motionlessly beckoning, a solitary figure of irresistible charm in search of a love to respond to her own. Everything within Steve screamed “Yes!” in the dream. But in the dream he was paralyzed. He could not move. The gulf between her and him remained.
Her gentle melancholy sorrow grew more painful by the moment, especially as Steve could not get to her and the ants would not cease fighting. This pushed him over the boundary of dreamland and he awoke to find himself on the point of sobbing. So he let himself go and sobbed sweet tears into his bedroll. He was too moved even to ask himself what it all meant, but there was a wondrous satisfaction in it somehow, an infilling.
He couldn’t get the image of his Phantom Maiden out of his head. Her slender trembling beauty and especially her tears bathed him in thoughts and feelings entirely new to him. This time when he drifted off to sleep it was into her arms and a warm and guiltless love.
Steve spent the entire next day walking under the halo of his nocturnal visitor. She muddled, soothed and disturbed, and excited him all at the same time, giving rise to a level and quality of restlessness he had never known before. He didn’t know what to do about her, and he had no idea what to do about the ants. But he had to do something! She had wept over them! And, in the end, so had he, thanks to her.
A dismal and awesome heaviness hung over him because of those ants. He knew that what he had witnessed was important or she would not have been weeping over it. He also knew that there was nothing he could do in the hollow to bring any good out of it. And so, it seemed to him, she would continue to be sad, all on account of him. Sometimes in those first days after the dream all of this struck him as irrational, but most of the time it didn’t. Most of the time, whether he was walking noiselessly along woodland trails in the full glory of the daylight or lying motionless under the canopy of stars at night, the image of two highly organized nations that had lived side by side in harmony for years annihilating each other under his very eyes over a misunderstanding kept reappearing in his mind’s eye. It was as though she wouldn’t let him forget it.
That was because he could not forget her! Over and over again when he should have been absorbed in the glories and harmonies of his immediate surroundings, he found himself drifting off into another dimension in search of his nocturnal Maiden. Her silhouette appeared everywhere, it seemed. Once he imagined he was actually seeing her behind a clump of chokecherries. It startled him—it was so realistic. But these vivid moments disappeared like soap bubbles in the air. Try as he might he could not escape from her, and most of the time he didn’t try very hard. He had fallen in love. It was that simple.
These two strange new impulses (the one to tell, the other to love) grew within him unbidden as the days went by. When they were in control of him, they became pure torture for him. Of course, given a bit of distance from them, his rational mind saw the folly of the whole business of letting a dream run your life. It was all insane nonsense. The price of trying to make something rational of that crazy dream would be to deny everything he had discovered to be true the previous year, and so help him, that would never happen! Why should he care whether anyone heard about the ants or not? He had no duty to the world he had intentionally left behind, a world that was just like the ants in so many ways. It was as useless to try to get a message across to the world as it would have been to try to get the ants to stop killing each other. People would think he was crazy for trying.
And what reason could there possibly be in the real world for getting tangled up with a woman, any kind of actual woman? They lure you in and then they chain you down. You’d always be at cross-purposes with each other under a veneer of social conformity. It’d be the end of your freedom.
Let’s get this straight! It’s plain stupid to think you have to tell something to the world that it can’t hear anyway and to dream endlessly about someone somewhere out there who can’t possibly exist. So settle down and recover the joy you had in this hallowed place until you got stupid. All the rest is delusion.
The tensions that this tug-of-war produced in him, he recalled years later, became unbearable. All the reasoning in the world did nothing to subdue his two new obsessions. He got furious whenever he found himself impervious to the many delights all around him just because his imagination had run wild and taken him somewhere else. The forest and its treasures hadn’t changed. He had changed. He had no one to blame but himself.
For the remainder of Steve’s time in the hollow, King played the humble role of making his Spectre Maiden believable. The dog’s selfless love and unquestioning devotion went to work on Steve. If a dog could be like that, surely she could too in real life. Even when Steve was all twisted up in his own thoughts and self-recrimination, the great silver husky would never make demands on him or complain about being neglected. On the contrary, his long-suffering and constancy found their way deep into Steve’s heart, reshaping it ever so slowly into a believer in a new sort of love, a love he could begin to respond to now in kind if he ever found it in a real person.
But you’re such a frog, he told himself in his clearer moments. Even if she is out there somewhere, why would she pay any attention to you?