“My dear boy.”
I feel something wet placed against my forehead. I open my eyes and see a woman, a wrinkled but pretty face, calm and comforting.
“Iris.”
She smiles at me.
“I thought you were dead,” I say.
“And I thought you were alive.”
I feel immobile, out of breath, weightless.
I’m dying or almost dead and this is my out-of-body experience.
“Where am I?”
“In good hands,” she says.
“Your hands.”
“No. But good hands.”
“Where—am I?”
“On the edge of a mountain upside down crying out in pain and terror.”
But I’m not doing that now. Or am I unconscious?
“I guess you wanted to do it your way, didn’t you?” Iris tells me. “I wish I’d had more time. But the evil ones surprise us all, don’t they.”
“Am I dead?”
“No, Chris.”
“Lily?”
I don’t get an answer. I can’t really see where I’m at—if this is a dream, I can’t tell what I’m supposed to be looking at. I see a big flower—a sunflower. A window behind it. Trees. Lots and lots of trees.
“Chris, listen. There is a place, one of the places I told you about—it’s tucked away behind an old church in the middle of everything. But if you go looking—if you go looking—you’ll find it.”
The room is growing dim.
“And then what?”
“Then you’ll find me,” Iris says.
I go to say something, but I can’t. The lights go out, and I suddenly find myself in that place she was talking about, screaming in terror.
Then whatever dream or reality I’m in turns black. Again.