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didn't keep my eyes shut now; I opened them and almost wished I hadn't.
I was heading headfirst down a long, rough-walled tunnel, roughly oval in
shape and dimly illuminated from behind. It re-sembled for all the world the
inside of a massive hollow tree, only I was going headfirst down that tunnel
and feeling the drop and the wind on my face, and I wasn't in full control of
the descent.
I wasn't alone in this rapid and scary flight, either. My pas-sage disturbed
all sorts of small creatures, many batlike but others unlike anything I'd
seen this side of gargoyles, from their apparent slumber on the walls. They
would shriek and take off in panicked flight in all directions, yellow and red
and orange eyes flashing in the semidarkness.
The sensation was not unlike that of a roller coaster, and it was nearly
impossible to relax and enjoy the ride even though something intellectually
whispered to me that somehow, for all the speed and all the little creatures
and the rest, I was coming very close to one wall and then another but never
actually hit-ting them. It was a sort of guided descent, only I wasn't
con-sciously doing the guiding.
How long this went on I couldn't say; subjectively it seemed like hours.
Finally, though, I broke free and clear into a vast cavern or something very
much like one. Above was a great dome of a dark blue color, but it was layered
from the horizons to the top like the sky an hour before sunrise.
Below was a vast body of water over which I flew, skimming the sur-face,
disturbing the relative calm. I came down until I could actually feel spray on
my face, then suddenly soared upward perhaps fifteen or twenty feet in the
air. Ahead of and below me I could see a vessel, a great boat of ancient
design made of intricately carved wood with a single mast in the center for a
sail that was not raised. Instead, the boat was being rowed by oarsmen,
strange, humanoid creatures wearing garb like some ancient
Egyptian god-things, with long, muscular black arms leading to rough, taloned
hands and with faces that were more doglike than human. The long snouts and
big eyes and small pointed ears produced not a cute or cuddly but rather a
menacing tone. These were not lapdogs, but humanoid cousins to the wolf.
The oarsmen there must have been forty to a side did not look up at me or in
any way acknowledge my presence, if in fact they knew I was there at all, and
the drummer in the front kept his canine gaze on the rowers and beat out the
slow, steady cadence. The helmsman, though, cocked his head to one side, as if
sensing something odd, and then looked up and most certainly saw me. His jaws
opened, re-vealing rows of sharp white teeth, and there was a saliva dribble
from one side of his mouth. Keeping his right hand on the tiller, he raised
his left and pointed a gnarled finger at me;
from the end of it shot a glow of green energy of a form I'd seen before.
I could not avoid it; it struck me, enveloped me, and seemed to burn. For the
first time in a very long time I
felt not just at the shoulders and above but completely, over the whole of my
body.
Momentum, though, took me away from the ship and its eerie and threatening
occupants, and soon they were lost from view. I felt odd, tingling all over,
but I wasn't completely aware of anything that had changed. Then, slowly, I
was aware that I
could feel a complete body and that I had a measure of control. Carefully, I
tried a bit of experimenting, shifting my weight slightly to one side and then
to the other, and saw that
I traveled in those directions. It was almost like driving a car; a little
went a long way in controlling my actions.
I slowed a bit and went down as I saw a reflection in the wa-ter below.
Quickly checking and not seeing any obvious ob-stacles ahead, I took
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myself once more to just a couple of yards from the surface and looked.
It was my own face that I saw staring back at me, the same one I'd had before,
but it sat atop a dark, metallic purple body, a monstrous body, one with a
serpentine tail and great bat's wings that were keeping me aloft.
I cried out, as much in shock as in terror at the vision, and for just a
moment lost control, but I managed to get myself back into controlled flight
before going headlong into the still waters.
A shore was approaching now, and I allowed myself to head for it, although the
landscape was so bizarre, it might as well have been on a distant planet. A
forest, a vast thicket with huge trees rising from it toward the
"sky" and beyond, lay all around. I grew a bit nervous flying such a dangerous
winding path after a while and turned, rose a bit, and landed as carefully as
I could on a thick branch of one of the master growths. The branch was a few
yards across and perhaps half a mile long plenty of room.
Talons in my feet bent down and gripped the wood, making my perch as solid as
if I'd grown from it. It was time to stop, time to look around and take stock
of this bizarre place.
My form would have seemed freakish in any other setting, but it seemed to fit
in perfectly around here. This was a world of eternal twilight, of strange
creatures not merely of another evolution but of a lot of other evolutionary
paths flit-ting about in the air and running over the ground and up, down, and
all around the trees. The textures and shapes had an unreal quality about
them, as if drawn by a master three-dimensional artist. Everything was as real
as anything else to me, yet all seemed at the same time permeated with a sense
of unreality.
It was in some ways the antithesis of the realities I could re-member, either
of them. They were not real, yet they seemed totally so, while this place
could not be real yet was.
And I and all the plants and animals around me weren't the only ones here.
The dog-faced characters on the ship surely weren't the only ones of their
kind, forever sailing like some ancient Flying Dutchman, nor were even they
the sole lords of this world.
What I had first taken for some kind of animal going along the forest floor,
occasionally showing itself in breaks in the trees or climbing over obstacles,
now was a clearly humanoid shape. The skin was strange, light blue in color,
and from the back the creature appeared human but was covered with vari-ous
lines or stripes or tattoos?
I took off again and followed the blue man below, certain that he didn't know
I existed or couldn't do much about it. He certainly was headed someplace
definite, and that was what I really wanted to find out, and without any
irritating green ray baths springing from fingertips, whatever that had done
to me.
Why had I been sent here, and how could I return? Worse, did I want to return
to a bedridden existence after I had this level of freedom, no matter how
fierce and gruesome I might appear? What had the March Hare, whoever he really
was, had in mind in sending me to this place?
And was it a real place in any sense at all, or did it just exist in the March
Hare's imagination or mine?
Would that fellow below me know? I looked ahead and saw a clearing right on
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