Run Away

I am at the old house with all my friends and family. It is morning time, and the daylight floods The Dreaming in a way I’ve never experienced before. Winter is there, and so is a boy named Haig. I run from the house. Everyone is calling after me and I know they will soon follow. I slip into the track on the far side of the house next to the old house, and run in slow motion towards the end of it. It is misty here.

There is a trap, a web of vines, in my way. I unhook the end of it looped around the top of a twig from a plant on the left side of the path and pull it aside like a webbed curtain of vines, and it loosens as I pull and I see where it is rigged on a twig from another plant on the right side of the path. I quickly step through the undone trap, and loop the end of it around the top of the plant’s twig again to slow my pursuers.

I turn and run through the fog to the end of the path. Suddenly I am running along the side of the house on the Other Side of the old house. My chasers are trapped in the web of vines in the path two houses down from where I am now. Now I am ascending the mossy stone steps at the back of the house on the Other Side of the old house. The air here is cool. The morning and the daylight do not reach here. I make a left turn at the top of the mossy stone steps in the alley way that is cool where the sun and light of the day do not reach.

Now there is another house to my right. I do not know this house. I have never been here. It is vaguely reminiscent of a house in the country where my Aunt and Uncle and cousins live, but that is all. I enter the house, but do not remember seeing the inside of it. Now I am in the backyard of this house, which is paved with concrete, rigged with clothing lines and covered with tarpaulin.

At the back of the backyard is a web of ropes, stretching across the entire length of the backyard. The man who owns the house is repairing the ropes of the webbing but when I ask, he cuts the ropes and creates another hole at the bottom of the web for me to slip through. The ones who are after me are now at the side of the house on the Other Side of the old house. The man tells me that they are coming. I can sense that they are.

I slip feet first through the web of ropes. His backyard ends on a precipice and I drop down into a sloping gully beyond it. I make my way across the gully as fast as I can, knowing that if I stop they will catch me. It is beautiful in the gully. The trees are majestic, the sunlight through the leaves shimmers like faeries. It is a mystical place. The gully ends by a side road to the main road. I run up the main road, I pass a roundabout, and I make a left into another side road, canopied and enshrouded by tall, magnificent trees.

The air here is cold. The light of day reaches this place the least. I make my way down this side road, running, running, running into its peaceful and comforting darkness, while down the road, past the roundabout, through the side road, into the gully, up the precipice and behind a web of rope, my hunters remain trapped, unable to follow, calling me back to them … calling me to return. The Dreaming shifts …