I looked out upon the falling rain, and knew that I was home. I’d been gone for nearly a dozen years, and had built up in my head an idyllic reconstruction of the place where I once lived, happy enough to take it at face value, but never believing that the honest reality could ever truly match it. I’d been wrong: the simple majesty of an encroaching treeline and fresh flavor of the air shone more vibrantly within my eyes than the fading idealizations which had been populating in my memory. Like a copy of a copy that had been copied countless times before, the things and places which I held most dear had yellowed and diminished, and I’d been none the wiser. Before me hung an angry sky in darkened hues of grey, and the only sunlight bleeding through was soft, diffuse and far away.

I was older now, and my bones could feel approaching storms, the ache inverse to barometric pressure. Judging by the pain now shooting through my legs, the clouds would soon be crowding in, driving the sheets of rain diagonally down upon us. My wife stood at my side, her arm resting gently on the shoulders of our son. The prospect of a storm, I’m sure, did not excite them, but they only saw the thickening brume, and couldn’t feel the speed at which it would approach. A flash of lightning somewhere behind us brought everything before us into sudden brief existence and then dragged it back into the shadows and out of conscious thought. I put one arm around my wife who was already beginning to shiver in the night, and the other around my son, whose trembling followed the thunder just a handful of beats distant from the lightning. I was home, and home knew it.

The downpour began to quicken as our taxi finally appeared, a beneficiary of the police department’s recent upgrade to their fleet. I funneled our luggage to the driver, who deftly arranged it into his open trunk as my wife and child bundled into the back of the decommissioned Crown Victoria and secured their safety belts. I stood a moment in the winter shower, and allowed the water to stream down my face, breathing in the essence of the Pacific Northwest and encouraging it to swell within me. I could feel the butterflies unfurl their jeweled wings and take to flight, leading me back down the paths of recollection and steeping me in the long-dormant and overwhelming love which I’d not savored in over a decade. My wife called out through the open window, informing me she’d like to go. The enchantment of the moment shattered, I shook off my reverie and took my seat in the back of our cab. My son snuggled close- it was past the hour to which he could normally arrive unimpaired (about ninety minutes after bedtime). I gave the address to our driver, and spared a glance toward the dwindling lights of downtown Winslow as we pulled away.

We drove along the back roads, lined with trees, and near pitch black, small glimpses of hidden lights far back from the roadside and filtered through arboreal obscuration reflecting every now and again off the glass and metal of the cab. The storm now stood before us, the rain slamming down into the windshield as we travelled through the chill and night toward the warmth and safety of my grandparents’ home. I asked the cabbie to take the route along the beach, and as we glided past the spraying surf below the purple twilight, I could almost make out through the misty gloom the outline of Seattle, reaching out across The Sound to welcome me back home. A glimpse of moon broke past the cloudy heavens, and cast its ultrasonic glow down on the choppy Puget Sound. I turned to tell my son to look, but he’d sunk down into dreams and could no longer share my own. My wife’s eyelids also had descended, and as we took a left at the final hill, leaving the shore to drown beneath the thrashing waves, their snores replaced the pounding breakers, the sounds of singing shores still ringing in my ears.

Through the gloom, a porchlight shone, drawing us in through the tightening grasp of Niorun toward the safety and security of places both warm and warmly remembered. A whispered word of invocation and my wife and son arose, their limbs swinging numbly at their sides, still more adept at navigating the realms of subconscious tangibility than the world viewed only by one’s waking eyes. They shambled toward the house, drawn like undead migrants on pilgrimage to Mensa. I stumbled through the shadows as I fumbled with the keys, the banality of e’erday tasks fracturing the nox incantatores by which I’d been enraptured. Clarity gradually emerged as the scraps of the dream’s fetters began to flutter down. The magic of the evening ebbed, the tide of commonality now washing in and carrying back out to somewhere hidden within the mist and fog the interpolated implications which had until this point, characterized the evening. Normality restored, I strode back to the driver and settled up our bill, retrieving bags and backpacks so that he might depart. He waved his thanks and bid us a good night, then pulled back out into the darkness, taillights steadily receding in the reasserted fog.

And then the night took hold once more, the lights cutting out without a sound. I whirled about to face the house, not five yards distant from where I now stood, but could discern only a sheet of ebon silk fitting itself about me. It’s just my nerves, I told myself, to calm the hamm’ring of my heart. It wasn’t real the last time, and it can’t possibly be now. Despite my struggles, my arms would still not move, and my breath, now ragged gasps fueled by adrenaline, blew back warmly ‘pon my face.

“Welcome back, my sweet, dear child. Your absence has been noted. There is much now that we must discuss. Come, little one: it’s time.”

I began to scream a desperate cry, a shout into the night, but not a sound escaped beyond a gurgling in my throat. Suddenly my balance shifted and my feet no longer touched the ground. I fell back through both time and space and discovered myself in neither. I was floating in an abstract nothingness, and I knew what would be coming…