Danny ducked under a branch that was huge and semi-transparent, as if it were made of a glass shadow.
When he looked closely, all the trees looked the same. He had walked for what seemed like an eternity, away from the marshy area where he had accidentally found himself, and now he was on a dry plain, dotted with very tall trees, their bare branches stretching toward the gray sky.
«It's a strange dream» the boy said.
His voice echoed terribly loud in the silence. If he concentrated, tho, Danny could understand that it wasn't actually an absolute silence: a surf sound permeated the place, like the one you might hear when you put your ear to the opening of a large seashell. There were no birds, no insects. No chirping, no tweeting.
Danny, shivering, kept walking. Dry twigs, and even those looked like smoked glass, snapped under the soles of his shoes with dry sounds.
The ground was bare, grayish, without dead leaves, without tufts of grass. There was nothing there except him and those ghostly trees that looked way more like sculptures than like living organisms: modern decor for a desolated, modern living room.
He tried to look inside one of the trunks, sticking his face into a hollow in the twisted grain of an old pine, a tree that looked like it had been split in half by lightning. Opening his eyes wide in the semi-darkness, he saw nothing: the hollow was smooth inside, like a plastic tube, and almost shiny. To the touch, the bark felt like that of a very ordinary tree, a note that clashed with the glassy appearance.
Danny stepped back, testing the ground with the toe of one shoe. The resulting sound was curiously hard and amplified. He realized, at that moment, that he wasn't breathing... but that he could, somehow, still hear the sound of breathing.
«Is there... is there anyone?» He asked.
It felt strange to be still not breathing, so he took a breath, which tasted strange, electric, and grassy on his tongue. He ran a hand over his face, then turned and retraced his steps.
«Is anyone there? I hear... I hear someone».
Nothing was moving around him. The trees were sparse where he was, spaced twenty feet apart, so it was easy to look in all directions. And there was absolutely no one there.
Yet beneath the constant, disturbing sound of the surf, Danny could hear a faint exhalation and inhalation, familiar, human, like the way he breathed himself, yet out of sync with his breathing in that moment.
«I'm scared» He said.
He smiled. It felt good to say how he felt... and there was no one to judge him for it. He felt a cold, clammy feeling on his exposed gums. The rest of his body felt no discomfort, he felt strong, his feet moved with ease, carrying a body that seemed to weigh only a few grams.
As he walked back, Danny could see water appearing: first streams hidden among the glassy roots of some large trees, then streams, and finally a full-blown swamp. As he dragged his feet through the swamp, Danny heard a rustling sound. He remembered why he had left that place: snakes.
Well, they weren't exactly snakes, but he had no other name for them: they were creatures of some kind, long and thin, that moved by slithering from branch to branch, overlapping each other, writhing, wandering erratically. Now that he saw them, Danny told himself that they were particularly scary, and that the dry, lifeless land from which he had returned certainly seemed terrifying, compared to the simple strangeness of those creatures. At least there was something alive, there.
«What are you?» He asked out loud.
In dreams, it often happens that the strangest creatures can speak, that goldfish can answer with prophetic phrases, that adorable little horses can teach friendship. This, which Danny thought was a dream, was actually not.
Danny tried to climb one of the trees. He had never done anything like this, so he was not very experienced, and it took him a moment to put a foot wrong and fall to the ground, with his back in the water. The impact took his breath away, painful, hard and cold, but what made his veins tremble with terror was that the swamp began to suck him in.
It seemed like his recurring nightmare, from when he had been an impressionable child brought to watch an adventure movie on the big screen: quicksand that drags him down, into an endless darkness that suffocates him, humid and lethal. He remembered that the best way to avoid sinking into the quicksand was not to move too much, so he froze, trying to distribute all his weight on the surface of the water.
He spread his arms, spread his legs, breathed slowly: in and out, in and out, controlling to the millimeter what movements his thin chest was.
A pair of hands grabbed him from behind eight.
«It's a dream, it's a dream, it's A DREAM!» Danny screamed, panicking.
The hands searched him for a moment, wrinkled his clothes, grabbed his sides like claws, then tightened on the sides of his ribs and began to tug at him furiously.
Danny couldn't keep calm any longer, he flailed, grabbed those hands, tried to pull them off him.
«GO AWAY! GO AWAY!».
He was sobbing now. The hands that were pulling him, that he was fighting, were greenish, pale, phosphorescent. As for the shape, they looked just like his own.
«GO AWAY!».
Danny kicked downward and that was enough to slip out of the ghost's grasp. He grabbed a root, struggling, and pulled with all his strength to get out of the swamp.
His tired arms and back protested the pain. Danny sat down at the base of the tree, panting. He looked back at where he had been, mouth agape, and saw the two pale, luminous hands slowly retreating into the water. Even from this distance, they still looked exactly like his own.
«What are you? What are you?» He asked, shaking from head to toe.
He had had enough of this nightmare; it was time to wake up. Danny pinched himself on the cheek. He felt it perfectly, but he didn't wake up. He tried another, harder, meaner, and there was a small red mark on his face, but he didn't wake up. His eyes grew watery.
He began to contemplate the idea that he wasn't in a dream. He stood up, dripping with water, and wiped his eyes with his forearm, then looked up.
The black snakes didn't seem interested in him, they continued their senseless, tangled, rapid movements. Wind in the branches. Danny bent down to look at the water: it seemed a few inches deep, and maybe it was, but underneath it was soaked, unstable ground, which would suck him in if he fell in again. And then there was that thing, the one with human hands, but it couldn't be a person, because if it had been a person it would have died down there.
Danny wasn't supposed to go into the puddles... or at least he wasn't supposed to fall in from the other side.
«I'm stuck» He said «I don't know where to go. There's no sign of any kind. Are you angels?».
The snakes ignored him. His father had said he'd seen angels, at the end of the tunnel, right? What if they weren't angels? What if they were... something else? Something that lived in a dark, silent place, with trees the color of smoked glass and ghosts that hid beneath the surface of the water?
Danny decided to walk away from the swamp again. The loneliness of certain places scared him, but the idea of being watched by an unknown creature, who had an interest in dragging him underground, was worse. Being careful not to step into the largest puddles, the ones that seemed to be made of ink, Danny began to trot toward drier areas. And he walked. And he walked.
