Chapter 21

Together Into the Dream

A ragged crash and shattering glass wrenched Essie and Random out of the daze they had fallen into in each other’s arms. They squinted through the dimness to where the window used to be and saw a deep oval shadow.

“Swallow me,” the thought winked in Essie’s mind like a neon motel sign. “Follow me,” it winked again.

“We’ve got to go!”

Essie jumped up peeling Random’s arms away frantically.

He shook his thoughts loose, and rose more slowly. She pulled him up toward what she began to realize was the giant snake’s mouth which had at attached itself to the side of the house like the rolling dock to the side of a 747.

“Eet ees the snake.” Essies said flatly eyes wide with the knowledge of where they were headed.

“Oh, no! I’m not going in there!” Random pulled back.

“We have no choice, Carida !” Essie pulled him along toward the tooth bordered passage, 3 inch daggers neatly spaced catching bits of light. “Eet is the only way to the tree. We must get to the tree. I know eet now.”

“I don’t know I feel like a walking meal.”

“Eet ees a dream snake. Eet looks like a snake, but it will not behave like a snake.”

They had to duck a little and step up over the teeth to enter. The floor was smooth and felt hard and smooth like burnished wood, and to their surprise slanted up twisting.

“It’s like a giant root tunnel,” Random noted feeling a little more confident with each step.

“I tink we don’ have much time!” Essie said as she began a slippery assent. Random followed closely.

Random and Essie came out of the tunnel

Bright scarlet, magenta, lemon colored, flowers flashed around them amid the huge leaves and arm thick vines clinging to smooth trunks of trees. To south where they headed dark clouds gathered ominously and thunder rumbled. They did not fear the rain, but arriving to late to complete the task that awaited them.

The path they ran on became riddled with twisting roots they slipped and slid as rain began to splat about them from thundering skies. Herds of immense obsidian clouds ran before gusts of wet wind and were broken among the upper branches of all encompassing tree. They both slipped and stumbled nearly sliding off of the slick root trail. They helped each other up, and in this way they went on for a long while. The root became thicker until they became 5 larger roots braided in twisting macramé knots and they had to climb over and around and then it became 3 huge roots and finally into 2 roots like the trunks of gargantuan trees parallel twisting away and back together all around them the wind pushed them at first from one side, then in front and then from behind like invisible hands. Then they saw through the mist of the rain, the trunk of valley filling tree a vague shadow looming in dimness. Bright sparks flickered off of the shining leaves whenever a flash of lightning snaked across the sky.

The two roots merged into one and they moved as along it holding each other. They mad slow but steady progress in the chaos of wind, water and now tangled branches. They glimpsed flower buds like people-sized green eggs perched on the lower branches when the wind moved the glittering leaves out of the way.

Essie was wondering how they would get up into the tree, the trunk was at least a hundred yards wide at the base, maybe there would be a way to climb or steps or vines she could not tell. They were too far away.

Random held tight and followed his senses overwhelming any thoughts that might enter his mind.

A gust of wet wind hit and swept them up shattering their dream bodies into rain, driving them toward the low branches, swirling up through the huge golden leaves. Their atomized bodies mixed with each other and the storm, rising on the air. Suddenly they were falling into an enormous open white shimmering flower as the buds began to open.

The borders of their bodies, skin, muscle, bone, nerves ceased to exist. Random whole being became liquid and flowing and one with water and Essie and flower. He couldn’t see but feel the light. All was vague feelings of being. He could feel Essie but there was no knowledge of names or who he was, or how he was separate from the flower, the water or Essie. They were without individuality mixed and poured through the flower into the heart of the flower where they were infused with the energy of light and immediately created the pressure of growth, explosion of life out into a shell of fruit and seed. There was no time in the process. All happened in second or month or years. There was no one to tell. A flower, water person has no time. The fruit burst forth in a shimmering sphere like a soap bubble creature hands and feet appeared out of the mass. Head, eyes, nose mouth and the rhythmic thump of a heart. The creature looked out at the tree and the dream world with the eyes of Random/Essie/Water/Flower and something more ancient and innocent than any of these. It could see the tree at the beginning and end and the energy of the tree and all that flowed in and out of the tree from the light and air.