EXCERPT:

In the distance on the edge of the cemetery a smear of crimson fluttered. Almost against his will, Adrian moved toward it. There was too much white all around. It hurt his eyes. The red was an oasis drawing him in.

He staggered, feeling dizzy, and stared down at a grave marker. The snow was so deep his boot had rammed into the stone. “Ouch”, he muttered under his breath.

He was at the top of the cemetery, near where they’d buried his father-in-law. There was nothing but ice-covered trees, gravestones and the crumbled statue. New snow and ice blanketed the grave and the caved-in earth beyond it. The thing was, he didn’t recall the journey. How’d I get here? he thought.

Just as confusing, the sun wasn’t in the same place as when he’d left the carriage house. It was further along in the sky, which was odd. That high up the freight-train wind whipped past him and churned the snow into a translucent froth.

He was so cold he could barely move, as if he’d been outside for hours. His skin itched. He was experiencing wooziness, worse each second, as his gaze swept across the void toward the house so far away with its illuminated windows and promise of safety and warmth.

Behind him a voice whispered, “I am not dreaming. You are real flesh and blood―but I believed you dead. Where have you been and…can you tell me what has happened to me?”

Adrian spun around, and there was a woman in a tattered scarlet gown, barefooted, her skin the white of the dead…a statue who moved. Her expression was one of confused despair.

“Where is the world?” she moaned. Her pale hands were around her face just like in that famous picture his wife liked so much; the one where the person is silently screaming.

“It’s still here,” he assured her, his heart racing as he fought the swift wave of vertigo. The taste of fear made his mouth dry. Panic made his left eye tick. “It hasn’t gone anywhere.”

Her bloodless lips moved into a cynical smile as if she didn’t believe him. “No…my world?”

 “Your world? There’s only one world. This.” He spread his hands out in an inclusive gesture. He was about to ask her who she was and what she was doing out in the cold with so little clothes on, but when he looked again she was no longer there. Gone. Quick as that.

He rubbed his eyes. Still no woman. “You’ve been out in the weather too long,” he chided himself sharply, “and a frozen, sorrowing man can see anything in a cemetery.” Even ghostly women with sharp teeth.

The strange thing was the woman in red had somehow seemed familiar, as if he’d met her before. He felt as if he was losing all sense of reality. Muttering under his breath to keep the doubts at bay, he trekked home. ***