But sometimes at night, when the cold wind's blowing...

[Eleusis (DELETED 5695)]

In the dream, Eleusis can't feel the wind, but he can see it. He watches the trailing branches of the trees sway in a beckoning dance, watches the grass bend nearly double around the flat outlines of the headstones. He sees the whirl of the long black coat of the woman standing by herself, sees her hair trail out and lash around her frame as if it is trying to bind her up in it. A wind like that ought to be doing the same thing to Eleusis' own hair, which is long enough to kiss his hipbones. Dark strands ought to be coiling around his arms and neck, blinding half his vision if not pulled back tightly at the nape of his neck. But it's like he is a ghost: not only does the wind have no palpable form, it doesn't seem to touch him, bodiless and bereft of the sensory cues he knows he ought to feel.

But it is always this way at the beginning.

Footsteps with no weight land on the windswept grass, drawing Eleusis nearer and nearer to the thing he fears most. At the nameless and faceless lady's feet, the pit gapes six feet by three feet and as deep as a portal to hell. Inside there is only inky shadow, which appears to have a gelatinous texture. Shadows that would close over one's face. Shadows to drown in. As Eleusis draws unwillingly to the edge of the pit, his gaze is forced inside. The shadows pulsate and become in places transparent like jellyfish, and the atavistic black cnidaria pull back and away, revealing the flat polished surface of a coffin, pristine and white. The edge of it lifts, rises as if to show a corpse for viewing, but despite how new and modern the coffin appears, all that he can see inside its depth is bone dust and a hint of brown, vermin-tooth scarred skull.

The single remaining orbital socket stares up at Eleusis with something akin to prurient curiosity, Then semi-opaque, glutinous tendrils of living shadow spill from the edge of the grave. Now there is sensation, stunningly and brutally real despite being nothing like anything Eleusis has experienced: the spongy yet cord-strong pressure around his ankles, the drag across the lip of the abyss, the wind, the hard thump of his body, his spine, against metal, and then the soft pillows beneath pressed into his back amid the sound of splintering bone.

And the coffin lid swings closed. And the darkness seeps in from every crevice and lies filthy and slick over his body, closes over his mouth, gums his eyelashes open and covers his eyes. And the darkness is breathing. And death is crouched, purring, at the edge of the grave, but she won't come, not soon, not for an infinity of thirst and of living shadow.

And the first handful of dirt hits the coffin lid... and he wakes up choking on a scream, humid sheets wrapped tightly around him.