A little bit shocked that he’d so missed the point of what I was trying to tell him — but undeniably much warmer. His coat weighed a ton and was practically steaming from his body heat — I nodded. He hadn’t let go of the collar.
It felt odd to be so near him. He definitely was no kindly uncle. He was, instead, very much a young man close to my own age.
And crackling with male sexuality.
I wondered if I should have just stayed in my line. Everyone in it was filing for the boat, which looked, now that I could see it up close, fairly comfortable.
“I didn’t mean just me,” I went on more slowly. “Everyone here is freaking out. They’re wet and cold, too.” I pointed towards the line of people who weren’t being let onto the ferry that had just docked. “What’s going on with them?”
He looked in the direction I’d pointed, then back down at me. He was still holding on to the collar of his coat, keeping it snug around my shoulders.
“You don’t need to worry,” he said. His expression had hardened again, however, and his eyes gone a stormy gray, as if this was a subject he didn’t like discussing. “A boat’s coming for them, too.”
“Well, they still deserve to be treated better,” I said, wincing as another man tried to make a break for the ferry line before a guard used force to subdue him. “It’s not their fault —”
He stepped even closer towards me, effectively blocking my view of what was going on in front of the ferry. “Do you want to go someplace else?” he asked. “Someplace away from here? Someplace warm?”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a rush of relief. He’d realized there’d been a mistake. He was going to fix it. I was going home. “Yes, please. ”
And then I blinked. Because that’s what human beings do, especially when they’ve been crying.
But when I opened my eyes again, I wasn’t home. I wasn’t standing on the shore of the lake anymore, either.
And what I’d been hoping was the end of the nightmare I’d been going through turned out to be just the beginning.
“Thee it behoves to take another road,”
Responded he, when he beheld me weeping,
“If from this savage place thou wouldst escape.”
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto I
Instead of home, or standing by the lake, I was in a long, elegantly appointed room.
The horse was gone. The guards were gone. The beach along the lake was gone. All of the people — the people who’d been waiting in the lines — were gone, too.
The wind was still there, though. It caused the long, gauzy white curtains, hanging from the elegant arches along one side of the room, to billow softly.
But the wind was the only thing I recognized. Everything else around me — the white-sheeted bed topped with a dark, heavy canopy on one end of the room; the pair of thronelike chairs at the long banquet table sitting before an enormous hearth at the other; the ornate antique tapestries, all depicting medieval-looking scenes, which hung here and there on the smooth, white marble walls; even the white divan on which I was sitting — I had never seen before in my life.
I was dreaming. I had to be.
Except that everything — the sound of water bubbling in the fountain in the courtyard outside the arches; the softness of the fur rug beneath my suddenly bare feet; the smell of the burning firewood in the hearth — felt so real. As real as everything had felt a split second before.
Most real of all was him, sitting beside me on the divan.
“Better now?” he asked.
His voice didn’t sound like thunder anymore. Instead, it sounded lush, like the rug into which my feet sank the minute I sprang to them.
Which I did the minute he spoke.
What was going on? I lifted a trembling hand to shove some of my long — now dry — hair from my face, and caught a glimpse of something white. I looked down.
I was no longer wearing his coat, or my wet, chilly clothes. I was in some kind of gown. It wasn’t a hospital gown, either. It was closely fitted on top, with a skirt that almost swept the floor. It bore a vague resemblance to what the maidens in the tapestries on the walls were wearing. It would not have looked out of place at the annual cotillion held for the upperclasswomen at the Westport Academy for Girls.
This part I had to be dreaming.
But then, why could I feel my heart pounding so hard in my chest?
He’d risen from the couch when I had. Now he stood looking down at me with an expression on his face that I could only describe as concerned.
“Isn’t this what you wanted?” he asked. “You’re warm now, and dry. You did say you wanted to go away from there.”
I stared up at him, openmouthed, completely unable to speak.
I was a tenth grader from Connecticut who had just blinked and ended up in some eighteen- or nineteen-year-old guy’s bedroom.
Did he not see how this might be disturbing?
“You’ll be quite safe here, you know,” he assured me.
I used to think I was safe in my own backyard. And look how that had turned out.
“I don’t understand,” I said, when I finally managed to find my voice. Even then, it came out sounding more pathetic than ever. I needed to sit back down. I was pretty sure I was having some kind of stroke or something. “What’s going on? Where are we? Who are you?”
I guess the fact that I was able to speak at all must have made him think I was fine, because he’d jetted off towards the table.