He closed his eyes. Found the strength to resist the pull of each
ebbing wave of sound.
But when he opened his eyes, he discovered his resistance was
imaginary. He was even closer to the trees than before, only thirty
feet from the perimeter of the forest, so close he had to squint
against the blinding brightness emanating from the branches, the
trunks, and the ground under the pines.
The moody amber light was now threaded with red, like blood in an egg
yolk.
Eduardo was scared, miles past fear into sheer terror, fighting a
looseness in his bowels and a weakness in his bladder, shaking so
violently that he would not have been surprised to hear his bones
rattling together--yet his heart was no longer racing. It had slowed
drastically and now matched the steady thirty-beats-per-minute of the
pulsating sound that seemed to issue from every radiant surface.
He couldn't possibly stay on his feet when his heartbeat was so slow,
the blood supply to his brain so diminished. He ought to be either in
severe shock or unconscious. His perceptions must be untrustworthy.
Perhaps the throbbing had escalated to match the pace of his hammering
heart.
Curiously, he was no longer aware of the frigid air. Yet no heat
accompanied the enigmatic light. He was neither hot nor cold.
He couldn't feel the earth under his feet. No sense of gravity,
weight, or weariness of muscle. Might as well have been floating.
The odors of the winter were no longer perceptible. Gone was the
faint, crisp, ozone-like scent of snow. Gone, the fresh smell of the
pine forest that rose just in front of him. Gone, the faint sour stink
of his own icy sweat.
No taste on his tongue. That was the weirdest of all. He had never
before realized there was always an endless and subtly changing series
of tastes in his mouth even when he wasn't eating anything. Now a
blandness. Neither sweet nor sour. Neither salty nor bitter. Not
even a blandness. Beyond blandness.
Nothing. Nada. He worked his mouth, felt saliva flooding it, but
still no taste.
All of his powers of sensory perception seemed to be focused solely on
the ghost light shining from within the trees and on the punishing,
insistent sound. He no longer felt the throbbing bass washing in cold
waves across his body, rather, the sound was coming from within him
now, and it surged out of him in the same way that it issued from the
trees.
Suddenly he was standing at the edge of the woods, on ground as
effulgent as molten lava. Inside the phenomenon. Gazing down, he saw
that his feet seemed to be planted on a sheet of glass beneath which a
sea of fire churned, a sea as deep as the stars were distant. The
extent of that abyss made him cry out in panic, although no thinnest
whisper escaped him.
Fearfully and reluctantly, yet wonderingly, Eduardo looked at his legs
and body, and saw that the amber light also radiated from him and was
riddled with bursts of red. He appeared to be a man from another
