Then it seemed like a host of shimmering midges in a corps de guerre. (Was this where all the insects had gone? Magnetically drawn to the hollow-in-life that a ghost colony might be, filling in the vacuum with the smallest fleck of indivisible yet visible living matter?)

Now they were airily shaping themselves into bouquets, like giant heads on tapering necks, like volutes of blossom on slowly spiraling stems. Nearing and nearing, possessed of both presence and distance.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said Brrr, to himself or to them, or both. Hoping they might be offended and leave.

They began to circle about him. The nearer they drew, the more of a family feeling they took on. Was it because, once a creature became a ghost, it shirked off the differentiations of biological diversity and, uniqueness annihilated, became just shades of life? Footfalls of the past?

“I have the distinct feeling I’m not in Oz anymore,” said Brrr. Now he was speaking aloud to keep up his courage-such as it was.

The specters wreathed themselves around him. As they tightened the circle, their separate margins began to merge. Before he was swallowed up in a blancmange of foggy apparition, he gave out a thunderclap of a roar. It appeared to make no impression on the creatures, but he was glad he could still roar. It meant he wasn’t dead. Presumably.

“Excuse my volume; I have no self-control,” he said. Well, why not talk to the phantoms? He had meant to avoid Cloud Swamp at all costs, but opportunity was presenting itself. And conversation was his only skill.

“Begging pardon for the intrusion. Frightfully thoughtless of me,” he went on. “Is there a spokesperson among you who can answer a question or two? If you’ve time to spare?”

There was a sort of drumming in the air, as if a billion miniature throats were clearing themselves. Languidly the sound resolved, its pitch rising and consolidating toward a common note. But it died out, bearing no word for Brrr upon its pressured breath.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said more forcefully. “I am, in actual fact, the King of the Forest.”

No reply. The apparent lack of interest on the part of a congress of ghosts shamed Brrr. It also frightened him. Of course they would realize he was no kind of king at all. He organized his thoughts with more honesty.

“I didn’t come here to disturb your rest,” he stated. “Indeed, I hoped to pass without pestering you. Shall we just nod courteously and say ‘Good-bye’ or ‘Piss off’ or whatever’s appropriate and then breeze on our separate ways?”

The assemblage of ghosts seemed to hover, listening, or drumming its fingers against its forearms, so to speak. Tacit. As yet uninvolved.

“Wait,” said a voice, not Brrr’s, but a normal worldly voice. Jemmsy? The Lion swiveled his head, not certain from which direction the sound approached.

Cubbins blundered down the side of an invisible bluff, snapping the branches of an invisible birch tree to break his descent. He splashed through the vision of ghosts and arrived at Brrr’s side with slicked thighs. Under one arm dripped a wedge of honeycomb.