Suddenly, the ground gives way beneath her, and her heart rises in her throat as she falls a long, cold distance through the dark. She is afraid to land; she lets her limbs go limp so that when she hits whatever ground there is she will crumple and not break. But then, as she falls through this black vacuum, she can feel her body begin to rotate so that she is no longer falling feet first but turning slow circles head over feet over head until she lands hard on her back, and for a moment she cannot breathe. Her eyes begin to adjust to the dark. The room that she has landed in is dim and cold and musty. It has no doors, no windows, and boulders for the walls and the low ceiling she’s not sure how she’s fallen through.

She hears in the corner of the room the hiss of a match struck into life. She turns her head to look in that direction; she follows the match with her eyes and watches as it shares its flame with a large torch that when lit casts a jumping orange glow. Isabelle blinks. Beneath the torch’s flame, she can see a figure, a man, her father, seated backward on a chair, his head held down in some kind of vise. A black African wearing nothing but a loincloth even in this cold stands over him, digging into his skull with a sharp, thin knife. She tries to stand to save her father, but she cannot get her limbs to move. She tries to call out, but she cannot scream.

I am in a dream, she tells herself, I am in a dream. And with the same effort with which she tried to get her dream self to move her limbs, she tries to rouse her body out of sleep. Wake up, Isabelle, she tells herself, though now that she has entered into her own dream, she feels almost curious to see what will happen. She tries to hover in this midway state between dreaming and wakefulness, tries to live as both her dream self and an observer of that dream, but the dream’s spell has been broken. She is aware now of the blankets around her, the sound of passing traffic on the street, the murmur of the television in the other room. Still, though, as after a scary ride or bad news, she is shaken. Her heart beats hard; she tries to breathe evenly and deeply to calm herself.

She opens her eyes. She is on her side, facing her desk, and there in her desk chair is the same African from her dream. He is sitting in his loincloth with his legs crossed, picking at his teeth with the same knife he used to dig into her father’s skull. His teeth and the whites of his eyes glow startlingly bright; his skin is so black she can hardly make out his features, but when he sees that she is looking at him, he pulls the knife from his teeth and grins, his smile hovering white in his invisible face like a crescent moon, or the Cheshire Cat.