The grasses thinned, and rusty cans began replacing marsh rats. A real rat moved across the track in front of me. It looked at Mitch as though daring him to fight, but the dog ignored it. He was whining constantly now, worried, and he stepped up the pace, urging me forward with his heavy head when he thought I was lagging.

I didn’t notice when we left the marsh, but suddenly we were picking our way through a dump. Cans, plastic bags, the white lips of six-pack holders, raggedy clothes, car seats, things I didn’t want to recognize, all mashed under-foot by the truck whose tracks we were following. I tripped on a tire, but kept slogging forward.

The refuse sort of ended at a barbed-wire fence, but the truck had been driven straight at the fence, and an eight-foot section had come loose. Mitch was sniffing at a fragment of crimson stuck to the barbs, whining and barking at me. I went to inspect it. It was new, new to the area, I mean, because the color was still so fresh. Every other piece of cloth had turned a dirty gray. I tried to feel it, but my swollen fingers were too cracked to tell anything.

“It looks like silk,” I said to Mitch. “Josie doesn’t wear silk, so what is it, boy?”

He picked his way across the sagging piece of fence, and I went after him. When we were clear of the fence, Mitch started to run. When I didn’t keep up with him, he came back to nip me in the calf. Dehydrated, hungry, frozen, I ran with him across a paved road, up a steep hill, onto a plateau covered in dead grass that was springy and flat underfoot. Maybe I had fallen asleep again, because it was too much like a fairy tale, where you go through the demon-filled woods and come to a magical castle—at least, the grounds to the magical castle.

I had a stitch in my side and black spots dancing in front of my eyes, which I kept confusing with Mitch. Only his hoarse bark kept me going in the right direction, or, at least, the direction he was headed. I was floating now, the turf a yard or more below my feet. I could fly, it was the magic of the fairy castle, one mud-heavy foot leaving the ground, the other leaping behind it, I only had to move my arms a little, and I catapulted headfirst down the hill, rolling over and over until I was almost lying in a lake.

A giant hound appeared, the familiar of the witch whose castle I’d invaded. He grabbed my coat sleeve and tried to pull me along the ground, but he couldn’t move me. He bit my arm and I sat up.