As if on cue, a corpse appeared in the water, starboard. It floated face up, a few feet from the gondola. The eyes were ivory orbs, sightless. Skin was missing in places, revealing vellum-hued patches of skull.

I pointed out the body to Pita. She looked the other way, playing ostrich, believing if she didn’t acknowledge it, then it wouldn’t exist. But then another body appeared, then another. Soon they filled the canal for as far as I could see in the gloom. Heads and limbs bumped against the hull of the gondola as we cleaved through them, but instead of slowing down, we seemed to be speeding up, as if the dead were ushering us along.

I was telling Pita this couldn’t be the way to heaven, it was too morbid, too sad, when a thundering roar, like a waterfall, sounded in the distance. It was accompanied by a thick, wet mist, which wrapped around us, blinding us.

Pita began to scream. I turned to face the boatman, to tell him to stop, to take us back.

The boatman was a skeleton, its empty orbits gazing past me, its mouth fixed in a permanent rictus, its impossible arms pushing us forward with that long pole, rhythmically, inexorably.

Pita had stopped screaming, and it took me a moment to realize why. She had become a doll. Life-sized, but definitely a doll, molded from polymer clay, painted bright colors, with glass eyes and synthetic hair.

I tried to stand, to jump ship, to swim through the corpse-infested water to safety, yet I couldn’t move, and I wondered whether I was a doll too.

Suddenly the mist parted and a black disc on the surface of the water appeared. Doom filled me as I knew this was a one-way trip, I was seconds away from dying, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it from happening.

The gondola plunged over the edge of the void, into a bottomless abyss, and I was falling, falling, falling.

6

I woke up and knew I was still dreaming because now I was in the ER room of the Florida hospital where I’d been airlifted to by helicopter after the racing accident. My heart wasn’t beating. I was in cardiac arrest, effectively dead in both brain and body. Then I began to float, or my consciousness began to float, up toward the ceiling of the room, and then I was looking down, watching the medical staff work the defibrillator on my bare chest, watching them inject me with a cold saline solution to hopefully save my brain and organs, hearing their discursive conversations, hearing “Hotel California” on the stereo, hearing the lyrics about checking out but never leaving.