Moving clear of the rows of headstones, he turned and saw a figure, glowing pale blue like himself, moving toward him from a distance of five or six rows. Owen ran, but he found that running in the night world was like running on the moon. Because his spirit form was lighter, each thrust of the leg shot you way up but not necessarily very far forward. Owen leaped house high but was slowed in his escape. The other glowing figure caught up and told him to stop. When he floated slowly down from on high, the figure made to take his hand to ground him, but the hand passed right through his.

She laughed as he made contact with the ground and bounced up a foot and a half.

“Who are you?” asked Owen, finally settling and turning to see her. He could tell it was a woman through the pale blue glow. She wore a robe and a nightgown like Sleeping Beauty in the mural but with a much shorter hem and a lace collar instead of décolletage. Her hair was short, and he couldn’t tell because of its incandescence what color it would be in the waking world.

“I’m a sleeper like you,” she said. And in that instant, he was called back, seemingly yanked by the collar, all the way across the park and back up his street, into his bed.

At breakfast the next morning, instead of his usual contemplation of the rescue of Sleeping Beauty, he tried to recall the face of the woman he met in the night world. Another person having an out-of-body experience? He’d never considered the possibility. She called herself a “sleeper.” He wondered how many sleepers there were in the area, and if she might have recognized him from the library. On one hand, he found it wondrous that sleeping people could shed their corporeal selves and rise up to meet as spirits or phantoms in the real world. On the other hand, the thought carried a tinge of disappointment in that he’d treasured the quiet solitude of the night world.