“Across the river; over the bridge
Into the woods; and turn around.”

The words came back to me easily. Like my name and address, a kind of automatic recall. I had learned them… somewhere. Somewhere that was not here.

In front of me was a river called the Hyades: wide, slow, and electric-blue. It could have been miles deep for all that I could see into it; the white pebbled banks vanished underneath the eddies of the current. There could be nothing—or anything—beneath that surface. I knew that I would not be swimming across. It stretched into the horizon however I looked; no getting around it, either.
Luckily, there was a bridge. It wasn’t until that thought occurred to me that I noticed it—appearing out of the corner of my eye like it had stood there for years. Even then, it looked like it might break and vanish if I took my eye off it.

It was made of webs of ropes stretching taut across the Hyades; two posts a side held a series of planks flat just feet above the current and curving rope rails on each side. It looked like the kind of bridge that would collapse after being crossed halfway, but only if you were running away from monsters or demons or other such things.

When I took my first step across it I could feel the timbers shifting beneath my feet and ropes stretching in my hands, but without a single creak or groan from either. I could feel the rough vibrations of the ropes rubbing against each other and I may have imagined their sound then, but at least I knew the softer sounds of the river were real. As I neared the middle of the bridge I felt as though the bottom planks must have been brushing against the water’s edge from the give of the ropes, but I did not look down to see it myself. Maybe if I didn’t see the ripples, nothing else would, either.

There was a forest on the opposite bank. This, at least, was always apparent to me. The whitewashed pebbles thinned out from the shore, and made up for their lack of numbers in size. I weaved around a few of the larger rocks reaching nearly to my knees as I began to make my inside.

Everything was, to some extent, covered in moss. Luckily, the leaves that fell along the path I made were not included, leaving my footing secure. Some sides of the trees had thicker, more vibrant coverings than others; I think North would have been in that direction, not that I knew if anything in particular would be found there.

After a while, I noticed the soft sounds of the river had been replaced by the rasping of leaves rubbing against each other and crunching underfoot. I turned around. There was a door.

It had a plain wooden frame, holding a plain wooden door. The color, I imagined, might have been the same ruddy brown as the insides of the trees around me. The knob was where I would have expected it to be, and the lack of visible hinges implied it would swing open away from me. I didn’t feel any particular urge to walk around it and check.

The forest was growing dim; a sun I hadn’t looked up to see was setting and setting. I reached out to grasp the handle, and it responded with a rattle saying that it was locked from the other side.

The world grew darker and darker and as I drew my hand back I heard that inviting little click that I wouldn’t by stopped by that door a second time, but even as I reached back the door was fading into an indiscriminate blackness, and my hand kept reaching and reaching
and reaching into thin air as I woke up. And again, I was left with some parting words that stayed fresh in my mind for hours after.

“Next time.”