Anon, to sudden silence won,
In fancy they pursue
The dream-child moving through a land
Of wonders wild and new,
In friendly chat with bird or beast
And half believe it true.
-Lewis Carroll

Descending

Fighting to breathe, she pushed between the passengers that filled the center aisle of the train. Part of her wished she could disappear into their mass and hide forever, but she had to keep moving.  

The riders seemed indifferent to her need for escape, saw the panicked girl as little more than a curiosity.  Others took advantage.  Random hands groped at her as she pressed through the crowd, and she elbowed one man whose daring fingers raked across her chest.  Everyone smelled sour.  

She stomped down hard on the foot of a tattooed man who tried to purposely block her way.  A cooing old lady ran her fingers through her long hair as she slipped by, patted her shoulder.  Some leered or shouted at her, but she pushed through them all, hardly able to hold onto her backpack.  She had no idea if the scarecrows still chased her, but knew she had to keep moving just in case.    

Finally reaching the end of the train car, she squeezed through two dilapidated people leaning against the door.  She yanked down on the door handle as they backed away.  Wind roared into her face as the door slid aside. She stepped out onto the tiny platform between the subway cars.  As soon as she let go of the handle, the door crashed shut behind her, and she dropped down fast, thinking the sound was a gunshot.

As the train glided through underground night, she crouched beneath the window, clinging onto the door handle that led to the next car, not knowing if she should go forward or take her chances and go back.  

The roaring wind stole her breath and tried to push her off balance.  The backpack she carried, though not large, didn’t help matters.  Her free hand pressed against the door’s metal surface to steady herself from falling.  Ahead was the last section of the train, and she realized she was heading deeper into the trap.  

She pressed her cheek against the door.  Blocked from the wind, her lungs found a safe space to breathe.  Her pursuers would never give up until she was dead.  She forced herself to settle down, tried to think.  

The ceiling of the tunnel raced above in a blur.  She wondered if she should just stay hidden between the subway cars, wait for a place to hop off.  The screeching wind stole away any promise of safety.  The train moved too fast to chance it.  With every sharp turn, the platform shifted beneath her.  

She had to keep moving.  

Crouching still, she held tight to the door handle.  Light flickered from the window that showed into the next car.  The chain railings on each side of the platform jerked and shuddered.  She felt the sensation of knives under her ribs. At once she wanted to jump off, leap over the side into the dark space between the train and the wall.  

The release would be instant.  Her body would be chiseled to bits, and she would never again have to worry about running.  

But that would be too simple.  The Hunter had no desire to take her down so easily, she knew, not after his months of prodding her onward, wearing her down day by day, moment by moment. The chasing scarecrows were catching up.  She had already run through six other cars trying to flee from them, although sensed they were playing with her now, taking their time since she had no place to go.    

Trapped like this, she recognized she only had herself to blame.  Hours before, back at the train station, if she had not been so fascinated at seeing that oddly dressed man she would not be in her current situation.  The man in white almost knocked her down as he bounded through the station toward one of the subway terminals, and he piqued her interest beyond curiosity.  She noticed as he rushed past her that he clutched an antique pocket-watch, so she couldn’t help but follow him, transfixed, thinking he held for her some hidden purpose.  

This was the way she had been traveling for months, allowing random moments or feelings or people to sweep her up into a last-minute decision that dragged her to places unknown.  In the end, they always seemed the right places.  The man she followed seemed so odd, dressed like he lived in another century entirely.  

Stranger still, his aura shimmered white like his clothes, made him look fuzzy or furry, and she realized that, no matter how panicked his behavior because he might miss his train, he was harmless.  She hurried to follow him for as long as she could and nearly lost him in the crowded terminal.  

Not paying much attention to where she was going, and quite by accident, she stepped onto a random train right before its doors slid shut, never considering when she would get out again, not even knowing where she was going.  By then she had utterly lost sight of the man with the pocket watch and white waistcoat.

The train raced through the underground without a hint of slowing.  It seemed to be falling deeper into the earth.  She had to find a place to hide.  Still clutching the door handle for balance, her other hand gripped the shoulder strap of her tattered backpack that contained her whole life.  She lifted her head to chance a look through the flickering window into the next section.  

The shock of her reflected face in the glass startled her.  A glance backward into where she had come showed only crowded bodies pressed against the door.  The passengers swayed with the same rhythm as the train.  No sight of her tormentors.  

She turned and in a burst of effort yanked the handle and slid aside the door, then stumbled into the last train car.  The roaring wind choked out as the door slammed shut at her back.

She hoped that maybe the scarecrow gang had given up on her, had found some other stranger to torture.  She immediately hated herself for thinking that and wished her fate upon no one.  

She again had to thrust her way between the packed bodies as she inched down the crowded aisle.  These new passengers paid her no heed, were less hostile, and swallowed her into their faceless mass.  This crowd seemed older, not teenagers like herself, and she guessed she didn’t appear very threatening to them.  

Wait, there!  

She saw the strange man dressed in the white waistcoat, standing at the far end of the train.  While everyone else held an aura of sullen indifference, his energy still glowed fuzzy white.  

Am I still supposed to follow him, she wondered.  But she was more terrified of those who were searching for her.  Again she just wanted to disappear, knowing she had to at least try to hide.  

An opening revealed itself on one of the bench seats lining the walls, and she squeezed her body between two travelers who thankfully slid over as best as they could to give her room.  The back of her head knocked against the window as the train lurched.  She dropped her backpack to her feet and unzipped the top flap, failing to find the water pouch she thought she had. 

She hoped this older crowd would help conceal her. Maybe it’s no use.  They were coming.  No matter what city, no matter what train, boat, or bus she rode, they would always be coming.  

For months now, without a plan and following the random signs, she had been chased by a patchwork of varying mobs—-cops, gangs, EFC inquisitors, pushers, street folk, militia, and now this gang of . . . scarecrows was the only way she could describe them—-all of them pushing her, scraping at her, prodding her to some end.  She knew the Hunter was using all of these varying, vicious bands to chase her to some unknown place where she must rise and take her stand against . . . something.  She wasn’t even sure what it was.  

Something.  But I’m not ready, I’m not ready, she kept telling herself as she tried to slow her breathing.  But she was still falling fast and she knew it.  

She regretted ever having challenged the Hunter those many months ago, and now she was caught up in his Wild Hunt, hounds barking close at her heels as the arrows of fate sought to take her down.  She could scarcely breathe.

Most of the standing riders swayed and jerked as though their limbs hung broken beneath their clothes.  Some wore scarves as face masks that were pulled up to their eyeballs.  Months of trampled garbage filled the center aisle.  

She leaned forward and tried to catch another glimpse of the man she had followed onto the train, but this caused her backpack to tip open and spill half its contents in the aisle.  The edge of her sketchpad slid to her feet.  

She reached down and pulled it up before it was stepped on, and then scooped the other items back into the pack, careful not to scoop up any garbage.  A quick survey of the trash didn’t reveal any faded paper she could add to the clipped-together sheets she had assembled.  Hugging the sketchpad safe to her chest, she realized exactly how she should make her escape.  

Her scalp tingled in anticipation, a subtle promise of future memory.  

Ignore it, she demanded of herself.  Disappear.  Like you used to.  She pulled a purple crayon from the sketchpad’s binding.  Even buried in this crowded train, she felt stripped and alone.  Who is that strange man?  It was no use, she knew.  The world was devoid of rescue.  It only contained those who chased and groped and pushed.  

Clutching her sketchpad, she remembered how back at the compound she’d always find comfort and disappear into her drawings, block out the world.  In her travels, she collected discarded paper if it was white or faded enough to add to the pages of her book, and everything had been clipped together.  

Across the aisle, seeing through a rare gap and over the heads of a sleeping man and a babbling old woman, she caught sight of her reflection in the black glass.  This time she would not let it shock her.  She stared it down. Just draw.

As she sketched with the crayon she blocked out the world.  Her memory snagged on the image of the last safe face she had seen months and months ago.  Anwyn’s curling red hair and warm smile drifted into memory’s reach.  After she had run away from the foster home, after the fires had burned the compound into black bones, she had been lucky to find people like Anwyn to take her in.  She had been lucky, too, to find someone who could nurse her back to physical and emotional health, and Anwyn had become both her friend and tutor in the Old Ways she was ripe to understand.  She had learned so much in so little time.

Anwyn had once told her “The Goddess is everywhere,” and it was to find this unknown, fleeting figure that she had taken flight from the woman’s safe refuge.  But after all the traveling that quickly grew into her being chased and ever on the run, she now found herself empty, carved from the inside out as she realized she had found nothing, no one, no Great Spirit of Nature, no Goddess, no names that any such figure had worn in the past.  Brighid, Danu, Isis, Astarte, Sophia, Hekate, Iyatiku, Ajysyst, Damkina, and the hundreds of other masks that had been memorized, all were absent from this world of crooked kingdoms and demons of disease.  

If such a great spirit-soul of infinite Woman had even really existed, she understood now that such a spirit must have fled from this bruised and bloody world.  She winced.  Anwyn would be disgraced to hear her think such things.

Wanting nothing more than to believe the Great Mother could still be found, she looked around at the crowding faces.  People stared at the ground or held their eyes closed as if pretending to sleep, oblivious to the suffocation.  They were the dead, and the train was a communal coffin.  She had been trapped in the train for hours now.  Everything had been crowded but calm until the scarecrows boarded at the most recent stop.  Her head swayed in a slicing rhythm.  

Just draw.  The Goddess is everywhere?  The Bright Spirit, the Lady of the Wild Green?  With sudden clarity, the young artist understood that if she were ever to glimpse the sacred in the world around her, she would first need to find it within herself.  

The train’s humidity soured her mouth with a taste of rust.  The low ceiling buried her alive.  Goddess . . . Phantom Queen . . .  Her mind mechanically rifled through more names and correspondences that meant nothing to her now.  Find it within.  Yet turning within she found only a gnawing black.  Faith and belief peeled away in dark layers, fell as slivers to the floor. 

A tear fell upon her wrist as she wildly sketched, hand moving without mind. Another paper face succumbed to frustration and she tore it from the wire binding, let it go, and watched it drift to the floor to be trampled with the other garbage.  She was wasting precious paper, but she didn’t care.  Soon she would need to find something new to draw on.  And the crayon was barely a nub.  

Across the aisle, floating outside the train’s window, she saw the face of a ghost too young to have been so trapped.  Dripping moisture ate at the skin.  Wide eyes peered through matted bangs.  Homeless, filthy, starving . . . A defiant smile then creased the ghost’s lips, the Dream Child daring her to fully awaken.  

And in that instant, the artist felt that her reflection held more substance, more spirit than she would ever possess in the real world.  She wondered how much longer before the scarecrows came and took her.  Urgency pulsed through her like an electric hunger.  

Snapping from her thoughts, she was alerted to the awful presence of the man sitting beside her.  He smelled like rot, leering into his lap.  She knew she shouldn’t trust him.  Despite her nerves, she was still able to make out the dull ochre of his aura, the ethereal coloring that surrounded his body like a glowing shroud.  She recognized in that light hidden from everyone else that a deep sickness crawled inside the man.  The other faceless people offered her nothing, no distinct features with which she could judge them friend or foe.  

Her panic began to surge.  They were coming.

She looked down to the page in her lap, seeking release.  Purple eyes emerged from the paper as she copied them from the Dream Child that stared at her from across the aisle.  

The sketchpad lurched atop her knees as the train unexpectedly shook up and down, caught in a wake of turbulence on its mag-lev stream.  Again, a tingle of numbness drifted across her mind, a warning of danger.  Ignoring it was futile.  She did not like these feelings, did not ask for them, did not want them.  The skin of the paper face dripped like the reflection it copied from the window.  The mournful eyes pulled her under, deeper into the hollow.  

With a loud crash, the door at the end of the aisle flung open.  A roar of wind heralded the new arrivals.  Five young men burst through from the train’s previous section.  

The crowd split open for them, bodies falling away toward the seats to clear a path.  The scarecrows bounded down the long aisle.  Their shrieks and laughter drowned out the passengers’ cries and shouts.  

They slowed down, demanded food from everyone they passed, dropping into a heavy pillowcase small packs of nutro-bars and the occasional pouch of drinking water.  One member of the gang smacked an old man in the back of the head, then pulled away a coat that had sat neatly folded upon the man’s lap.  The youth slid into the oversized trench as the old man looked away, his eyes wet.  The artist’s heart burned to see the old man so upset and helpless.

The face of one of the newcomers had been intentionally deformed, his flesh modified into slivers of ears and mangled lips.  He had an orange complexion.  She then realized that large, triangle-shaped wedges had been cut out from his lips, transforming his face into the appearance of a jack-o’-lantern.  As if sensing her beacon of attention from ten yards away, the mutilated man flashed a frenzied gaze, then twisted his pumpkin mouth into a grin.

He screamed over his howling counterparts, spit leaking from carved lips, “My Shadow boys!  I’ve finally found her, she who will be our new Pixie Princess in the games tonight!  Take your time.  She can’t fly far!”

“Princess . . .  Princess . . . ” the others laughed and chanted while robbing all the passengers of food, valuables, and any weapons they dared to conceal.

Princess?  Games?  She had no idea what they were talking about, wished she could hide forever.