The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville Page A

will bring it back to him. And then the shout turns into a scream. But he is too far, too far.…
    Olivier was shaking me by the shoulders. I could see light coming through the high windows of my dungeon, which meant that some of the snow covering the windows had melted. Just how late in the day was it? My head was pounding. Why was Olivier shaking me up and down?
    “Are you all right?” he said when he saw my eyes were open. He looked frightened. “You were screaming, you know. I heard it all the way upstairs. The little argonaut crawled under my refrigerator when he heard you.”
    “Screaming?” I said. “It was just a dream. I haven’t had it in years. Besides—it didn’t really happen that way.”
    “Happen what way?” said Olivier, looking puzzled.
    But then it suddenly dawned on me that Sam was really dead. The only way I could see him again was in a dream, so even if the dream was an incorrect memory, that was all I had. Shit. I felt as if I’d been kicked in the head by the mule of karma.
    “The pancake batter’s all ready,” Olivier told me. “I’m making you buttermilk flapjacks, with gallons of chicory coffee and some of those cute, disgusting little pig sausages—enough cholesterol to plug your pipes permanently—and just for good measure, eggs over tenderly—”
    “Over easy,” I corrected Olivier’s Yankee slang, a pastiche of patois . “Exactly what time is it, landlord?”
    “Time for brunch, not breakfast,” said Olivier. “I waited to give you a ride to work. I’m afraid that your car has been buried by the snowplow.”
    I decided to put on some warm clothes and thick gloves after brunch and dig out my car before checking in for work. I needed physical exercise after two days of driving. And sometimes, after a melt like this one, we’d have a deep freeze, which would mean a month of hacking at automobile glace. But also, I needed the time to be alone, to make the mental transition from funeral to factory.
    So I dragged out my “ghetto blaster” portable radio and took it outside where, surrounded by sparkly snow dunes and icicle-tinseled houses, I hand-dug the slush from my little Honda to the rhythm of Bob Seger cranking out The Fire Down Below . And I thought about the various kinds of tissues we choose from which to weave our dreams and our realities.
    The truth was, I never had found Sam in those woods, he had found me. In the real story—not the dream—I got up above timber-line, where the air was too thin for trees to survive and where no animal, so they say, ever chooses to sleep. There was a full moon and I stood atop a rock, bathed in the bright white light. The sun had long gone, and the sky was a purple-black spangled with stars. Thick, dark forest circled me below on every side.
    I don’t think I’ve ever known terror like that, standing alone in that milky white light, staring up at the whole universe. I was too terrified to remember my pangs of hunger. Too terrified to cry. I have no idea how long I stood unable to move, knowing that—whatever the danger to a small animal like me, being exposed and defenseless up here—any move I made would be a move closer to that black and impenetrable forest full of night sounds from which I’d just escaped.
    Then he came through the wood, in the dead of night, to find me. At first, when I saw a movement at the forest fringe, I backed away in fear. But when I saw the flash of Sam’s white buckskins, I raced across the vast space and threw myself into his arms and wept with relief.
    “Okay, hotshot,” Sam said, pulling me away to look at me with eyes turned a silvery grey by the moonlight. “You can tell me later what gave you the crazy idea to follow me like that. You were lucky I doubled back on my own trail and found your tracks. But I hope you realize you’ve interrupted my very important meeting tonight with the totem spirits. And here you are, above timberline, where I thought I taught you never to go at night.