Sally Yan shoved through dark trees that pushed back ever harder.

She had abandoned Lavinia, just like she’d abandoned KerriAnne to soul-searing emptiness.

She remembered her first glimpse of her soul mate wearing an old cloth nightgown while she, Sally, hid behind the drapes. Was it only luck that had made her break into Lavinia’s apartment and no other? She’d been so lonely when she found Lavinia. Now she felt that ancient dry-sand hopelessness again. As she struggled through dark fog, always alone, without love, without hope, her mind played back the horror that Helga had told them about this morning.

A long time later, she stopped, brain clotted with cobwebs. How long had she been struggling through this awful forest? More time had passed than should have. “Shit,” she said, too loud.

There was light ahead, a clearing. Through the grasping branches she saw with dazzled eyes a dim bulk which had the shape of the stone wall of her vision.

She was almost there. The dread evil was held from her now by only the thinnest membrane.

She reached into her pocket and clutched the pentagram tightly, remembering also the white stone cross on Skellig Michael. In her hand both the the Wiccan symbol and the healing symbol of Chinese medicine, in her memory the Christian symbol. She should have asked Lavinia for her Mogen David as well…

The last branch gave way with a sharp snap and she was in the clearing.

Light was around her, blessed light. The sun was too low to fall into this small clearing but just the patch of pale sky, rimmed as it was by stern trunks and clotted foliage, raised her spirits.

When her eyes adjusted, she saw the old ruined wall, choked with vines like grasping verdant snakes. The dead hiker would be on the other side.

She started to walk around the wall and stopped cold.

A dark opening yawned before her, and marble steps descended into gloom. The vision had not shown her this.

In the first part of her vision she’d been in a dark house with something horrible beneath the floors. Her heart hammered as she looked at that ominous stairway.

She avoided it at last, walking as quietly as possible around it and to the other side of the crumbling wall, stepping across jagged lumps of rubble and crumbs of broken glass.

A dense green patch of soft plants blocked her way, watered by some hidden spring. They tore and let out a shockingly strong prickly herbal scent under her hands. She flung the last handfuls aside.

And there he was, face white and pale, with a scraggly goatee, a couple of pimples and a mole that sprouted 4 long hairs. The face was not relaxed in death but scrunched, miserable.

That awful scream seemed to shake the air. Why didn’t it shiver the wall into dust?

She knelt, knees on dry rock, tongue just as dry against the roof of her mouth.

If she touched the dead man’s face she would understand – something. It was why she was here. And she was so alone.

As her hand brushed the hiker’s messy brown hair, the scream intensified.

Her hand made contact with clammy skin.

Instantly, she was as helplessly paralyzed as Lavinia had been her first day. Unable to move, she watched in horror as the hiker’s story unfolded…