The drowsiness washed over his mind again, and the thought was carried away on the crest. He reached after them, but couldn't quite make it. There was but one last glimmer:
"What this world needs," Marc murmured, "is a good five ton kick in the...."
His eyes closed, and instantly his chest began to rise and fall with the deep, regular breathing of complete sleep.
A warm breeze dusted the edge of the curtain and set it rippling. Somewhere in the night, in the distance across the city, a siren wailed with inconsolable melancholy. A cat stalked the intersection, as silent and intense as his leopard-long shadow. In his narcotic slumbers Marc rolled a bit to one side and made a small whimpering sound as the adhesive pulled at his back. He lay back and was still.
But Marc had dismissed all conscious memory of his injury some time hence. In the same moment when he had fallen asleep he had left the room of the rippling curtain and unhappy echoes and had passed into the untroubled, all-black world of unconsciousness.
Now, however, he stirred again, and with that almost indiscernible movement, leaped from the darkness into lighter regions; into the secret, all-things-are-possible world of his subconscious—into the world where dreams can become more real than reality itself. Marc paused on the brink of this world for one tremulous moment, then plunged forward....
Brilliant light shot up to meet him so that he had to close his eyes against the glare. Then, slowly, he opened them again. Much like the sensation of stepping onto cool lawn after having walked barefoot on scorching concrete, pain was swiftly followed by almost unbearable pleasure.
Before Marc's gaze a soft greenness stretched away from him into graceful rising slopes and cool shadowed hollows—artfully like a display of green velvet in a shop window. On the rise of the most distant knoll stretched a forest of strange trees which held at once a cathedral of stateliness and a feathery pliability. Weaving slightly with the breeze they were mindful of nothing so much as a handful of royal plumes stuck into the earth at the whim of a bemused child. The Valley of The Subconscious Mind....
Marc knew instantly where he was; he'd been there often enough before. He glanced around in search of some movement, some flash of animated color. But there was nothing. He started up the rise, stretching his long legs purposefully before him. Surely she would be there, probably among the trees.