The stone dust is settling onto the grass of the graveyard, the leather of her shoes. She almost tries hitting another stone just out of curiosity, to see if it'll disintegrate, too, but stops herself in time. Instead Willow brushes the dust off her feet, and after one last look at the distant, shaking sky, she chooses a direction at random and starts walking, out to the dark band of the horizon, into the black and featureless night.
And it's weird because things get darker, actually darker, like the way on a foggy day you look down the street and you can't see the end of the block at all. And once you walk down there the air is just as thin and clear as usual-- it's where you just were that's now shrouded in mist. But it's not happening the way it ought to, the way it should be happening, as she's walking forward the air in front of her is getting *thicker*, she'd swear it, it's practically inky with blackness, and it's getting harder to breathe. The grass squishes under her feet less and less audibly until it's not there at all. When she looks behind her half-expecting the graveyard to be the one bright spot in a dark and flat landscape, a tiny suspended tableau of spinning stars and white gravestones, it's gone. There's nothing there, even now, and Willow feels its absence like a sudden, ridiculous stab of pain in the chest. Or is that the effort of trying to breathe now? Willow thinks she's stopped walking but she can't be entirely sure. It feels like something's still pushing her forwards, and she's starting to cough on the air, it's getting dense and practically oily, like the noxious smoke from a refinery plant; and she drops her head and she's choking, and for one endless, unpleasant moment she's not drawing any breath in at all, it's just tightness in her throat, and that's the second before Willow remembers that this is just a dream.
And in dreams you don't need to breathe. Is that right? Professor Walsh talked about dreams, when-- it must have been years ago. What did Willow's lecture notes say? She can see, in her mind, the pages of neat handwriting in colored pens, but the words fuzz and disappear into the elusiveness of memory. She'd have to remember it on her own. Dreams. Transcendation onto a different plane. (Transubstantiation? No, that's Christianity.) Vampires have dreams, right? They can access it; and they don't need to breathe. But they don't breathe while awake, either. Maybe dreams are just the exploration of an internal reality, in which case the features of the everyday body wouldn't be transcended but, rather, exaggerated. The way you sometimes can walk in dreams but you can't walk, you're wobbling, weakened, falling over, and maybe that's because it's not your muscles actually moving but rather the muscle memory working in your brain, oh, the little map your brain has of your own body, what is it called, she read an article somewhere. But--
Dreams. Breathe. Dreams. It's a full minute before she realizes that she *is* pulling in breath, fast and greedy, lungs uncramping to take the air into her chest. Willow looks up cautiously and the scenery slams back down around her: empty parking lot, alley leading to the street, asphalt cold and solid through her jeans. It's the lot behind the haircutter's place, half a block away from the Magic Box. She knows where she is now.
Willow gets to her feet, slowly, and takes a step in the direction of the Magic Box. For a moment it looks as though nothing is wrong, and then the pavement cracks and bends like thin sheeted metal under her feet. She
... and that's still all I have at the moment.