The realization didn't bother her. Gillian felt no connection to the huddled thing in the snow. She didn't belong to it anymore.
With a mental shrug, she turned away--and she was in a tunnel.
A huge dark place, with the feeling of being vastly complicated somehow. As if space here were folded or twisted-and maybe time, too.
She was rushing through it, flying. Points of light were whizzing by-who could tell how far away in the darkness?
Oh, God, Gillian thought. It's the tunnel. This is happening. Right now. To me.
I'm really dead.
And going at warp speed.
Weirder than being dead was being dead with a sense of humor.
Contradictions . . . this felt so real, more real than anything that had ever happened while she was alive.
But at the same time, she had a strange sense of unreality. The edges of her self were blurred, as if somehow she were a part of the tunnel and the lights and the motion. She didn't have a distinct body anymore.
Could this all be happening in my head?
With that, for the first time, she felt frightened. Things in her head . . . could be scary. What if she ran into her nightmares, the very things that her subconscious knew terrified her most?
That was when she realized she had no control over where she was going.
And the tunnel had changed. There was a bright light up ahead.
It wasn't blue-white, as she would have expected from movies. It was pale gold, blurred as if she were seeing it through frosty glass, but still unbelievably brilliant.