in the real world, the waking world, i wake up coughing & choking on lungs filled with mucous.
drifting off again. the children of the world of the dead are feral, & live in the woods. there is a division among them. the followers of one boy, lets call him ralph- well, they use magic to find water, beams of red like a laser pointer in smoke leading them there. the other faction, headed up by a boy we'll call jack, uses magic to make water bubble up from the ground. i check the water that jack's method makes, & using the wraithly ability to touch the smallest of things, i grab what looks like a very minature saturn, which i realize is a decaying, radioactive atom. both factions insist that magic only be used for water.
i decide to go down under ground, to find the source of the radiation, & the children follow me out of curiosity. the doctor comes with me, despite my teasing her. the extensive caverns react to thought, showing its manner & form; as the children walk through the caves, absolutely nothing happens, but where i stand, the walls glow house blue & shape themselves into vaulted cathedrals. where the doctor is, there is also that blue, but everything looks like pillars of salt. we joke about the thoughts of thoughts making our thoughts visible, which, thinking, become visible themselves, & eventually we just end up saying "thoughts, thoughts, thoughts" over & over, laughing.
below ground is a museum, strange & filled with relics of war, vials of anthrax. one of the vials, labeled gammathrax, is open, tampered with. in a glass case is the uniform of the general from the prophecy, whom i tell the children was the greatest leader the world ever knew. the doctor is angry at me, so i apologise for trying to get a rise out of her. she thinks i have been tampering with these things, that that is the real reason i came down here. also missing are the sheriff's spurs.
