#1 The gusting wind whips around the edges of your car as you drive, creating a whistling so penetrating that it nearly drowns out the radio, cranked up to nearly speaker-busting volume in your attempt to inhibit coherent thought.  But your efforts are futile -- the music, the wind, even the dark and narrow road before you fail to provide sufficient distraction, and the same mental images persist in forming in your mind's eye, those same impossible events playing over and over again in defiance of all your denial.  You see your best friend's foot slip, and his body topple and begin a fall which was certain to leave him bloody and bruised at the bottom of the long, hard staircase.  Then, just as clearly, you see his body stop, inexplicably, and hover in mid-fall, then with a jerk, right itself again to leave him standing, unhurt, beside you.  He had thanked you, and then went on, certain that you had reached out a hand and caught him, saving him from what at the very least would be an unpleasant experience.  You know differently, though -- no hand had touched him, but nonetheless, you know, somehow, that you had saved him, but with something other than your mundane arms.  You had remained silent about it, of course, but had thought of nothing else the rest of the day, both exhilarated and terrified by what you had done.  By dusk, you had felt an overpowering urge to escape, and so you had jumped in the car and driven off, no particular destination in mind, just knowing you had to get away.  And so you have come here, driving through a thick forest at nighttime, still propelled by an urge to run which you cannot explain, trying and failing to block out memories of something so impossible your rational mind rejects the very recollection of it. Looking around you, you suddenly realize that you have no idea of where you are, or even how you got here.  You had been driving away, but keeping to roads that you knew, near comforting and hopefully distracting evidences of normal, rational civilization; you cannot remember entering this thick forest, with trees so densely packed together that the sky is completely blotted out.  The dark they create is all-encompassing -- even your headlights seems strangely muted, barely illuminating the way ahead.  You don't even know of any such place near your home, and you certainly don't remember turning onto any road so abandoned and desolate.  It is as if this place had just sprang into existence between one thought and the next, sometime when you hadn't been paying attention, and somehow you had just accepted it at the time.  But now you just want out, but since you have no idea of how you got here, you have no idea of how to get back.  You feel one more layer of panic taking hold as you wonder what to do -- you don't even think you can turn the car around on a road this narrow, with the trees looming in so close in on either side as to make any direction save forward unthinkable.  So you drive on, as the darkness deepens and the forest thickens to the point where nothing is visible beyond the glow of your headlights just a few feet ahead. Finally, you see a light, a steady white pinprick ahead and off to the right.  You feel some hope arise, thinking that there might be some human habitation here, someone of which to ask directions back to the city.  Indeed, as you approach the light, the road turns to the right, leading you up a hill directly towards that spark of hope.  The source of the light is revealed to be a house, with one window lit, a house of vaguely archaic aspect, with marble columns and stone construction, overgrown with ivy, imposing and actually rather frightening, with suggestions of old ghosts and arcane powers, suggestions lent credibility by the increasingly active wind and the shadows of the tall trees around you.  You stop the car in front of the house, and look up at it, wondering.