Alan’s first surprise was that he was not wet. Instead, he found himself laying face-first on hot, black sand. His second surprise was the smell – there was an overwhelming odor of sulfur, mixed with sun-cooked skunk roadkill. Pushing himself up on his hands and knees, and then to his feet, Alan was next surprised to find the sun was gone – the bright sky and sea breeze – and killer wave – had been replaced by swirling clouds of ash from horizon to horizon, with heat lightning providing all the light. Birds with wings that reflected silver in the flashes wheeled through the sky.

Evidently, he'd been out for some time – or, something?

The forest behind him was full of scraggly trees with rusty leaves and weeping red sap through cracks in the bark. The beach before him was empty except for hundreds of small stacks of stones, piled inexpertly, like his children liked to do. The sea beyond reflected the scarlet sky and shone like blood in the lightning flashes, but there were no waves in sight – just an endless stagnation and stillness in the water.

There was wind, though – it whistled through the trees like moans. Alan was from the Midwest and loved lightning storms, but he felt no kinship or familiarity with the weather here. The sound of distant footsteps behind him made him turn. Trudging through the trees was a creature, almost as tall as the wave had been. The being was humanoid, visibly male, with clay-ochre skin that was nearly camouflaged against the ash behind him. He carried a massive club, like a long iron cylinder, covered in rounded bumps, with a short handle at the end – tetsubo, Alan reminded himself – and then his eyes saw the horse head where a human face should have been. The being locked eyes with him, let out a shrieking laugh, and began to run towards him. For the second time, Alan fell toward the beach, this time backwards, and only tripping over his own fear.

Scenes of terror from his life flashed in front of Alan’s eyes. The sound of footsteps in his dormitory bedroom when the door was locked and everyone was asleep. A packet of pens getting knocked off a shelf when no one was around while he served as a missionary – and then, in the still empty room, a cup falling as well. The sense of a malevolent presence where no one visible was there. As he scooted backwards in terror and turned to run, Alan remembered the resolution to each of those frightening scenarios: he prayed, and the evil ceased. Alan’s faith had fallen off in recent years – Susan had been less enthusiastic about going to church than he had been, and getting the kids up and into church clothes every Sunday had been a fight he was only willing to go through with every month or two – but prayer was still reflexive. Always had been.

So Alan called out in his mind to God.

And the world cracked.

The space between Alan and the monster ripped open, revealing blinding white light behind it – such that Alan had to turn his head and put his hands in front of his eyes as they burned through his eyelids and the palms of his hands. The rent in reality extended to the ground below him and the air around him, and Alan felt himself slip through the gap in space so that he was falling once more.

Time passed. Alan wasn’t certain if he had remained conscious or not, but when he opened his eyes again, the light was gone, and Alan was still falling, tumbling end over end through the darkness in a substance that was thinner than water, but thicker than air. Breathing wasn’t possible, but neither did it seem necessary – at least, in all his flailing, Alan hadn’t yet needed to take a breath.

As Alan made another forward rotation, his right hand flew upwards, grasping for anything in this space – and he found his hand clasped about the wrist by another, steadying him and arresting his descent. Alan thought he heard words, but they were spoken so quietly and gently that he couldn’t understand them, and wasn’t sure if it was his imagination that he had heard something at all, before whatever it was deposited him gently onto solid ground.

Shafts of silver moonlight melted away the dark liquid all about him to reveal a bamboo forest at night. Alan was seated at the base of a copse of tall, straight trees. Mercifully, these all had dark, probably green leaves, though it was hard to tell in the moonlight. The sky was clear, and full of more stars than he had seen since visiting the family farm; the ash and lightning were all gone, as was the shrieking wind. To his right was the stone bell, shrine, and reflecting pool, exactly how it had been before the wave…

Susan! Elaine, Charles, James, Carrie! Panic rose in his throat. The monster and the red forest had distracted him for a moment, but now all the visceral terror was in him again, spiking his blood with adrenaline and sending him bolt upright, off the ground and running for the beach.

His sprint took him a few steps, until the angle from his higher elevation let him see the beach clearly, and then he stopped and fell to his knees. The sandy beach was entirely gone. In its place was a narrow stretch of pebbly gravel. Even here, on the ledge above the beach, it looked like the road had been completely swept away – all that was left was trail of hard-packed dirt.

Wait a minute. If the road was swept away, why is the dirt hard-packed? And why is everything dry?

Alan rose to his feet and advanced to the road. Looking up and down the road in both directions revealed that there was no asphalt anywhere, and that the streetlights and guardrails were also gone. Dark trees pressed in on the narrow track from every side – only here, at the clearing with the pagzebo, was there enough room for the moonlight to penetrate.

The trees had obviously been living there for years. Seven years for bamboo to sprout,­ the Wikipedia-part of his memory helpfully provided – unless it’s one of the faster growing varieties than the kind discussed in self-help seminars as a metaphor for “You’re making more progress than you think you are!” Yes, Alan had been to a number of those, too – aaaaaand he realized suddenly that he was panicking, and his mind was dissociating to try and hide from the fact that his family was gone, he had no idea where he was, and that he had probably just visited actual, honest-to-goodness Hell.

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Alan’s musings were disturbed by a blue-white glow that appeared down the forest trail. It bobbed and flickered like the lights from the lantern his parents used when they went camping as a family. Alan’s first impulse was to run towards the first sign of civilization that he had seen since arriving in this moonlit place. But something about the light gave him a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach, as the light got brighter, his mind filled with dread rather than hope. The copse of trees behind the shrine, near where he had first arrived, was dense enough to provide some cover, if he worked himself in a ways; a moment later, he was shimmying in amongst the bamboo until he was six or eight feet back into the trees behind the shrine, with a partial view of the road and pazeda? – No, that doesn’t work, I’ll have to come up with a better one – while hopefully remaining hidden himself.

The light kept growing in strength and proximity, and with it came the sounds of jangling bells and shouts, the choral hum of chanted song, wind and string instruments Alan could not identify, and the tread of many feet. The sound did not correspond to the strength of the light – whether due to the acoustics of the forest or something else, Alan couldn’t tell, but he heard the procession only a few seconds before it appeared.

It was a parade of monsters. First came the floating orbs of light – pulsing, blue-white and cold, drifting through the air down the path. Alan’s felt the dread descend upon him again, and he had to consciously stop himself from trying to move further back into the forest. A troop of upright, long-limbed turtles came next, carrying halberds – naginatas, said the voice in his head – which they clashed against their apparently metal chest-shells, in unison, once every three paces, with a sound like discordant cymbals. Foxes and bears danced and spun and whirled past, standing upright with their arms and paws outstretched, flames trailing their arms and movements in the place of a dancer’s clothing or a bird’s feathers. Four mudmen, chanting a long, droning mumble from features indistinct except for perfectly spherical eyes that looked like they were made of hematite, carried a palanquin bearing a giant rabbit in a kimono. She? – Alan thought the kimono was one of the feminine ones - was holding a fan, which was the only reason Alan could see what the creature was at all. Her fur was otherwise emitting such blinding white light that he could not look at her directly for more than a moment or two before his eyes hurt as if after a long day in the sun.

The four rabbits that came behind, by contrast, wore simpler clothing, more like a martial arts gi, and the light from the bright rabbit seemed to cause them to bleed shadows that trailed behind them as they hopped – actually hopped! – down the path in discrete bounces. The strangeness of that distracted him for a moment; Alan had seen plenty of real rabbits at and around the suburbs of his home. They ran like any other animal, stretching out their legs to move. These black-furred rabbits were upright on their hind legs, and bounced in rigid, vertical hops like they were trying to do an impression of a pogostick – sproing sproing sproing - down the path. They also had very prominent canines, which Alan was quite certain belonged exclusively on carnivores.

As the rabbits bounced past, the procession slowed and came to a stop as the next figure in the procession came even with the shrine. Whoever or whatever it was paused so that, by the time Alan looked over to it, his view was blocked by a tree, but he could see that it was riding an orange-scaled oriental dragon: sinuous body, half leonine / half-canine face with thick, fleshy whiskers, four limbs, and a long tail. The creature was hobbled with manacles and chains that connected each foot, and passed through rings to link to each other, while its face and mouth were clamped shut in a metal mask adorned only with a few slotted holes. The dragon gave a growl as robed legs dismounted the creature, and then a whimper as one of the fiery bears behind it slashed at the dragon’s hindquarters with a burning paw.

The robed creature apparently paid it no mind, as the fabric Alan could see approached the shrine without pausing or turning back. The kimono-robes had a beautiful red-blossom pattern and shone slightly in the bobbing lights. As the creature bowed, Alan saw that the being had two humanoid arms, but the neck and head curved up and forward into those of a fish. The wide mouth had four spiny whiskers drooping down from it, while the top of the head held a fin that pointed up and back, ending in a narrow point. Surprising, the curve of the creature’s neck extended back from its face, so the entire skull jutted backward as far as the catfish jaw jutted forward. As the catfish man? bowed to the shrine, his whiskers twitched, and he looked from side to side until his eyes locked onto those of Alan’s. There was a moment’s pause, and then the catfish man stood, his upper body obscured from Alan’s view again.

A deep, jolly voice said something in what sounded like it could have been Japanese – Alan was better at reading than speaking or listening, darn it! – and then the entire procession broke out into raucous laughter. Each creature laughed in accordance with its physiology, so the bears emitted a stuttering roar, the fox creatures gave a series of yipping bark, the rabbits emitted a sort of whinnying sound, and the turtles burped like frogs. The robed creature re-mounted the captured dragon, and the lights began pulsing magenta and orange instead of their former white-blue.

The procession started moving again, and Alan’s attention was drawn from the bewildering menagerie of creatures to the pink-orange fog that began seeping up out of the ground. When the haze came above the level of his shoes and socks, white-hot pain erupted across the skin of his lower legs. Anywhere covered only by pants and not by the tighter clothing was a mass of itching, burning discomfort. Alan grabbed at his ankles to feel what was happening with them in the shadowed dark of his unsuccessful bamboo hiding place, and felt blisters forming and popping under his hands, as if he had been wearing chafing clothing for hours in the rain. A moment later, his hands began blistering too.

“AAAAUGH!” Unable to hold the pain and with is hiding spot already compromised, Alan screamed and struggled back towards the shrine just as the lights and creatures of the procession faded away into nothing along with the echoes of his scream. Alan was left alone with the moonlight and the rising haze, and the blistering pain on his feet and hands and creeping up his arms. The fog was thicker where he had been hiding in the copse of trees, slightly behind and above the shrine, so Alan stumbled forward toward bell. The bamboo was close around him, and felt constricting in a way it hadn’t when he’d wormed his way in; the branches and undergrowth seemed to grasp at him, until it was only by dint of half-leaping, half shoving his way through the last few trees that he was able to propel himself out of their grasp.

Straight into the stone bell.

To his surprise, the monstrously heavy bell actually moved when he impacted it, ringing out with its sonorous clang.

Alan weighed far less than the bell, so he had not expected it to swing forward when he accidentally hurled himself against it. He expected far less for it to swing back at him and strike him with its full weight, slinging him back against the ground of the rise he had just descended and the lower banks of the bamboo trees. The collision nearly broke him, and the last thing he saw, writhing on the ground from the impact, was a cloud of the pink haze, low to the ground, spilling out towards him from the bamboo. It poured out over him like fog-machine smoke, covering his face, his hands, his body, everything.

The world descended into pain.