13.

When he was a child a particular dream came to Joshua, which left him much disturbed. For it seemed to him that he was wandering the house at night, and though it was past midnight in the densest blackness of the wee morning hours, and though all the house was dark, the house was yet full of crowds of people. They were all visitors here, and the place was so dark that shadows spread out everywhere around him; and yet against every wall and in every corner there were guests; it was a grand party. And he moved from room to room and hall to hall, till they began to all crowd about him and render him strange honors and worship, as if he were some great and important man, though he knew he was only a little boy. They would bow before him with their hands stretched out, though they were rich and powerful men, fine and luxurious women; and the hands reached up over him if only to touch the fringe of his shirt, as if any word from him were the grandest blessing. Finally he fled from them into the bathroom, where they came and knocked; and he went into the mirror, and thus entered the world that stands on the fringes of this world, the world just behind the walls, in the narrow spaces at the edges of what was real. And no matter where he traveled in the walls of the house he could not return into the land of the real, but stayed trapped in the narrow spaces at the edge and fringe of daylight and reality. He had entered the place of paintings and the other side of mirrors--he'd entered the flat world of two dimensions, and could not stretch himself out into the fullness of waking life and sunlight again; but found himself made of rectangles and squares, stuck behind rectangular walls and flat surfaces; stuffed into the false world, the world that lay on the other side of the TV set and the movie screen and the mirror. In this way he was able to travel the world over in a very short time, by means of the secret passageways that lay between France and Chile--the secret passageways behind the mirrors and walls. He gazed out at Japanese restaurants through the paintings on their walls, and as soon as he'd turned himself about he was in an English pub staring out through a wall or other flat surface. He realized that truth comes not by climbing to higher tiers of what was real, but by reducing oneself to the fundamentals; and that the power of the mystic comes not by his being of a higher reality, but by his practice at sinking into the lowest and most universal stuff of which reality was made.

And thus did he travel forever--and he saw a trail of blood, and followed after it. And the trail of blood grew wider and wider, smeared out on the floor in the labyrinth he found himself within; and he was certain to happen upon the corpse of the very world once he had found who it was that bled. With great anxiety he followed after the blood, so that he found himself running through dark woods on a moonless night, obsessed with the blood, desperate to find the one who was bleeding. He never found out whose blood that was, though the thought occurred to him upon waking that those who plumb the ocean's depths must be descending not deep into water, but deep into blood; for water is the blood of the earth.