I walked southwest of Gravenhurst through unmarked forests. If Dr. Best was making more than idle threats, let that hunter have to navigate these woods and deal with the same challengers I had faced, and surely would face. The Land of No Trees and the Land of All the Trees didn’t seem to be on great terms, so let there be more bickering with me in the middle.

Loosely aiming for a town on the map called Coldwater for no particular reason, I found that the next two nights showed me that the summer was dying fast. I was stepping on the first few fallen leaves that would eventually be down in heaps, and the summer’s heat vanished when the sun fled west. Once my enhanced hearing blasted me with the overhead cries of geese honking their way south.

During the days of sleep I was doing work with my inner army … and my flying head.

Helen, Simon, Allan, Karl and Nancy were never sleeping, though they still wanted to have ‘off’ time. I demanded that they rotate to keep at least one person on watch from a vantage point that looked in. This psychic construction in my dreams was mostly Simon’s work, the frame of a tower that was getting stronger and taller, its top aiming a searchlight out into the murky dark jungles where something nasty was hiding. A line of barbed wire encircled a clear perimeter of ‘explored mind’, and right now Allan and Chester were clearing forest with a machete, systematically removing hiding spots, blocking corridors of rock and earth with trees or stones.

Karl was starting up a wall behind the barbed wire perimeter, built with insulation against a strong northern winter. His ‘metaphor’ for grasping the whole surreal situation was more in line with his life experience – he needed to make a house resistant against the elements, from weather to termites.

Nancy was walking around with a clipboard most of the time, reminding people of what needed to be done, reminding them what the others were doing to make sure it all fit properly. I sensed a little annoyance toward her from Allan and Karl, though Chester made Allan much more tolerant.

Helen, being in there the longest, had made herself an inner sanctum that was basically a labyrinthine garden. Every time I dreamed she was borrowing some of my dream to lucidly construct a little more, adding new species and fountains and bird feeders and rock art, and Simon had incorporated this garden into his plans should an intruder get inside the perimeter. Lured into the garden where they would fall back to, the intruder would find themselves in a maze of choke points and kill zones. Helen didn’t like adding trap doors and hidden tunnels to her garden, but she was being mostly cooperative, passively dismissing most of this as ‘Home Alone nonsense’.

When I wanted to leave their little enclave I could ‘fly’ as a disembodied head again, roaming the outer, physical world for several kilometers, poking around. This ESP seemed to be a version of my waking psionic sense with greater range that I could only use while motionless, though the flight controls were difficult. While some controlled loops and patrols were possible there was a line on the map where any controlled flying fell apart and my remote vision basically randomized.

Nancy suspected that it was the Niagara Escarpment, remembering a map from so many years ago. If this was one of Raven’s ‘other obstacles’ that could bewilder vampiric ESP then it would also give me some cover from any vampires searching for me on the other side, which was a nice populated hunk of Ontario and the US. I would have to think twice about crossing it.

But I got some important intel regardless. There were creatures in Lake Simcoe that hooted and waved and cursed at my head as I flew by, little figures below the waves that would make the entire body of water verboten for my kind. And though it was on the other side of the Escarpment I concluded that the Greenock Swamp Wetlands were also out of bounds. They were guarded by a huge and green Bigfoot-like swamp thing with red eyes that followed me as I buzzed overhead like a half-dead fly.

To the northwest, somewhere deep in Lake Huron, was a massive but distant source of pain – the kind that I could get in tiny amounts from a maple or cherry tree. It was faint but constant, like the field of the north pole. Calabogie mountain in the northeast was also potent enough to be just detectable as a slight stinging of the dreaming eyes across many miles. I could not judge the power of individual houses of worship yet, picking up only these gargantuan signals of spiritual might.

Able to think with greater clarity in the hold of the dream, I thought that I could address the problem with Karl Ruckert and the landscaper I had tried to euthanize. If I could boost the range of my psychic ear to the point where it took days for me to reach a target that would give me more time to authenticate their willingness to die.

The nights were for hunting, not bothering with that damn ring. I’m not sure if there are any guardians or monstrous lurkers in the wilderness between Coldwater and Gravenhurst, but if so I was now tough enough to be worth leaving alone.