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There was something different about the stars that night that's one of the few things I can clearly remember about that cold winter evening so many years ago. Everything else about that experience seems so surreal now, so dreamlike, and I often question if any of the strange things I remember actually happened.

I have strange memories of lying on my back in the snow and staring upward into the night, watching curiously as those strange, luminous stars winked and twinkled in the velvet blackness of the night sky. I had a hazy recollection that it had been snowing and that it should still be snowing, but for some strange reason the sky had suddenly cleared above me. I just lay there in the snow, not really feeling the cold anymore, my numb mind trying to figure out just what exactly had happened and what was still happening. Those odd stars pulsated in the dark and captivated my attention, drawing my mind away to a place where all was warm and fuzzy and good. For some strange reason I resisted their pull.

The clink and ping of cooling metal had faded away some time ago and I couldn't quite remember how long I had been lying there. Had there been a fire? I thought I could recall a flickering orange light that cast strange shadows over the snow. A brief memory of acrid smoke stinging nose and eyes drifted through my mind before fading into nothingness. Thinking was so damned difficult. The cold had stolen away nearly all of my body heat and with that precious heat had gone most of my mind. All I could do was stare at those weird pulsating stars. Their whispers invaded my head and it began to feel like I was floating away.

Momentarily I fought against the whispers and after a brief struggle they pulled away from me, leaving murmuring echoes that lingered unhappily in the dark. The tugging fingers that had coiled around my limbs loosened their grip and reluctantly drew away from me. The cold immediately returned and I realized that I couldn't feel my legs anymore. My left arm was pointed almost straight out from my shoulder and my forearm was twisted around grotesquely. I could feel the bubble and flare of pain tickling the edges of my awareness. I wondered why my arm was like that. It didn't seem right for it to be like that. I wanted to reach over and straighten it out but I couldn't muster the energy to do it. I was tired to the bone and it was so much easier to just lie there and stare at the stars, those strange, mesmerizing stars. They talked to me, those stars, telling me that everything was going to be all right. I didn't believe them, I couldn't believe them. I had this nagging suspicion that I was hurt bad, but I couldn't get my mind any further around that problem. The song of the stars crept deeper and deeper into my mind and pushed all else away.

My thoughts became as soft as cotton fluff and it was strangely comfortable lying there in the snow. The cold had seeped into my very core yet I had stopped feeling it a short time after my teeth had stopped chattering. It almost felt like I was lying on a nice warm bed. I suddenly realized how tired I was and I knew that it wouldn't have taken much for me to fall asleep. My brain longed for that blissful rest but those stars whispered to me that that would not be a good idea. Give in to us, they whispered, while you still can. We can help you, they said, we can take you away from the darkness that will soon find you. The choice is yours, they whispered, and for a moment they pulled back and left me all alone.

I blinked frosty eyelashes at the sky above and tried to swallow the lump that had grown large in my throat. I stirred weakly in my snowy bed, using the last of my remaining strength in attempt to do something, anything, instead of just lying there. It was no use. I wasn't going anywhere.

Choose, the stars whispered from a long ways above, darkness or light. I sensed some urgency behind their whispers that I couldn't quite fathom.

My mind emptied and all thoughts drifted away until the cold was the only thing that was left. Sleep beckoned but there was something I had to do first. If only I could remember what it was...

Darkness crept over me, and it grew closer with every blink of my eyes. There was a cold depth to that blackness that I didn't like, a finality that made what was left of me recoil from those inky depths. Better to stare at the light, I thought, those hopeful sparks above me. At least there was some promise of warmth, no matter how distant or slight.

I felt a smile grow on my lips and those white orbs began to pulse brighter than ever and their pull on my mind became irresistible. I could do nothing but give in to the song they sang in my mind. The stars grew bigger and bigger until they merged into a blindingly bright light. I felt myself being lifted, carried away, and moved from the cold into warmth. Suddenly a great weight held me pinned me down, immobilizing my limbs. The light faded and I saw everything from high above, and what I saw was slowly receding as I was pulled farther and farther away. I saw the road curve through the trees and I saw where tire tracks slid off the road and into the ditch. At the end of those tire tracks was a smouldering wreck in the center of a circle of blackened snow. I saw the trail left as someone had struggled blindly away from the charred hulk, and then I saw something else that scared the hell out of me.

Something lay at the end of that trail, a familiar shape, and I was absolutely stunned when I saw my body lying motionless there in the snow, frosty eyes staring unseeing up into the stars. There was a vacancy in those eyes and a slackness to my horribly pale face that made me recoil in terror. I wasn't there anymore. There was nothing there anymore. That body below was just an empty shell that was slowly cooling off in the snow. Fear went nova in my mind as I struggled against the impossible. I wanted to go back down there but I was pulled farther and farther away, the land below fading away into darkness. A kaleidoscope of strange images suddenly flashed before my mind's eye and I tried to scream but all that came out was a garbled bark...

And then I was awake, sweating and gulping for air in darkness so thick that I could almost feel it against my skin. Right away, I was gripped by a terrible sense of wrongness. The longer I stared upwards into the black, the stronger the feeling grew. It was only when the memory of the nightmare faded enough for conscious thought to take over from the unreal state that exists between sleep and wakefulness that I began to understand my uneasiness.

It was just too dark. I was used to a certain level of light in my room because of the nearby streetlights but I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face. Other things just didn't add up as well. The red glowing numbers from my alarm clock were conspicuously absent, and the air in this place was more than a little stale. Underlying the predominant musty atmosphere was a familiar odour that toyed with my sleep drugged brain for a moment until I realized what it was.

Wet dog.

How exactly the dog got wet was a mystery that my sleep addled brain had no idea what to do with at the time. I decided that I should probably get up and figure out what was going on. As soon as I sat up things took another turn for the weird. A searing flash of pain shot through my left forearm and I involuntarily yanked it out from under me and fell back to the bed with a thud.

I clenched my jaw until the pain subsided to a barely tolerable level then I tentatively reached out and felt for my left arm. It came as a total shock to find that there were what felt like two pieces of wood bound on either side of my arm.

By this time I was totally awake and getting very, very worried. Somehow, I had broken my arm.

Needless to say, one's brain doesn't react very well to nasty surprises like that at the completely wrong hours of the morning. Something was terribly wrong with this situation and I knew it. I had no clue as to how my arm got broken. Somehow, that didn't strike me as being an easy sort of thing to forget.

A hollow feeling grew in my gut as I tried and figure out just what the hell was going on.

I remembered leaving work and driving home...

I remembered... Nothing.

And why was it so damned cold in here anyway? Did my furnace give out during the night?

As more and more neurons began firing and contributing intermittently to my sluggish thought processes, I got the distinct impression that I was no longer at home. Fear took me in a vice-like grip at that realization and I stared wide-eyed into the black. I had a broken arm, I wasn't at home, just what the hell had happened to me?

After much indecision, I decided to get up out of bed and try to figure out where I was. I soon as I attempted that manoeuvre, I ran into more problems. Apparently I had been sleeping on the floor, and on something that felt little more than a thick rug. My searching fingers groped about in the darkness. The rug felt more like coarse hair than carpet. I really didn't know what to think about that.

I fought my way to my feet and took a couple of wobbly steps over a floor that was a whole lot more uneven that it should have been, and then all hell broke loose. The next step I took, I tripped over something that felt suspiciously like a chair and landed fully on my left arm. This made me yell out in pain, which in turn prompted a bunch of scuffling and heavy breathing from a previously unseen person in the room with me. I scrambled to my feet, the pain in my arm forgotten for the moment and squinted fearfully into the impenetrable darkness. My pounding heart was so loud in my ears that I was sure the other person in the room with me could hear it.

The next ten or fifteen seconds happened in slow motion. I barked out a challenge to whoever was in the room with me, something to the effect of "who's there?" With a few colourful metaphors thrown in for good measure. After a prolonged period of silence where I actually began to believe that I must have been hearing things, I ignored all of the evidence to the contrary and took another step forward. More scuffling from my unseen companion resulted. This time, my heart rate jumped up a notch or ten and the adrenalin poured into my system. I did an abrupt about-face and took off running.

That will go down in history as being one of the dumbest things I have ever done. After all, what good is running when it's pitch dark and you don't have a clue where you are?

If I recall correctly, (my memories get a little fuzzy at this point) I managed about three running steps before there was a heavy impact against my head. Pain and stars blasted through the darkness.

I felt my body hit the floor and as the world faded into oblivion, I cursed my stupidity.