She blinked awake and she was a girl again. Her father stared down with concern. “Penelope”, he whispered, “Where did you go?” In a moment it all flooded back. She had grown up, she had finished school and university, and had married and started a family of her own. But in the waking world her mind lost grip on those memories like escaping balloons until all that remained was a faint, fuzzy premonition of warmth overshadowed by unspeakable darkness.

It was with this same dizzy, disturbed look that she was found by the firemen hours later, in the bushes across the street, Cupcake shivering at her side as the flames collapsed her house.

No one ever understood why.