Anne coughed and gasped for air, waking to the feel of a bony hand gripping her arm and shaking her.
"Are you all right there, miss?" It was an old man.
She sat up from where she had been lying on the concrete steps of the burnt house. She peered around herself; the knowledge that she had woken to her real life gripping her heart, tearing it, making her want to weep.
"Are you okay?" the old man enquired again, kindly. It was the farmer she had seen the other day.
"I'm sorry. I must have dozed off," she explained. It had been so real, so incredibly lucid. It could not have been a dream. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-" she went on apologetically. She was trespassing after all.
The old man helped her up. "It's fine, miss. I saw you looking around at the old place from out in the field. You sat down, then seemed to collapse. I thought you had fainted."
"How long was I lying here?" Anne asked. Physically, she felt fine, as if she had just woken from a deep restful sleep. But the knowledge that her beautiful dream had ended made it bittersweet.
"As long as it took me to ride over. Maybe thirty seconds. A minute at most. You sat and then just slumped over."
"I had the weirdest dream," Anne said. He seemed like a nice man. He had a kindly, wrinkled, suntanned face from which bright blue eyes sparkled. "Do you know anything of a woman named Patricia?"
"You mean this Patricia?" The old man enquired, pointing at the burnt remains of the house. "You dreamt about her?"
"I did. Yes! It was so real."
The old man rubbed his chin. "I see the house sometimes. In the morning, when there's a heavy mist. No one believes me, but I've seen it."
"What happened? Who were they?" Anne was not afraid. She was easily spooked by scary movies and bumps in the night, but she felt nothing other than warmth and love right then. If those were ghosts, they were better than most everyday people.
"Nick and Patricia Harper. They burnt to death in this house back in nineteen sixty-eight. It was tragic. They were so young and just married."
"They burned?" The thought shocked Anne. The last she remembered was going to sleep in her husband's arms. She had felt like she was choking when she woke though. That struck her as significant.
"Yes. You should talk to my wife," the old man went on. "She's up on all about the Harpers. Patricia was her friend, back in the day. We bought the land from the bank not long after it happened. It seemed like the right thing to do."