The path to the house waits in patience. It is not an eager patience,
like a cat hunched down in the underbrush, watching a bird and waiting
for it to come close enough. It is a timeless patience, like winter
waiting for spring to pass into summer and summer into fall -- or like
a trapdoor spider, motionless in its tunnel.

Set foot on the path, and you can almost feel it tenses. A faint
rippling in the grass alongside it, as from a gentle gust of
wind. Other signs are subtler, imperceptible. The bends and turns
coils ever so slightly tighter, straight sections pull back just a
fraction of an inch and your destination, the house, appear just that
little bit more in focus, more within reach.

Keep your eyes on that house and you are safe. Nothing out of the
ordinary will happen. You will walk the path to the end and reach the
house -- maybe you knock on the door, greet the owner, go inside to
chat over a glass of a wine. It is a normal house, and normal things
happen there.

But if you take a moment to gaze out across the picturesque dunes at
the too-blue sea, or if you smile down at a sand-coloured cat that
emerges from the grass to walk beside you, tail held high, or if you
glance back over your shoulder because you could have sworn someone
called your name -- the path is very old, and very clever and it knows
many stratagems.

Look away from your destination, even just for a second, and it is too
late. When you look back up to where you were going, at where the
house should be, at where the house _was_, just a moment ago, you will
not find it. Turn and look behind you, at the road where you parked
your car, and you will not find that, either. Like the ant getting too
close to the unseen trapdoor in the sand, you did not even have time
to see the spider strike.

The path remains the same. You can recognize that bend, that tuft of
grass, that way it crests the that dune. It is the same path. It just
leads somewhere new. Somewhere else.

Where? We don't know. Maybe to treasure, or to an adventure. Maybe to
despair. Perhaps each careless traveler gets a different
destination. Or maybe the path no longer leads anywhere, but just goes
on, forever.

All we know is that it does not lead back.