1.

Dryadia squatted before the flat-screen TV, doing her best to impersonate a circular cane chair.   Over the last five-hundred years, she had impersonated a variety of chairs and other furniture.   Usually with ease.   But today her attention was diverted too much by the small child sitting on her, bouncing up and down, hammering her toys upon Dryadia’s armrests.

*      *      *

“Mummy, I want presents!   Mummy, I want presents!” shrieked pony-tailed Suzie Lomax, banging two metal carriages of a small toy train upon poor Dryadia.

“Quieten down, Suzie, we’re getting your presents now,” said the little girl’s mother, Sandy.   She threw a glance at her own mother seated on a green sofa across the lounge room and bent to start looking through a number of brightly wrapped packages.

“Mummy’ll have your presents ready soon, honey,” said Sally Curran, smiling broadly at her granddaughter.

Little Suzie considered this promise for a moment.   Then she began banging the toy train on the armrests of the cane chair again.   “I want presents!   I want presents!” she chanted again.

“You’ll get a…” began Sandy, stopping in shock as the little girl suddenly shrieked and pitched forward to her knees on the lounge room floor.

“Oh enough!” thought Dryadia changing to her true form: a beautiful woman of eighteen or twenty, with long brown hair, piercing green eyes, and pale, almost transparent alabaster flesh.

“What…?   Who…?” asked Sandy Lomax, staring in shock at the bare-foot maiden, dressed only in a knee-length white “shroud”.   Then, as little Suzie began to cry, Sandy risked approaching the alabaster woman to snatch up her daughter.

As the young woman leapt toward her, Dryadia shrilled a high-pitched squeal, “Eeeeeeeeeiii!”   Sounding more forest creature than human being, she span round to race toward the door to the corridor.

“No, wait!” called Sandy, no longer concerned the strange woman was a danger to Suzie.

Ignoring her call, Dryadia raced into the corridor, then looked round frantically for any way out of the long hallway she had suddenly found herself in.   At the other end of the corridor she could see a small rectangle of light, leading to a grassy yard behind the house.