Canto III
When she had finished, she looked to her former Professor with the lucid eyes of the somewhat mad and suggested, "Should we find a place to be for awhile? I think I'd like to read some Virgil."
He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose in exasperation. It was delightful that he had, even in his deceased state, nerves with which to feel. "Is that a metaphor? There's only so much abstraction that an individual can take."
"True," she replied, "there is the feeling sometimes that if one gets too caught up in things that don't exist, one mightn't exist either."
She then extended her hand towards him, suggesting that he take the connection as a stronghold to reality.
"You cannot touch me," he said, feeling some pain in his heart because damn it, he wanted desperately to be close to someone at the present moment. Even if that closeness was only a hand, and even if that someone were as unfathomable and mystical as Luna Lovegood.
"Try," she said, unperturbed.
With the knowledge that seeking anything solid or tangible was a quest in futility, he extended his hand and grasped. As he expected, he did not feel her flesh; the sensation was like reaching out to touch a dream-image, and there was the sense that his perceptions of the somber trees and delicate dry grass were hallucinatory.
But what he did feel, as his fingers passed through the marble-white palm of her open hand, was a strange, glowing pulse of vitality, as subtle and welcome as the most devilish and attractive whispers of Satan.