I am new to these pages, and I will admit I expected my first assignment in the Whispering Groves to involve mud. Instead it involved a ribbon, a crowd, and the strangest and loveliest hour I have spent since I came to Wexamour. The Reverie has opened, out at the restored Misthollow lodge, and I am going to do my best to tell you about it, with the warning up front that the woman who made it would prefer I did not explain too much, and that I am not entirely sure I could if I tried.

Let me start with what everyone wants to know, which is what it actually is. The Reverie is an immersive entertainment experience, the first of its kind on the island, and that sentence is doing a great deal of work because nobody who has been inside seems able to improve on it. You do not watch anything. You do not sit in a row. You step through the door, and according to every single person I spoke to in the queue afterward, you are simply somewhere else, completely, until you are gently returned to the lodge and the afternoon.

Its proprietor is a woman who goes by Madame Solace, and she is the most charming evasion I have ever interviewed. I asked her, plainly, how it works. She put her hand on my arm, smiled, and said, “I do not explain the door, dear. I only open it.” I asked what people see in there. “That depends entirely on what they have been missing.” I asked whether it was magic, or some apparition craft, or something the University would recognize. She laughed and said, “We do not use any of those words here. We do not even use the word show.” Every answer was warm. Every answer was a lovely closed gate. I left knowing precisely as much as I arrived with and somehow wanting very much to go back.

One early patron, a Millhaven man who had come up for the morning, tried hardest to describe it for me. He stood outside the lodge for a long moment afterward, looking at the ordinary trees, and finally said it was realer than real. “Sharper than waking,” he said. “I have not felt that awake in years. Not since before the Silence.” He could not tell me what he had experienced, only that it had been more vivid than the morning he walked back out into, and that he had not wanted to leave. Several people in the queue nodded along as though he had said something they all already knew.

Now, I cover health and wellness for these pages, and I want to be clear about why this opening belongs in my column and not only in the entertainment notices. We talk a great deal in Wexamour about rest, about restoring the nerves, about feeling like ourselves again in a season that has gone strangely still. I have never seen a room do for people what this one does. They come out softer in the shoulders, brighter in the eye, unclenched in a way no tonic or tisane has ever managed. Whatever Madame Solace is doing behind that door, the people of the Groves are walking away from it well, and in a spring this quiet I am not inclined to argue with that.

The interest has been remarkable. University students have started making the trip out from Vaelthir, forty minutes by broom or a short walk from the registered apparition point at the townline, and the queue on opening morning ran well down the fire road. The Groves Council, which I am told can take six years to clear a fallen tree, somehow found a representative to hold one end of the ribbon, which several locals noted with raised eyebrows. The ribbon was cut to real applause. Then the first group went in, and the lodge went quiet, and the rest of us waited in the kind of hush you do not usually get from a crowd that excited.

I do not fully understand what has opened in the Groves. I only know that I have not stopped thinking about that door, that the man from Millhaven is apparently going back on Saturday, and that you are going to be hearing a great deal about The Reverie in the weeks to come. Go early, go curious, and tell me what you find, because Madame Solace certainly will not.

Marigold Fenn is the Chronicle’s new health and wellness correspondent and is delighted to be writing for the Whispering Groves pages. Tips, recommendations, and personal accounts of a good night’s rest may be sent to her by owl.