"Jenny?" Dee's voice said hesitantly. "Jenny, are you okay?"
I've had such a strange dream, Jenny thought, but when she lifted her face from her hands, it was real. She was sitting on the floor of her grandfather's basement, in a puddle of icy-cold water. Dee, Audrey, Zach, and Michael were standing in another puddle, looking at her.
"I found these three in the hallway," Zach said.
"We fell down a shaft," Michael said. "This hole just opened up in front of us. It took us all the way back to the first floor."
"It was a chute," said Dee. "I fell down it, too, and then we had to walk back up here."
"We followed your crayon trail, and it ended at a door," Zach finished. "We pressed the button and ..."
"It let us in," Audrey said crisply, when he stopped. "But it looks like something's already happened."
"My nightmare," Jenny said. She was having a very hard time bringing herself back to the present. The five-year-old in her mind seemed more real than the sixteen-year-old these people were talking to. Dee and Michael and Audrey looked like strangers.
Not Zach, because Zach had been there when she was five.
Zach, maybe, understood this. In any case he knelt on the floor beside her, ignoring the water soaking into his jeans.
"What happened?" he said, his gray eyes steady.
"I lost," Jenny said dully, feeling strangely removed from everything. "I screwed up. I couldn't save him. I lost."
"It's something about Grandpa Evenson, isn't it?"
"What do you know about it?"
Zach hesitated, then, looking her directly in the face, he said, "Only what my parents told me. They say he-went crazy that day. Tried to-well, hurt you."
Jenny was shocked out of her apathy. "What?"
"They found you here, in the basement, with your clothes all torn and your arms all scratched. Your legs and feet were bleeding...."
"From the ice," Jenny whispered. "I got dragged through the ice. And he scratched my hands to make me let him go. They were taking him. He let them take him instead of me."
Then, suddenly, she was sobbing again. She felt a movement, then a slender, hard arm around her. Dee. A rustle and a cool hand on her wrist. Audrey, heedless of her fancy clothes. An awkward, warm grip from behind on her shoulder. Michael, They were all around her, all trying to help.
"You went through our nightmares with all of us," Audrey said softly. "It's not fair you had to face yours alone."
Jenny shook her head. "You don't understand. All of you had nightmares about things you were scared might happen. Mine did happen-because of me. It was real. It was my fault."
"Tell us," Dee said, her face stern and beautiful.
"He was a sorcerer," Jenny said. She looked at Zach. "You mean, all this time everybody thought he tried to hurt me?"
"What were they supposed to think?" Zach said. "You were here, practically in a coma. You screamed if anyone tried to touch you, but you wouldn't talk. And he was gone. They figured he ran away when he realized what he tried to do. And when they looked around at this place"-Zach looked around the basement himself and snorted-"well, they knew he was crazy. Paranoid. Because all this junk turned out to be-"
"Charms for protection," Jenny said.
"Right. I mean, what kind of nut collects thousands of those from all over the world? And he had piles of books on the occult, all kinds of garbage____"
"He was a sorcerer," Jenny said again. "Not a black one. Maybe not a white one, either, but not black. He wasn't trying to do evil. He was just-a little bit naive. He didn't allow for accidents happening ... like a five-year-old coming down here on a day he didn't expect her, and opening a door she knew she shouldn't touch."
"That door?" Dee looked at the empty closet.
Jenny nodded.
"But what was in the closet? A monster?"
"Julian."
They all stared at her.
Jenny swallowed the bad taste in her mouth. "My grandfather wanted-well, the same thing those German boys in the forest wanted, I guess." She looked at Audrey. "Power. Or maybe he was just curious. He knew there were-things - out in the darkness, and he caught some. Maybe he used runes to summon them up, I don't know. But I know he used a rune to hold them. On that door."
"And just what," Michael said, his voice unusually grim, "would you call the things he caught?"
"Aliens," Jenny said, looking at Dee. "Dark elves," she said, looking at Audrey. "Demons," she said, turning around to face Michael. "The Shadow Men," she said to Zach.
Dee hissed softly in comprehension.
Once started, Jenny couldn't seem to stop. "Dakaki. The Erlking. The old gods. The fairy folk..."
"Okay," Michael said huskily. "Enough, already."
"They're real," Jenny said. "They've always been here-like genies, you know? The old name for a genie was djinn, and in his notes my grandfather called them aljunnu. Djinn-aljunnu-Julian-get it? It was a joke. They like to play with us...."
Her voice was rising. She felt herself gripped from all sides, but she went on.
"He was keeping them trapped-but I let them out, and that changed everything. They said they had
the right to take me. But he went instead. He did it for me." She stopped.
"If we're going to get through this," Dee said, "we've got to be strong. We've got to stand together. All right?"
"Right," Audrey said, the first to confirm it. Looking down, Jenny saw Audrey's perfectly polished nails entwined with Dee's slender dark fingers. Both holding on to each other, to Jenny.
"Right," Zach said with no hesitation, no distance in his winter-gray eyes. His long-fingered artist's hand came down over Dee's and Audrey's.
"Right," whispered Michael, and he gripped Zach's hand with his own square pudgy fingers, unembarrassed.
"But there's nothing to do," Jenny said, almost crying again. "He won. I lost. I didn't make it through my nightmare. That door"-nodding at the closet one-"was always here. It's not the way out."
"What about that one?" Michael said, standing back and looking up the stairs.
Jenny had to move around the bookcase to see it. Instead of the blank wall she had seen earlier at the top of the staircase, there was a door.
Directly above them-in the room above-a clock struck five.
"You must have done something right," Dee said.
Jenny's skirt was clammy, clinging to her legs. Her hair, she knew, was in complete disarray. She was exhausted and still shaking inside, and it seemed like years since she had slept.
"I'll go first," she said and led them up the stairs, trying to look like Dee, proud as a princess. She found her slip of paper on the top step and stepped on it.
"If that's the turret-the top of the house-we've won," Audrey said. "Right?"
Somehow Jenny didn't think it was going to be that easy.
She twisted the knob and pushed, and the door swung back on oiled hinges. They all stepped into the room above. It was much larger than any turret could possibly be.
It was the More Games store.
Well, more or less, Jenny thought. There were the same shelves and racks and tables with the same uncanny games on them. There was the same small window-quite dark-and the same lamps with shades of purple and red and blue glass.
But there were differences, too. One was the grandfather clock standing near a corner, ticking loudly and steadily.
The other was Tom.
Jenny ran to him. He was huddled against the clock, chained to it somehow. Her mind registered fury at the humiliation of that, then went on to more important things.
"Tommy," she said, reaching with both hands for him.
He turned weakly, and Jenny was shocked. There were no bruises on his face, but he looked-ravaged. His skin was unhealthily pale, and there were black circles under his eyes. He gave her the ghost of his own rakish smile.
"Hey, Thorny," he said painfully.
Jenny put her face against his shoulder and cried.
The faded-photograph memory had disappeared.
What Jenny remembered now was the day of their first kiss, in second grade, behind the hibiscus bushes at George Washington Elementary School. They'd both gotten detention, but it had been worth it.
That kiss, she thought. Everything innocent. Everything sweet. Tom hadn't been arrogant, then, hadn't taken anything for granted. Tom had loved her.
"Tommy," she said. "I missed you so much. What did he do to you?"
Tom shook his head. "Hardly anything ... I don't understand. There were the rats"-his haunted eyes skittered around the floor-"but they're gone now."
Rats. So that was what Tom had seen in the parlor-the invisible things that had tried to climb up his legs. In second grade Tom had owned a turtle, and his older brother Greg had owned a pet rat. One morning they woke up to find that the rat had eaten the turtle-eaten it right out of the shell.
I knew how upset that made him-how much he hated rats after that, Jenny thought. Why didn't I realize what they were in the parlor?
Because it hadn't seemed bad enough. Tom had been so afraid. But one thing Jenny had learned: Everybody's nightmare was scariest to them. You had to see it with them, get into their shoes, to understand just how scary.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "But, oh, Tom, your wrists-" They were torn, bleeding. He was wearing shackles like the kind his brother Bruce used in police work. The rest of him was wrapped up like Marley's ghost.
"I kept trying to get away," he said. "Not because of the rats. Because I saw you. He would come and hold up a mirror, and I could see you and what was happening to you. I saw you go through everything. When Summer died ..." He stopped to get control of himself, his face twisting.
Saw we? Jenny thought in horror. Pictures of what Tom might have seen when she and Julian were together flashed through her mind. Then she felt a backwash of relief. If Julian had been standing here holding a mirror, he must have been showing Tom the times when he-Julian-wasn't with Jenny. Still, she had to know.