House of Blood

HOUSE OF

BLOOD

BRYAN SMITH

This book is dedicated to the memory of Lonnie L. Smith,

who should be here to see this dream come true.

I love you, Dad.

Copyright © 2004 by Bryan Smith

All rights reserved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the following people: My mother, Cherie Smith, who along with my father steered me through some dark times. For this, I will always be grateful. My wife Rachael, for believing in me and seeing me through many ups and downs. Brian Keene, the patron saint of up-and-coming horror writers. James Newman, for timely advice. Undaunted Press editor Cullen Bunn. My longtime friends Keith Ashley, Brent Wilhoite, and Paul Minturn. My brothers Jeff Smith and Eric Smith and their families. The whole Shocklines gang. The brewers of Guinness Extra Stout. And of course, editor Don D’Auria.

Being the rock ‘n’ roll fanboy I am, I’d be remiss not to thank these guys for making music that’s kept me marginally sane throughout the years: The Replacements, Hanoi Rocks, Guns N’ Roses, Backyard Babies, Zodiac Mindwarp, Iggy, and the Ramones.

________________________

Later they would all agree they should have stayed on that dark stretch of Tennessee highway. One or two of those left alive at that point would remark on how useless it is to want to change something that cannot be changed-the kind of insight normally available only to people forced by circumstance to move beyond the self-centered world of their own psyches and see things as they really are. They would also experience the bitter realization that such knowledge is often earned the hard way.

But all that was in the future.

Right now the travelers were still on the interstate, five weary young people returning from a vacation that hadn’t gone quite as well as planned. Squeezed into a Honda Accord, they were engaged in the age-old ritual of returning vacationers everywhere-general bickering and the exchange of petty insults.

Chad Robbins shifted uncomfortably in the backseat. “What a lovely fucking idea this was.” He breathed a put upon sigh. “Remind me, who thought it would be fun to relive those not-so-long-ago halcyon days of our college years?”

“You did, Chad. Among others.”

“Fuck you, Dream,” Chad said. “I had to be convinced. For months I listened to earnest pleas from all of you. You especially. You fuckers brainwashed me.”

Alicia Jackson snorted. “Bullshit.”

Dream Weaver, the Accord’s owner and driver, glanced to her right, where a red-eyed and out-of-patience Alicia was ensconced in the shotgun seat. “Alicia, please.”

Too late.

Alicia’s seat belt seemed to snap away of its own accord as she whirled around, leaned through the gap between the front seats, and said, “Nobody brainwashed you, asshole. You wanna know who came up with this idea? I did. That’s right, and I didn’t manipulate you or cajole you in any way. You got asked maybe twice to go along with us, and that was only out of misguided courtesy. You’re only here because Dream took pity on you. Like always. Jesus Christ, you’re still the little outcast geek she kept the seniors from beating up in high school.” Her lips curled into a sneer that radiated contempt. “Some things never change, right? You didn’t know how to be gracious then, either.”

Dream gripped the steering wheel hard and prayed for an end to the fighting. She had never dealt well with extreme displays of anger among her friends, and she was trying hard not to cry. Crying would be bad. Because once the tears began to flow, she would have to pull over and cry until she could cry no more, a process she suspected would take a very long time. Of course, she would only be delaying the inevitable if she managed to stem the floodgates.

The trip to Key West had come to an abrupt and premature end. Things hadn’t gone well almost from the beginning, when tempers soared over the inability of certain people to adhere to the previously agreed upon departure time-and the situation only deteriorated from there. Due to a desire to re-create that wistfully remembered spirit of collegiate camaraderie, they’d traveled together, taking just two cars. The second car, a VW Beetle, was still in Key West. The Beetle belonged to Dan Bishop, Dream’s boyfriend.

Ex-boyfriend now.

Who was probably still in room 206 of the Paradise Inn. On the sixth day of their stay, Dream had returned early from a shopping excursion with Alicia and Karen Hidecki. When she’d opened the door to room 206, she’d caught Dan in what could only be described as a compromising position. That is, it compromised certain illusions of fidelity and monogamy. The revelation also compromised the assumption her lover of six months was exclusively heterosexual.

One can easily imagine the ensuing brouhaha.

Shocked and heartbroken, Dream spent the evening being consoled by her girlfriends, who assured her over and over that Dan was a heartless fiend unworthy of her tears. They left in a rush the next morning, hurriedly cramming strewn clothes and tourist booty into bags and suitcases. Before they departed, Dream happened to glance at Dan’s Beetle-which was parked several spaces down from the Accord-and was startled by what she saw. Every one of its windows had been smashed in. Bits of safety glass glittered on the faded asphalt like pebbles on a beach.

And then they were gone, grimly embarking on a journey home Dream was determined to make in one day’s time. They had been on the road now nearly fourteen hours, with some 120 miles still remaining between them and Nashville, home to all of them. They were in the high country of East Tennessee now, just outside Chattanooga, and the going was excruciatingly slow. The road was shrouded by tall trees on both sides and sloped precipitously, curving wildly through the mountainous region like the pencil squiggles of a young child. Their ears popped due to the elevation, and they would occasionally see where roadside ramps had been carved from the earth for runaway trucks. It was a dangerous route even in daylight, so Dream grudgingly adhered to the posted low speed limits. She thought she might not be so careful if she was traveling alone.

Perhaps she would even be a little reckless.

But she wasn’t alone. There were four other people with her, three of whom were her oldest friends. The fourth was Shane Wallace, Karen Hidecki’s boyfriend. Shane and Karen were in the backseat with Chad. Karen sagged unconscious between them, her head lolling on Shane’s shoulder, a cowboy hat tipped down over her slack features.

Shane, who was normally good-humored in the traditional manner of a former BMOC, was as cranky as any of them. “Stop arguing, you assholes. You’re giving me a headache.”

“Shut up, Shane,” Alicia said, directing an angry glance at him before refocusing her attention on Chad Robbins. “You’re a sniveling little shit, Chad. How dare you attack a sweetheart like Dream.”

“How dare I?” A small smile touched the corners of Chad’s mouth. “Maybe I’m tired of being her charity case, hmm?” He laughed. “Or could it be I’m tired of the passive-aggressive games she plays in our so-called friendship? Maybe I’ve just come to loathe the ever-present hint of condescension in her little girly voice.” Another laugh. “Oh, there could be all sorts of reasons I’d lash out at such a … sweetheart.”

Dream wiped away a single tear as it spilled down her cheek. “Alicia!” Her voice was strangled with grief. “If you love me … please stop this.”

Relief swept over her as she heard Alicia release a deep sigh. She allowed herself to hope the worst of it was over. Alicia Jackson had a temper like no one else Dream knew. She was like Jekyll and Hyde. Alicia was a sophisticated black woman who could dazzle you with her wit and intelligence. A person could have the most enlightening conversations with Alicia about science and God and the nature of the universe. But you didn’t want to offend her, because she would not hesitate to use that same intellect as a weapon. She was completely without fear of confrontation. But she was also sensitive enough to know when it was time to back off.

Like now.

She showed Chad one more sneer, investing it with all the considerable disdain she could muster, and returned to her seat. “You’re not even worth crushing under my heel, cockroach.”

Chad chuckled. “Oooh, now you’re just turning me on.”

Alicia looked at Dream and made the universal sign for gagging-a finger pointed into a wide-open mouth. Dream mustered a small smile, but she was unable to control the trembling that caused the expression to twist into a grimace. She had been unprepared for the psychological wallop of Chad’s hateful words. She heard them again in her mind, marveled at the intensity of feeling behind them, and wondered how it was sweet Chad Robbins could have masked that degree of resentment for so long. Which begged the question-just how long had he felt this way about her?

All along, said a quietly insinuating voice that issued from somewhere deep inside her. He’s hated you from the very beginning.

Dream believed this was the voice of paranoia, but she did feel some uncertainty. Her first memories of Chad were of a sweet kid who somehow managed to be at once gawky and serenely at ease with himself. He was just another geek wandering the hallways of Smyrna High School, one of so many, and he likely would never have entered her social circle had happenstance not caused her to be in the vicinity of an impending beating he’d been about to receive at the hands of several large football players.

What a ditz she’d been in those days. Although wildly popular and possessed of the kind of head-turning blond beauty that might have landed her on the covers of fashion magazines had she grown up in a major metropolitan center, Dream had somehow turned out to be that rarity of rarities among popular, good-looking kids-a kind soul. A therapist had once attributed her selflessness and altruism to the absurd moniker her parents had burdened her with at birth, which made as much sense as anything else. A girl named Dream certainly didn’t want to be anybody’s nightmare. Of course, that didn’t explain why Chad had become so important to her almost from the beginning. He wasn’t the first gawky kid she saved from a beating, nor was he the last, but he was the only one she’d truly taken under her wing.

There’d been a sort of sweetness about him back then, and she was a sucker for sweet, shy boys, but there was something else about him that fascinated her, something less tangible than a pleasant disposition. She thought it had something to do with the way he looked her right in the eye when speaking or listening to her. He was never nervous around her, and he didn’t try to impress her by performing feats of astonishing stupidity the way so many other boys did. Maybe it was just that he was the first person of the male persuasion to treat her like a real person instead of an object. It was also of no little significance that he didn’t make fun of her unusual name. Hell, there’d just been a sense of ingrained decency about him, and she’d responded to that.

… maybe I’m tired of being her charity case …

She eventually decided the reason for his apparent lack of physical interest in her was a simple matter of orientation. She wasn’t a snob about her looks, but she was intelligent enough-and self-aware enough-to know she was extremely attractive by just about any standard. Nearly every male she encountered let her know this in some way, either by openly ogling her or-in the case of older men-glancing at certain parts of her anatomy in a surreptitious way. Since Chad didn’t do these things-and since he was never in the company of a girl other than herself or her friends-he had to be homosexual. It was this ill-informed conclusion that brought about one of the most awkward moments of their friendship, that weekend after high school graduation when she’d set him up on a blind date with another boy.

There was just one problem.

Chad was straight.

He didn’t date girls until well into their freshman year at college, and when he did begin dating, the girls he went out with were shy, bookish types. Dream experienced an odd sense of rejection. She obsessed over his lack of interest in her. Oh, she’d never been really attracted to him, not physically, but she was mystified by the notion of a heterosexual boy who didn’t want her. Thinking these things made her feel shallow, but she couldn’t help it. A lifetime as a sex object left a girl with certain expectations. Ten years had gone by and she still didn’t understand it. She experienced moments of deep depression during which it was all she could think about. She would lock herself in her apartment, drink wine, and cry over the only boy who had never tried to fuck her. Who, she would admit to herself when the wine bottle was nearly empty, was the only boy she really wanted.

Which was just insane.

Yes, perhaps insanity, or something very close to it, did play a role. That would help explain the only half-serious suicide attempt of two years ago she had never told him about. At least Alicia had kept her mouth shut about that tonight, thank God. She hadn’t really wanted to die-not then-but the attempt landed her in the emergency room and left her with a legacy of scars. She normally concealed these with bracelets, but there were nights when she would lie alone in bed and stare at the little white lines on her left wrist and remember how it felt to part her own flesh with a blade.

Never again, she usually thought in those moments.

But now she wasn’t so sure.

There was a sudden hiccup from the backseat.

Dream glanced at the rearview mirror and saw Karen Hidecki stir from her vodka-induced slumber. Karen was a third-generation Asian-American who looked a bit like Lucy Liu. She pushed back the cowboy hat, squinted, and looked around at her companions. “Are we home yet?”

Chad snorted. “No, you fucking lush. We’re still a gazillion miles away.”

Karen’s head wobbled as she directed a glassy-eyed glare at Chad. “Don’t talk to me like that, Chad. Not unless you want your ass kicked.”

Chad, who was slightly built and no match for the athletic Karen Hidecki, nonetheless said, “Kick away, vodka girl. I’m not afraid of you.” He grinned. “You’re about twelve steps away from being able to effectively aim your foot at my ass, anyway.”

“So I’ll do it for her,” Shane said. “My aim’s pretty good, chump.”

Dream groaned. “Stop.”

But no one was listening to her. She was speaking so softly no one even heard her anyway. The verbal firefight was spinning out of control, strafing everyone in sight with random insults. No one was safe. Dream was sure a state of critical mass would soon be attained, resulting in a physical altercation while the car was still in motion. She was consumed with a sense of urgency, an overwhelming need to do something to head off such a potentially calamitous event.

But what?

She prayed for a miracle, some divine deliverance from this madness. Her gaze flicked to the right as the Accord’s headlights picked out a green road sign. Her heart fluttered as she listened to new threats emanating from the backseat. The wheels of inspiration started spinning in her head.

Chad was laughing again. Dangerous, almost hysterical laughter. “Hey, Shane, you want to know a secret?”

Shane’s expression radiated contempt. “Hey Chad, you want to know a fact? I can knock most of your teeth down your throat with one punch.”

Karen went rigid between them. “Chad … don’t.”

Chad was still laughing. “That’s pretty scary, Shane. But, you know, you might want to knock someone else’s teeth out in a second.”

Karen ground her teeth. “Don’t,” she hissed.

Alicia shot a puzzled expression at Dream.

What’s this shit all about?

Dream didn’t know, but a sense of dread caused the muscles in her arms to twitch like those of a junkie in the midst of withdrawal. The spite in Chad’s voice was an awful thing to hear. It was like listening to a depraved stranger. She was having difficulty reconciling the malice radiated by this person with her memories of the boy she remembered. She knew some of it was due to major changes in Chad’s life. Success in business had eradicated most of his former shyness and replaced it with swagger and a caustic tongue. She often had to consciously remind herself that he really wasn’t the same person he’d been-and that a heartbreaking amount of time had passed since he’d even remotely resembled that person.

“Dan Bishop didn’t have all the fun in Florida, Shane.” Chad grinned. His tone was that of one who relished the discomfort his words generated. “Someone else got some extracurricular tail during our ill-fated sojourn to the Sunshine State. Care to hazard a guess who?”

A silent moment elapsed.

Karen closed her eyes and awaited the inevitable.

Chad chuckled, but some of the edge was gone from his voice. Dream had a sudden precognitive flash about what he was going to say, something that just couldn’t be.

Something very, very wrong.

Chad said, “I fucked your girlfriend, Shane.”

Dream drew in a sharp breath.

Chad kept talking, driving the figurative knife home and giving it a wicked twist. “I fucked her while you were out fishing with Dan.”

Dream drew in a sharp breath.

One strangled word emerged from Shane’s throat: “Bullshit.”

Karen sobbed. “You fucking asshole, Chad.”

“It wasn’t the first time, either. But you shouldn’t be jealous.” Some of the malice returned to Chad’s voice. “There’s no emotional involvement. She calls me her fuckbuddy. She has several fuckbuddies, Shane. The way I understand it, she just can’t get enough dick.”

Shane was shaking with barely controlled fury.

“Now, don’t be angry with her.” A tone of mock consolation entered Chad’s voice then. “She needs help. Professional help. Booze isn’t her only weakness, guy. She’s addicted to sex, too.” He smirked. “She’s a nymphomaniac. A slut. A whore. A cheap floozie. Not to mention a really nice piece of ass.”

Dream flicked on the Accord’s right turn signal.

The action went unnoticed by the rest of the car’s occupants, including Alicia, whose attention was riveted to the brewing shitstorm in the backseat.

Karen sagged in her seat and said, “Somebody just put me out of my misery, please.”

Shane looked at her. “Tell me he’s full of shit, Karen.”

Karen apparently had nothing else to say.

Chad’s smirk deepened. “There you go, Shane. Secret revealed.”

Shane lunged across the suddenly gasping Karen Hidecki and clamped a large hand around Chad’s throat.

Karen shrieked.

Alicia surged through the gap between the front seats in an attempt to save Chad Robbins from almost certain asphyxiation. The backseat became a cacophony of screams, shouts, and choked gasps.

No one realized the Accord was slowing down.

Or that it was turning off the interstate.

Most of them would never see it again.

***

Monsters pursued Eddie down a long tunnel lit intermittently by flickering gas lamps. The narrow passage twisted every so often, sometimes creating a blind spot untouched by the gaslight. Several times he crashed into the tunnel wall, tumbled to the hardpacked dirt floor, and staggered back to his feet. Every time he got up, the monsters seemed just a little bit closer than they were before. Their frenzied, hungry cries filled his ears and made his stomach clench with fear. Soon, he supposed, he would feel their hot breath on the back of his neck.

And then it would be too late.

He arrived at a place where the tunnel branched off in two directions. He came to a sudden stop, risked a glance behind him, and listened to the sound of his pursuers drawing still closer. His gaze snapped back to the maddening intersection and the unwanted complications it created. He experienced a long moment of panicky indecision that threatened to paralyze him. He saw himself rooted to this spot until fangs pierced his flesh and tore him apart.

The passage to his left glowed with a brighter light than that cast by the lamps. Somewhere down that length of tunnel, perhaps just around the next bend, lurked lights powered by electricity. The notion of electricity was alluring, with its hints of things sane, of things created by men from the world of his former life. The passage to the right was darker by far. He detected a faint flicker of gaslight from that direction. So he had a choice-on the one hand, more of the same; on the other, a slim possibility of deliverance from this land of madness.

He listened a moment longer to the heavy thud of dozens of dreadful creatures careening down the tunnel behind him.

His once-comfortable head start was dwindling by the nanosecond.

His only choice was forward motion.

NOW

He turned toward the light and started running again.

The tunnel continued in a straight line for a few moments, and the light-its source still unseen-grew steadily brighter. Eddie then reached another bend in the tunnel, the last he would encounter. The hardpacked dirt of the tunnel floor gave way to a short expanse of cracked tile bordered by cinder-block walls. Someone had scrawled “Lazarus is the way” on one of the walls. A bank of fluorescent lights hummed quietly from the ceiling. An unlatched metal door at the center of the wall directly opposite him beckoned like a street-corner whore in stiletto heels and a microskirt.

“What the hell … ?”

A goddamn open door. The fleeting thought that maybe he was being herded rather than chased flashed through his mind like a comet. The implications were dreadful, but there was no time to contemplate this new layer of mystery. No time at all. He would be monster dinner if he lingered any longer. He bolted toward the door, crossed the expanse of tile quicker than Carl Owens on crack, yanked the door open, stepped through the opening, and slammed it shut. He threw the latch home, turned a crank that secured it, and stepped back to catch his breath and gather his wits.

Something large and powerful struck the other side of the wall. Eddie flinched, but he thought he was safe for the moment. Another creature struck the door and its hinges groaned a bit. Eddie gulped. Maybe he wasn’t so safe. He remained certain the door would hold a little longer, but he had to concede it would eventually yield to the furious assault it was enduring. Which was cool, since he meant to be long gone from here by then.

The idea of freedom bloomed in his brain like a spring flower-it was intoxicating, the prospect of again being able to breathe fresh air. To see the sun again. To go anywhere his heart desired. To watch pay-per-view porn at his leisure. Mostly, it would be nice to again live in a world uninhabited by monsters and crazy people. Okay, there were crazy people in the surface world, too, but that was a pedestrian kind of crazy by comparison. He would rather come face-to-face with Jeffrey Dahmer’s long-lost, meaner brother than spend one more second in this freak-show place.

Speaking of which, wasn’t it high time he got his ass in gear again?

The door hinges groaned a little louder.

YEP

He whirled around, staggered forward a foot or two, and came to an abrupt halt.

“Oh my God …”he breathed.

He was in a cramped, dimly lit room that appeared to be some sort of security office or checkpoint. A large, paper-cluttered metal desk occupied much of the room. Above it a bank of black-and-white monitors flickered quietly. Several seemed to show various empty tunnels. Or perhaps these were just different portions of the same tunnel. The tunnel-or tunnels-closely resembled the place he’d just left behind. Funny, he hadn’t noticed anything even remotely resembling a camera. He supposed they’d been obscured in some fashion, an easy enough proposition in all that darkness. The top row of screens was devoted to several angles of a deceptively normal-looking house. How innocuous it seemed. How normal. How safe. Well, how else would the entrance to hell ensnare its victims? Other monitors revealed places he’d become all too familiar with over these last several months. Looking at these scenes made him anxious to get on with his flight from the howling terror behind him.

And he fully intended to do just that.

He needed another moment, however, to recover from the shock of seeing the dead people. He wasn’t too bothered by the death aspect. Up-close encounters with death occurred with regularity down here. He’d become almost blasé about death. As a concept applied to other people, that is. The notion of his own death did still disturb him. Okay, it wigged him out. Still, he’d seen plenty of death down here, so much so that death as a phenomenon had lost its ability to shock him. Then again, maybe not, because there was something about what he was seeing now that was more disturbing than the things he’d seen before.

A nude fat man weighed down a swivel chair in front of the desk. A nude woman straddled him. The fat man had a large bald spot and a wedge of now-displaced combed-over hair. The woman was thinner and not bad-looking. She looked as if she’d been roughed up some time prior to her union with the fat security guard, and she bore the mark of a slave girl on her neck. Her head hung limply over the fat man’s shoulder and her glassy eyes stared at nothing at all. They’d been run through with an ornate sword-its bloody tip pierced the back of the swivel chair.

Eddie regained his voice. “Holy fuck …”

He tried to imagine a human being strong enough to put that thing through two people-one of whom had been very large-and the back of a chair. His mind couldn’t comprehend such a thing. But the solution to the puzzle was obvious-a human being hadn’t done it.

Nor had one of those monsters out there.

Who probably lacked the ability to effectively wield swords and didn’t really need them anyway.

No, this could only have been done by the owner of the house.

The thing that feigned the appearance of an ordinary man. A mortal man. A creature worse by far than the fearsome things that had hounded him through the tunnels.

The Master.

The monster to end all motherfucking monsters.

Eddie’s internal terror barometer shot past the red zone. The only thing he wanted to deal with less than the tunnel creatures was that… thing. He cast his gaze about the rest of the room, which was otherwise nondescript. There was a single tall filing cabinet, beside it an overflowing wastebasket. A doorway revealed a tiny room with a dirty toilet. There was another door next to the bank of monitors. It stood slightly open, letting in a sliver of yellow light.

The closed metal door behind him rattled louder than ever.

He could hear the scrape of tortured hinges pulling slowly free of concrete moorings.

Still, he didn’t move.

He stared at the sliver of light, his body quaking like that of a man in the grip of a small seizure. He was moments away from being eaten alive. But it was possible an even worse fate awaited him through that open door.

He heard the heaviest thud yet from the tunnel.

The door came loose from the wall and fell heavily to the floor beneath the weight of the surging creatures. There was no more time to think. No more time to weigh one fate against another. Eddie moved. And slid for a microsecond on the pool of blood that surrounded the chair. But he righted himself immediately, slipped through the open door, and pulled it shut. This one locked electronically. A resolute click assured him it was sealed against all unauthorized personnel. He glimpsed an electronic keypad embedded in the wall next to the door. He tried to remember seeing something similar near the other door, but he was drawing a blank. Not that it mattered. It was just curious how the primitivism of Below gradually gave way to higher-tech gadgetry.

The creatures slammed against the door and bellowed outrage at yet another thwarted chance to corner their quarry.

Eddie allowed himself a shaky sneer. “Poor monsters. No dinner for you tonight.”

He was in a short hallway with a high ceiling. The cold electronic eye of a security camera stared down at him from the ceiling. A red light next to the lens blinked on and off. It didn’t bother him. The security guard wouldn’t be coming after him anytime soon. Still, that door-like the one before it-probably wouldn’t hold forever, so it wouldn’t do to linger.

At the other end of the hallway was a tall concrete staircase. It seemed to stretch into infinity. Maybe not quite that far, but it was certainly the tallest staircase Eddie had ever seen. There were good-sized office buildings that didn’t reach that high. But he could just make out the tiny outline of a door at the top of the staircase. He glanced in the other direction and saw nothing but gray wall-a dead end.

He strode in the opposite direction and began to mount the stairs. He climbed the steps two at a time at first, driven forward by a new burst of adrenaline and a renewed flicker of hope. It was probably a foolish hope, but he would nonetheless chase it until he collapsed. Or until hostile forces caused his collapse. A dozen steps fell away below him. Two dozen. Three dozen. Then he was taking them one at a time, but was still moving at a pretty good clip. The door at the top grew incrementally larger, though it remained tantalizingly far away.

Fatigue began to set in after a few dozen more steps. He had to work at making his tired legs move up another level. A sheen of sweat covered his bare torso. He concentrated on continuing the upward trajectory, focusing the whole of his will on the monumental physical effort needed to keep moving. The act of swinging a leg up another step became excruciating, worse than, say, carrying large sacks of potatoes up a steep hill on a sweltering summer day. He wanted more than anything a spare moment or two to sit down on one of these steps. His heart pistoned in his chest like the engine of a very old and very feeble car.

“Don’t throw a rod, motherfucker…,” he muttered to his beleaguered heart.

It was a while before he realized the pursuing creatures were now nonpursuing creatures. He was ascending the steps at a rate slower than an elderly Florida driver steering a Buick through a choked intersection. Awareness dawned as a realization of the absence of any sound other than his labored breathing and the rapid thrum of his heart.

He came to a stop, an act that didn’t require a lot of effort. He sagged against the cold concrete wall, slid slowly down until he was in a squatting position, and stayed right there while his body tried to recover. He figured he might be able to cease panting within a week or two. He sat there with his eyes closed for several minutes, thankful he was no longer in quite so much imminent danger of being ripped to shreds. His breathing leveled out, and his heart no longer seemed ready to propel itself out of his chest. He allowed his eyes to flutter open, and he had his first opportunity to cast a downward glance.

The sensation of vertigo made his stomach lurch. His head swam, and he was dizzier than he had been at any time since he’d made himself spin like a top as a kid. He gripped one of the steps above him with one hand, slapped the open palm of the other against the wall, and held on for dear life. The vertigo passed in a few moments. Then, when he felt prepared, he risked another look down.

He felt a slight twinge in his stomach, but it was of minor consequence. He was okay. There were no ravenous monsters with bulbous demonic red eyes hot on his trail. Not anymore. The staircase below him was empty, as was the little hallway at the bottom. He listened intently, but he could detect no sounds of destruction from the little security room. Well, that was good. Something had worked in his favor for a change. Then he turned his eyes toward the ceiling and looked at the blinking red light of the security camera. He thought of how much closer the camera had seemed when he was in the hallway.

Actually…

Well, the staircase, too, seemed much steeper even than it had originally appeared. He was maybe a third of the way up, and he felt as if he had been climbing the stairs forever. A feeling of unreality gripped him. A new creeping sensation of fear spread through him. Unreality. That was just the right word for it. Or was it just that reality was very fluid in this strange place?

Would he climb these stairs forever without reaching the top?

“No. Nuh-uh. No way, nohow.”

He would give it one more good effort. Thirty minutes. No, an hour. And he would climb the steps at a more reasonable rate this time instead of using up all his energy at once. If he was still only a third of the way up the stairs after another hour of climbing, he would give it up and toss himself off the staircase. He would rather die than be condemned to this odd purgatory forever.

“Okay, then.”

He got to his feet, took a deep breath, and resumed the upward trek. He was a bit wobbly and he desperately craved a bottle or two of Gatorade, but he felt reasonably okay. He kept his head down this time instead of staring at the impossibly faraway door. To while away the time, he counted the steps as he climbed. One, two, three… a dozen … two dozen … three dozen … same old story.

Or maybe not.

When he finally glanced up, he was surprised to see the door was actually getting bigger. And closer. An impulse to pick up the pace-nearly impossible to resist-flashed through him. But he forced himself to continue at his steady rate.

And the door loomed larger still.

And closer still.

Until, at last, he could count the number of steps remaining between himself and the landing. Seventeen steps. Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen. Less than ten. And then he did move faster, covering the last several in leaps and bounds. He came to a stop on the landing and felt that he knew what it was like to climb Mt. Everest. Hell, Mt. Everest was for pussies. What did a simple mountain have on a haunted stairwell?

Well, maybe it wasn’t haunted.

He decided that wasn’t the precise right word-but he did know this was a place that had absolutely nothing to do with the natural world.

And he knew one other thing.

He wanted out.

Now.

He studied the door. It was made of much simpler stuff than the previous two he had encountered. In fact, it was made of wood. There was no electronic keypad to either side of it. There didn’t appear to be any locking mechanism of any kind. Just a simple brass doorknob. All he had to do was reach out, grasp it, and turn it. …

Then he thought of how deceptive appearances often were here.

And he thought of the skewered couple in the security room. The perpetrator of that act was probably somewhere on the other side of this door. The idea of encountering that abomination chilled him to the core, but he knew there was no going back.

And he couldn’t just stand here on this landing forever.

So he took a deep breath.

Gripped the knob.

And turned it until the door began to ease away from the frame.

Setting aside decades of ingrained agnosticism, he muttered a prayer and entered the devil’s home.

The entity the denizens of Below called The Master was several centuries old. His existence on this plane spanned more than three quarters of a millennium, but when he was in his human guise, his appearance was that of a gray-haired man in his early sixties. He could adopt the appearance of a much younger man, but he’d found most humans treated their elders with a degree of deference he enjoyed. It established their subservience from the beginning.

And that was the real jewel at the heart of the game. A creature of such longevity needed amusements, and he enjoyed the games he played with the humans. Like bugs mired in a spider’s web, they didn’t realize they’d entered the devil’s den until it was too late to get away. He loved to taunt them, to strip away their layers of false civility and pride, to torment them until they were just broken, sniveling shells. Some he would kill, preferably as their friends and loved ones were made to watch, others he would banish Below, where they would do the work that honored his own dark gods and allowed him to exist in this haunted corridor of the world, a darkly enchanted place that was simultaneously of the natural world and beyond it.

He stared at the reflection of his human mask in a mirror in his chambers. He saw a handsome, distinguished face, an artfully crafted facade. He knew what he would see should he choose to lift the mask. In neither instance would he see the visage of a deity. His kind was flesh and blood. Like all the other creatures of the world. In the end, his special abilities would not save him. The knowledge he possessed of his own nature was limited to what little he was able to glean from ancient texts he knew to have been penned by his forebears. He knew his natural life cycle was approximately a thousand years, an arc he was three quarters of the way through. The two to three hundred years remaining to him would seem an eternity to lesser beings, but to a creature that had already lived so long this stretch of time seemed terribly finite.

Two hundred years.

Maybe three.

A drop in the celestial bucket.

He tilted his head to one side then the other, focused his concentration, and deepened the shade of gray around his temples. He examined this final touch, smiled, and found it satisfactory. He pulled on a tweed jacket he’d removed from the corpse of an Englishman in the 1930s, slid on an Oxford class ring (from another Englishman of the same approximate vintage), and left his chambers.

For the time being, he shunted aside disquieting thoughts of mortality.

There was much to do tonight.

He stepped into the darkened hallway, grinned like a Halloween ghoul, and went downstairs to meet the newest arrival.

Mark Cody fiddled with his Zippo lighter, flipping the top up and down, up and down, and stared nervously about the room. It was a large den, anchored by a suitably impressive fireplace and lined with bookshelves. He was sitting at the edge of a plush sofa, his knees inches from an oak coffee table. There was an ashtray on it, but there was something off-putting about its pristine appearance-it looked never to have been touched by falling ash.

Mark sighed. He was in desperate need of a soothing brace of nicotine, but he wasn’t sure whether he should light up. There was something not right about this place. Oh, he’d been happy to see the woman in her black Bentley, that Ms. Wickman, when she’d shown up next to his deceased Volvo.

Strange thing, that.

The car was barely a year old and it was down for the count. The engine didn’t even attempt to turn over when he twisted the key in the ignition. There was only that annoying click. He supposed the battery was dead, even though he’d always been careful about not doing anything dumb to run it down, like leaving the headlights on when he went into work.

So it was just dead. And he’d been in the probably pointless process of locking it up when the Bentley’s headlights came into view up the road. He remembered the sigh of relief that shuddered through him. He sure hadn’t been looking forward to that hike into town, whichever town it was, and he’d initially been effusive in his gratitude when the Bentley slowed and the driver’s-side window slid down.

Then he got a look at Ms. Wickman.

An attractive woman in a way, but there was something oh so cold about her.

Still, he got into the Bentley and rode with her up the winding stretch of rural highway until they arrived at the place she called “The Master’s home.” She’d mentioned this person during each of her terse contributions to the en route conversation.

The Master.

Sheesh.

Mark shook his head. The term conjured images of counts in castles in old black-and-white movies. But the place could hardly be called imposing, at least from outside. It was big enough, the kind of home that would go for half a mill in the suburbs, but it hardly seemed the proper residence for a person whose employees addressed him as “The Master.”

He stopped scoffing the moment he was inside the house.

There were no bodies hanging from meat hooks. He hadn’t wandered onto the set of a Wes Craven movie. But there was something undeniably… off… in the house. The atmosphere inside was charged with a palpable sense of danger. He jumped at every flicker of shadow. When Ms. Wickman asked him if something was wrong, he tried not to notice the hint of a smirk tugging at one corner of her mouth.

She’d instructed him to have a seat in the den, perhaps pour himself a drink from the bar, and await The Master’s arrival. He’d feigned a lighthearted tone and asked for The Master’s real name, but she’d only stared at him with the stoniest expression this side of Mt. Rushmore.

So here he was.

Still waiting.

Flipping the Zippo top up and down.

Up and down.

Then, the hell with it, a flicker of flame, and the Marlboro wedged into the corner of his mouth flared to life. He sucked in a deep lungful of smoke, savored it for one very sweet moment, then slowly expelled it. He immediately felt better. But only a little. A grandfather clock ticked away in a corner. Click. Click. Like the tocking of a clock in the death chamber as it approached midnight.

He thought about this person, The Master.

Whatever else he was, he had to be one pompous son of a bitch.

He started to draw in another lungful of smoke as he heard the slap of loafers on the hardwood floor. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, wedged it into a notch of the ashtray, and stood up.

He frowned.

This was The Master?

He tried to suppress a smirk but didn’t altogether succeed. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but this wasn’t it. He’d been prepared for someone imposing, maybe a combination of old-time plantation owner and present-day cracker businessman. But this guy wasn’t anything like that. Shit, this old duffer looked like his classics professor back at Southern Florida State.

Then he opened his mouth. “Mr. Cody, I presume?”

Mark extended a hand. “That’s me.” He made the smirk morph into a smile that oozed false sincerity. “Pleased to meet ya.”

The old man smiled. “Likewise.”

Mark cleared his throat. “Say… would I be out of line by asking your real name? Ms. Wickman wouldn’t tell me.”

The man pursed his lips and gave a professorial nod. “Ms. Wickman is a devoted … employee.”

Mark cranked the smile up another notch. “Yeah, well, we ain’t strangers here anymore, eh? Now that we’ve introduced ourselves, I mean.”

The man regarded him with a faintly bemused smile, started to say something, then inclined his head toward the doorway through which he’d entered. Mark frowned, glanced in the same direction, and saw nothing.

“Um…” Mark cleared his throat again. “As I was saying …”

The man shifted his gaze back to Mark. His smile was broader now, more genuinely amused-by what Mark didn’t know, but the expression was unnerving. “My name is irrelevant. You wouldn’t be able to pronounce it. It’s from a language with only one living practitioner.”

The old man laughed, a sound that was surprisingly hearty. Mark found it disturbing in the extreme. “Now, I have a question for you.”

Mark grunted. “Oookay…” He threw up his arms. “You didn’t answer my question, not really, just kind of in a doublespeak, politician kind of way, but what the hell, I guess I’m just a more gracious guy” His smile was completely sincere now. “So fire away, pops.”

Something flared in the old man’s eyes now. Something vaguely predatory. “You’re aware, aren’t you, that your country’s surgeon general has deemed smoking hazardous to your health?”

Mark laughed. “Sure.” He picked up the smoldering cigarette, puffed on it until the end flared back to life. “What about it?”

The old man indicated his cigarette with a nod. “A vice I rarely indulge these days, but I wonder if I might have one of yours?”

Mark shrugged in a magnanimous way, extracted the pack of Marlboros from his coat pocket, and tossed it over to the old man. “Have at ‘em, pops.”

The old man turned the pack over and over in his hands, studying it. Then he again fixed his gaze on Mark. The predatory gleam in his eyes burned brighter now. He extracted a single cigarette from the pack and approached Mark, who, thinking the old man wanted a light, extended the Zippo. The man swatted the lighter away with a flick of his wrist and it went flying over the sofa.

A wave of terror surged through Mark. The whole of his consciousness was occupied by a single concept: Get away from the crazy man right now!

He heard the front door open.

Then voices.

He lurched in that direction. But the old man seized him about the throat and pushed him down onto the sofa. Mark wheezed, struggled desperately for air. He felt like he was drowning. The old man showed him the package of cigarettes. The crinkled cellophane wrapping reflected the crackling light from the fireplace.

His nostrils flared. Something about his face seemed to be changing. Mark would have screamed had he been capable of it.

“These things will be the death of you, boy!” He showed Mark a death’s-head grin, a rictus of cruel humor. “Don’t you know that?”

The Master forced Mark’s mouth open.

And fed him the cigarette he’d removed from the package.

Then the rest of them, one after another.

Until he choked on them.

The Accord swooped around the curving exit ramp, and its passengers cried out in surprise. Dream experienced a flash of guilt, but scaring her warring friends seemed the only way to get them to cease hostilities. The Accord hugged the turn until the ramp straightened out. Then they were on a two-lane road even narrower and darker than the interstate. This stretch of road seemed devoid of streetlamps, which was worrisome, but it was the last thing Dream gave a damn about at the moment.

She pushed the brake pedal to the floor, brought the car to a stop on the road’s shoulder, wrenched the gear to neutral, and got out, slamming the door behind her. She stalked away from the car, came to a stop a few dozen feet away, turned her head to the sky, and let out a piercing cry of frustration. Then every muscle in her body went slack, and she sank to her knees. Warm asphalt scuffed her bare flesh, but she hardly noticed. She was too weary to feel pain. She crossed her legs beneath her, cupped her face in her hands, and finally shed the tears she’d been holding back.

A few moments passed while she sat there at the edge of the cone of light projected by the Accord’s headlights. Then a door opened. Someone got out. She heard the solid thunk of the door being thrown shut, followed by the slap of sandals on asphalt. Dream didn’t bother to peek through her fingers to see who it was.

There was no need.

Alicia Jackson sat down beside her on the asphalt, draped a slim brown arm around her friend’s shoulders, and said, “You okay, sweetheart?”

Dream released one more shuddery sob, sniffled, and wiped tears from her face. “Yeah …” She cleared her throat. “Sorry.”

“Good.” Alicia gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “In a minute I’d like you to tell me why you did this, but first I think we ought to get up and move farther away from the road.”

Dream looked past her knees and realized for the first time how close she was to the yellow line separating the road from the shoulder. “I guess this is a little dangerous.”

Alicia got up with her, keeping a hand on one of Dream’s elbows. Dream wobbled a bit as she got to her feet, but Alicia managed to keep her upright. Then they clasped hands and walked slowly back to the Accord. The rest of its passengers were still inside, watching them with what Dream imagined was a new understanding of her boundaries. Perhaps they would be more sensitive now, less willing to tamper with her already fragile sense of emotional stability.

Or maybe it was just fear she was sensing.

Or anger.

She experienced a flash of guilt, became aware of a gray cloud gathering in her brain, a vague numbness that normally preceded the onset of a bad depressive episode. She was seized by a sudden impulse to apologize. Never mind that her abrupt deviation from the interstate might well have prevented a catastrophic highway accident. She’d done the right thing, something she recognized intellectually-but that didn’t matter.

She’d frightened her friends.

They were probably upset with her.

Could be they even hated her. Why not? There was a lot of hate going around. Hell, she had plenty to spare, most of it self-directed.

It was stupid.

Senseless.

But there you go.

The Accord’s dome light was on, and Dream saw that its remaining occupants were still arguing, albeit in a somewhat less heated manner. Dream wanted to shake them all, make them come to their senses, see that they ought to treat each other better and with more respect. Yeah, right. She’d have an easier time preaching tolerance at a white supremacy rally.

They reached the Accord and Dream slumped down on its hood. Alicia stood in front of her, her arms crossed over her chest. “Now we should talk, girl.”

Dream sighed. “How could Dan have done this to me, Alicia?” Her eyes moistened again. “Why do these terrible things keep happening to me? All I want is a normal life. All I want is somebody to love me. Why can’t I have that?”

Now it was Alicia’s turn to sigh. “Honey, I know you’ve had a rough time. Trust me, though, this really isn’t the time to deal with this.” She paused. “And I think I ought to do any driving there might be left to do tonight.”

But Dream couldn’t let the question go. Not yet. “Why, Alicia?”

Alicia shook her head. “Shit, you’re really going to make me do this, aren’t you?” She took a deep breath. “This keeps happening to you because you’ve never gotten over that insufferable little asshole in the backseat.” She raised a hand to stifle Dream’s protest. “Don’t insult me with your denials. I know you, girl. Here’s a hard truth, sweetie, and I want you to take this to heart. Whatever you saw in him originally is gone. He lost his humanity the moment that World Lit frump popped his cherry. He became like every other loser you’ve ever attached yourself to-obnoxious and full of himself.” She released a big breath. “It’s time you moved on, Dream.”

Dream pouted, breathed a petulant sigh. “Why can’t I attract a real man?”

Alicia’s voice was thick with frustration. “Goddamn, Dream. The only real man is one who’ll treat you with respect and dignity. It’s high time you got clued in to that.”

Dream flinched. “Oh …”

“Sorry.” Alicia continued in a softer tone. “Try to really listen to me and stop being such a little drama queen. I know you, Dream. You’re better than that.”

Dream looked away from her friend and didn’t say anything.

The discourse on Dream’s failed romantic life was brought to a merciful end by the sound of the others getting out of the Accord. Chad Robbins, hands in his pockets, sauntered over to where Alicia was standing. “She okay?”

Dream gasped at the sight of Alicia’s hand snapping hard across Chad’s startled face. “No, motherfucker, she’s not okay. Now go away!”

Chad adjusted his glasses, rubbed his stinging flesh, and said, “Well, so much for the caring, sensitive approach. Fuck both of you.”

Shane Wallace shook his head at all of them, swung his legs over the guardrail, and disappeared into a stand of trees. Karen Hidecki reached the gathering at the front of the car and staggered to a slow halt. “Shane’s taking a leak. I would, too, but I don’t wanna go in the woods.”

Chad snorted. “The toxic twosome. One day pictures of your livers will be shown to middle-school students as a warning on the dangers of alcohol abuse.”

Karen frowned. “How’d you get to be so mean, Chad?”

Alicia looked at him. “I’d like to know the answer to that myself.”

Chad smirked. “Lots of people would like to know what makes me tick. I’m just a fascinating guy. But I have a few questions of my own I’d like answered, starting with where the hell are we and why are we here?”

Dream said, “Somewhere a little east of Chattanooga. And we’re here because a few of my friends stopped acting like civilized human beings.”

“And once again the unassailable Dream Weaver, she of the single stupidest name in recorded history, laughably attempts to place herself on the moral high road.” The mocking tone, a stable of Chad’s verbal arsenal, had long ago lost its ability to sting. What was shocking to Dream was the unadulterated anger in his voice. This was something new, these outward displays of hatefulness. “Allow me to remind you of a few key things, your highness. One, tricky maneuvers involving automobiles and hairpin curves are best left to professional racers. They certainly should not be performed by unmedicated manic-depressives, especially not by PMS-ing manic-depressives. Two, and I think I should emphasize this as dramatically as possible…” Here his voice rose drastically in pitch. “YOU ALMOST GOT US FUCKING KILLED, YOU STUPID FUCKING BLOND BIMBO BITCH!”

Karen Hidecki said, “Whoa … oh, wow …”

“Chad,” Alicia said, calmer than Dream would ever have imagined her friend being under circumstances such as these, “I know you don’t give a damn about anybody’s feelings but your own, but I’m telling you to keep a lid on your bullshit. Otherwise I’ll have to hurt you. That’s not a threat, it’s a promise.”

Karen turned her sullen face away from the line of trees. “You’ll have help, too.”

Then her gaze went back to the impenetrable darkness of the forest. Heartache was evident in every nuance of her posture and facial features. She exuded regret in a way that was almost a physical presence. It was painful to observe.

Dream slid off the Accord’s hood and approached Chad, who instinctively backpedaled a step. She took a grim satisfaction in the look of utter surprise on his face. Well, he would be surprised, of course-a genuine act of confrontation would be the last thing Chad would expect from her.

She stepped right up to him. “What did I ever do to you, Chad?” She strove to make her voice as calm as Alicia’s, hoped to fill it with even a fraction of that same withering quality. “I really would like to know, because I’ve never been anything but a friend to you. I’ve supported you through every crisis in your life. I’ve been your shoulder to cry on when girlfriends left you. I’ve thought about it, really dredged my fucking memory, and I can’t think of a single thing I’ve done to warrant this viciousness. But obviously there’s something I’m missing. Please do me the favor of telling me what it is. You owe me that much.”

Chad glared at her for another long moment, then the hardness went out of his face, like air escaping from a balloon. His shoulders sagged and he suddenly seemed very tired. Like the rest of them. “Okay” he said, sighing. “There is something.”

Alicia grunted. “This should be rich.”

Chad opened his mouth to say something, then appeared to hesitate. Finally, he said, “I don’t know if I should tell you.” Another hesitation. “You might want to kill me.”

Dream felt a nameless terror rising in the back of her mind. She was right on the cusp of knowing what he was talking about. “No…”

Chad nodded. “Yeah.” A sheepish expression distorted his features. “I’ve known about your little secret all along, Dream.”

Dream shot a horrified glare at Alicia. “You didn’t?”

The exasperated look on Alicia’s face was enough to dispel her suspicion, though. “I never said a goddamn word, Dream. I keep my word, girl.”

They heard Karen sigh. “I told him.” She kept her back turned to them. “I guess I’m just full of character defects. No honor.” Her voice grew quiet. “Not worthy of trust.”

Chad rolled his eyes. “Break out the violins and strike up the self-pity orchestra. Jesus Christ.” His gaze fixed on Dream. “Let’s stop fucking around and get this all out in the open. I’ve known all along about your so-called suicide attempt. What’s funny is how you went to great lengths to cover up such a stupid plea for attention. You had to know it would get back to me somehow. And why is it I can’t stop thinking that was what you wanted all along-to make me feel guilty for failing to fall at your feet and pledge my undying devotion? You need help, Dream. Serious help. And you need to stop laying your troubles at my feet. It’s not fair.”

Dream’s eyes brimmed with tears again.

She wrenched her gaze away from him. “You asshole. …”

Chad grunted. Dream didn’t need to see the smirk on his face to know it was there. “Yeah, I’m an asshole. And you’re the most selfish-“

Dream didn’t know what she was doing until she had done it. Her clenched fist struck Chad’s midsection with a force that surprised both of them. It was the first time in her life she’d hit anyone in anger. Chad clutched his stomach, bent over, and gasped for air. His glasses slid from his face and tumbled to the asphalt, where they landed with a crack.

There was a long period of relative silence during which the only sound was that of Chad’s attempts to regain his breath. Dream knew right away her friends were shaken by the sight of her assaulting another human being. Sure, Chad probably deserved some form of punishment, maybe even a good thrashing, but no one would have expected Dream to administer it. Dream was kindhearted. Dream was a hippy-dippy pacifist who listened to Phish and fawned over every puppy she met. Dream wore tie-dyed T-shirts and always had a flower in her hair in the springtime. She was a kind of benevolent earth goddess. She was, well, a flake.

This wasn’t that Dream, the one they all knew and loved.

This was a tigress.

“Damn you for making me do that, Chad.” She sniffled again. “Damn you.”

Alicia touched her elbow. “Easy, Dream.”

Dream flinched from the touch. She wasn’t ready to be consoled. She wasn’t done addressing Chad, either. “It breaks my heart to say this, but you better know I mean it.

I don’t ever want to see you again after this. You can officially absolve yourself of any guilt, real or imagined, I may have caused you.”

Chad held his stomach a moment longer. He examined his broken glasses and cast them aside. He wore them for nearsightedness, but he could see okay without them. He got shakily to his feet. “Okay.” There was a note of sad resignation in his voice. “I guess that’s the way it has to be.”

“Thank God,” Alicia said. “This is eons overdue, if you ask me.”

“Amen “Karen said.

Chad sneered. “Hypocrite.”

Alicia shot a warning glance at Chad, then addressed Dream. “Sweetie, do you have an Atlas in your car? A Mobil guide?”

Chad shook his head. “What do you want, a four-star hotel? Let’s just find the nearest Rathole Inn and call it a night.”

Alicia smirked. “Appropriate, since you are a rat.”

Dream looked at Alicia. “I don’t have an Atlas or anything like that. There was one in Dan’s car, but… well…” She turned her hands up helplessly. “But I saw one of those road signs with symbols on it before I pulled off the interstate. I’m pretty sure there was one of those lodging icons on it.”

Alicia nodded. “Okay, so if we drive a little bit down this road, we ought to come to one of those clusters of motels and convenience stores soon enough.”

Dream said, “I think so.”

The discussion about what to do next continued as Karen Hidecki drifted away from them. She reached the guardrail and stood there as she studied the stand of trees. Shane was out there somewhere. She strained to detect any evidence of his presence, but there was nothing-just darkness and the occasional flicker of shadow as the breeze stirred tree limbs. Something about the inscrutable blackness disturbed her, made her hug herself even though the night was warm. It occurred to her that Shane had been out there a long time.

Almost as if on cue, a scream emanated from somewhere in the woods.

A scream of pain, judging from the shrillness of the cry.

Karen’s heart lurched.

Shane!

She vaulted the guardrail, scrambled up the slight rise, and plunged into the woods. She didn’t realize what an impediment her alcohol-slowed reflexes would be until she ran into a low-hanging tree limb a second after seeing it. The limb smacked her forehead and sent her tumbling to the forest floor, where the back of her head struck something hard and unyielding. She never lost consciousness, but everything went gray for a moment, and she only caught a fuzzy glimpse of the creature that emerged from the shadows to stand over her. She sensed only that it was something very large and entirely outside her experience. It seemed to contemplate her for a moment, the way a patron of a restaurant would study a slab of meat prior to impaling it with knife and fork, then its head jerked up at the sound of her approaching friends.

They were calling her name, getting closer by the moment.

Then it was gone.

Karen blinked her eyes in surprise. There hadn’t even been enough time to be properly scared, but now a tsunami-sized wave of terror was sweeping in, oh, yes.

“What the fuck was that?” she panted.

She heard a crackling of branches somewhere in front of her, then a brutal burst of knowledge arrived in her head fully formed.

Shane had already encountered that… thing.

Which meant…

“SHANE!”

She started to get up, but then a hand fell on her shoulder and held her down. She screamed.

Eddie proceeded the only way imaginable under the circumstances-with the most extreme degree of caution he could muster. He was in the kitchen of The Master’s home. It looked much the same as he remembered from his prior experience. Here was the same large, wellstocked pantry. In the middle of the room was a large island with cupboards and a sink. Beyond it was a table, the same one at which he’d partaken of his last normal meal prior to his imprisonment Below.

He’d arrived here some six months earlier, a lost and weary traveler in search of a telephone. He had been returning from a business trip to North Carolina, where he’d assisted in setting up a new distribution center for the company that employed him, when his car-a year-old Lexus-began to sputter and cough. He’d pulled off the highway in desperation, figuring he would call Triple A from his cell phone. Only his cell phone, a brand-new, company-provided Motorola, had also decided to stop working.

Eddie was a low-key guy, laid-back and not given to fits of temper; he chalked up the mechanical failures to a quirk of fate, the kind of thing he could turn into a funny story at the next corporate meeting. So he got out of his car and started walking, certain he would soon reach a place to crash for the night. In the morning he would call Triple A from a phone provided by the hotel. They would tow his car and soon he would be on his way in a Hertz rental.

Things didn’t work out quite that way.

He walked and walked for what seemed like forever. He was good at judging distance by foot from his days on the high school track team. A mile went by. Two. Three. He began to tire. Huffing and puffing, he stopped to try his cell phone one more time. Nothing. So he trudged on. Five miles and no sign of civilization. Okay, there was a winding asphalt road, bordered on each side by guardrails. Clearly man-made stuff. But he hadn’t encountered even one road sign, not one billboard, nothing at all to indicate he was in a populated area. Which was just absurd. He knew where he was. He’d passed through Knoxville not long before the Lexus started misbehaving. So there should be something. Some tiny telltale indication of a human presence.

But there was nothing.

He was beginning to despair when his eyes detected the faint pinpoint of a distant car’s headlights winding along a curve in the road. He listened to it draw nearer, suddenly all too aware of how rarely he himself stopped for hitchhikers, which was approximately never. As the car entered a straightaway that led to where Eddie was standing, he stepped into the center of the road and began waving his arms up and down.

He remembered thinking, I look like a crazy man.

The car, a sleek black Bentley slowed down as it approached him, but instead of going around him it drew to a stop beside him and the driver’s-side window whirred down. He walked over and peered down into the face of a stern-faced woman, whose hair was pulled back into a tight black bun. Her face was implacable and ghost-pale as she listened to his tale of woe.

After babbling for what seemed like a day or so, Eddie concluded with, “So, if you could get me to the nearest hotel, I would be forever in your debt.” He fumbled for his wallet. “I could pay you a generous-“

The woman’s expression didn’t change as she said, “Get in.”

Eddie thought there was something strange about her, but he’d been in no position to hesitate or question why she was so willing to pick up a total stranger. She told him only that she would take him to her employer’s house, where he could use a phone.

“A hotel would be better,” he’d said.

To which she hadn’t replied.

He was happy to no longer be stranded, so he didn’t press the matter.

And so it was that he’d arrived at the house he was once again in. An unassuming two-story abode that sat hunched against an East Tennessee mountain. He was too tired to be disturbed by its utter isolation. He wouldn’t know it for a few more hours yet, but his life as a free man had come to an end the moment the front door swung shut. There had been times since when he’d thought this season in hell would never end, but maybe there was hope after all.

So get moving, he thought.

He padded slowly through the kitchen on his bare feet. He stopped at the island to extract a long carving knife from a wooden block. The knife would provide precious little defense against The Master himself, but just being armed at all made him feel a little better.

A few more quiet, shuffling steps and he was out of the kitchen. He peered around a corner into a hallway. To his left, at the far end of the hallway, was the closed front door of the house. He willed himself to resist the impulse to immediately dash in that direction. He had to be patient, had to make sure no one was watching. To his immediate right was a staircase that led to a series of bedrooms and The Master’s chambers.

The devil’s playground.

The memory of his one night ensconced in one of the second-floor rooms made him shiver-a return trip to that place would be nearly as bad as a return Below.

He shuffled past the staircase and peered around another corner. He saw a plushly decorated living room with opposing sofas, a coffee table, bookshelves, and a bar. Eddie remembered this room, too-it was where The Master entertained “guests.” He heard a low murmur of voices issuing from the far end of the room.

Two male voices.

Eddie sucked in a breath.

One of them—

The Master.

The timbre of that hated voice was unmistakable.

Eddie edged away from the corner and stood staring at the closed front door, wondering if he should make a run for it now or spend more precious time looking for an alternate way out. He was smart enough to know the latter choice was the only sensible one, but something primal in him rebelled against the notion of spending even one extra moment in this house of horrors.

Gotta get out, he thought.

Eddie trembled and took a shaky step toward the door. His heart racing, he took another step. And another. He kept expecting The Master to suddenly appear before him, all imposing six-feet-plus of him, leering at Eddie like a raincoat-wearing pervert as he closed in for a quick kill. Or perhaps he would toy with Eddie the way a cat does with a trapped mouse. The latter seemed far more likely.

He took another careful step.

Then froze.

Shit!

He heard a muffled jangle of keys from the other side of the door. His breath caught in his throat as he watched the knob begin to turn. It was the bitch, returning with yet another new fly caught in The Master’s web. The sadistic “housekeeper.” Ms. Wickman, she was called, but Eddie had come to think of her as “lisa of the Manor.” She wasn’t quite as voluptuous and strangely alluring as Dyanne Thome, that cinematic icon of bondage and discipline, but this woman was the real thing, the personal overseer of the methodical torture administered to The Master’s newly arrived guests.

There wasn’t anyone he feared as much as The Master.

But one person came close.

lisa of the motherfucking Manor.

Without thinking about what he was doing-there wasn’t time for thought-Eddie turned and raced up the stairs. When he remembered where he was going and the horrors that awaited him, he had to suppress a scream. An impulse to turn around and go back flashed through him, but he dismissed it as the closed option it had obviously become. He reached the second-floor landing, looked down the long, empty hallway he’d entered, and trembled. There were rooms here that resembled normal bedrooms, but they were all equipped with cleverly concealed implements of the sort favored by sophisticated sadists everywhere. Other rooms, usually locked to prevent premature entrance by new arrivals, were full-scale torture chambers.

Eddie performed a speedy analysis of his current situation and decided death at his own hands might be the best option all around. He looked at the carving knife and tried to imagine piercing his own flesh with it. But not his wrists, of course. Too slow a way to get the job done. He’d have to slash his own throat.

He grimaced at the image.

Aw, fuck it.

The door downstairs opened, and he heard his suspicions confirmed. Ms. Wickman had an accent that was vaguely British, like the way an expatriate Brit might sound after decades of living in the United States. Then there was another voice, a refined southern gentleman’s voice.

Some unfortunate old duffer who had no idea how dire his circumstances really were.

Eddie, unfortunately, was in no position to warn him.

He made himself focus on the content of their conversation. There was something about The Master being busy at the moment. In the meantime, the bitch said, she could show him to his room. There came a creak of old wood as the two began ascending the staircase.

The knife almost slipped from Eddie’s hand. He was shaking again. He clenched his hand tighter around the handle and willed the tremors still as he backed down the hallway. He was scared shitless. There was no way out, no obvious escape route available, but perhaps he could find a place to hide. He tried the knobs of the doors as he passed them, finding each one locked until his hand closed around one that yielded about midway down the hallway. He rushed into the room, then pushed the door quickly but gently shut. He turned the lock and backed into the room.

He turned away from the door and gasped at the sight of a girl emerging from the bathroom. She saw him a second later and opened her mouth wide. Eddie braced for the scream that would bring death running, but a low, susurring sound emanated from that open cavity. Eddie stared at her for a moment, his face a study in perplexity. Then it dawned on him-she was mute. She was also young, maybe fifteen or sixteen, with long black hair and porcelain skin. She was wearing a long dress made of velvet that exposed small, ghostly shoulders, and there was a scarlet choker around her thin throat. A tiny black kitten purred in her embrace even as it glared at Eddie.

She was the most beautiful thing Eddie had ever seen.

But he wasn’t so startled by her beauty that his self-preservation instincts were swept away. She was clearly one of The Master’s kept women. A Mistress (in the dispenser-of-pain-and-discipline sense of the word). She was beginning to edge back toward the open bathroom door. Eddie closed the gap between them before she could slip away, clamped a fistful of glistening black hair with one hand, and used the other to lay the blade of the knife against her throat. The kitten dropped to the floor.

His mouth pressed against her ear. “Listen to me, girl,” he whispered. “I don’t want to hurt you. I know I probably look like a maniac, but that’s only because I’ve had a really bad day.” More like a really bad six months, but who was counting? “Help me hide and we won’t have any problems.”

She struggled in his grip, and he wound his hand tighter in her hair, eliciting a small cry of pain. He felt bad about it, but he didn’t really have a choice. “Christ, what’s wrong with you?” His voice was a more insistent whisper. “I’m the one with the knife, little missy, so knock it off.”

He felt something rubbing against his ankle and looked down to see the kitten staring up at them. “Piss off, furball.”

The girl went rigid in his grip and hissed at him again. Eddie’s gaze went back to the kitten, which was still watching him with those creepy yellow eyes. A plan began to formulate in his head. He saw instantly it was his only hope, albeit a thin one. He released the girl and picked up the kitten, placing the knife at its puny neck. The girl whirled around and gaped at him in horror.

Eddie tensed for a moment as he heard voices in the hallway, getting closer by the moment, and he briefly believed his desperate run to freedom had reached the endgame stage. The voices grew louder. They were right outside the door. Then they were moving away down the hallway, growing dimmer.

Eddie released the breath he’d been holding.

“Okay,” he said, still keeping his voice low. “Here’s the deal. I don’t mean you or the kitty harm. I only want out of here. Help me hide out awhile, maybe even find a way to get me out of this place, and you won’t have to call PETA on me.” But now a measure of menace entered his voice. “Then again, fuck me over and furball gets skewered.” He turned the kitten’s face toward her. “Got it?”

Her eyes narrowed, became thin slits of rage, but she nodded.

“Good.”

Eddie looked around the room. It was dominated by a large four-poster bed with a heavy canopy of lavender velvet. In a corner next to it was a full-length oval mirror on a swivel stand. There was a chest of drawers and a vanity. He supposed he could hide under the bed, but the thought made him feel claustrophobic. He peeked inside the bathroom. He saw a Jacuzzi, a shower stall, and a lot of ornate fixtures.

He stepped all the way into the bathroom, peeked around the door, and saw a closet large enough to house an immigrant family. Eddie returned to the bedroom, glanced around one more time, and this time glimpsed the coiled cat-o’-nine-tails on the bedspread. The girl followed his gaze, smiled when she saw what he was looking at, and raised a lascivious eyebrow at him.

Eddie shuddered. “Think again. I got drawn in that way last time, didn’t I? One minute you’re playing a kinky game, the next you’re trussed up on a rack with clamps on your privates.”

The girl shrugged.

“Look, I know you’re one of them, but my gut tells me there’s a tiny uncorrupted corner of your soul. I think maybe your heart’s not as black and twisted as the other sick fuckers here. You know why I think that?”

The girl shook her head, a hint of a smirk appearing at one corner of her mouth.

But Eddie was undaunted. “Because you care whether this thing lives or dies. Hey, I still only trust you about as far as I can bowl you, but I think there’s a chance I’ll be okay as long as I’ve got your little friend.” He sighed. “And, fuck it, I’m about out of other options. I’ll hide in your closet for a bit. I guess they’ll be looking for me soon, but I’m willing to bet you could convince them I’m not here. Am I right?”

The girl appeared to think about it a moment, then nodded.

“Great.” Eddie edged toward the bathroom. “Now you think about what I told you. Come up with a way to get me out of here. We can talk about it-” Eddie frowned. “Shit. Do you have paper and something to write with?”

She nodded again.

“Good.” He stepped into the bathroom. “Say good night to kitty? He gazed again into her cold, calculating eyes. “And keep thinking about what might happen if you double-cross me. Think about kitty guts spilling on the floor.”

The kitten meowed softly.

The girl stared a plea at him.

“Don’t worry,” Eddie said, strangely compelled to offer reassurance. “He’ll be fine. Good night, now.”

He walked into the closet and pulled the door shut. A row of long dresses hung from a rail. He slipped behind them, feeling their silky smoothness brush his bare torso. Then he arranged himself in a dark corner of the floor, held the kitten close, and cooed at it.

It watched him with its strangely luminescent eyes.

Shane Wallace liked to think of himself as a guy’s guy. The kind of hearty slab of macho attitude lesser men aspired to be like. An object of envy. A stud whose mere presence in a room got the ladies purring with desire. His days as a star running back at his high school were a decade in the past, but his body still looked cut from granite. Female heads turned wherever he went, a phenomenon that might have been an ego-booster had his ego ever been in need of boosting.

Such was not the case.

Shane Wallace wasn’t just about surface shit, though. Sure, he liked his chicks hot, but he wasn’t a shallow bastard. He was really a deep kind of guy. Sensitive but stoic, the way a real man should be-like Mel Gibson in the movies. A guy you could count on. He was a strong shoulder to cry on for the girls, a dependable drinking buddy to his male friends. He was the kind of guy you wanted on your side when life was fucking you in the ass. He often thought he would make a good movie hero. Hell, he had the looks, was quick with the one-liners, popular with the ladies, and he was-in his not even remotely humble opinion-definitely heroic.

So he was having a great deal of difficulty reconciling this deeply held self-image with his current predicament-hiding behind a tree and squatting bare-assed with his pants down around his ankles while people around him screamed and called out his name. Well, there was only one person calling his name, and he was pretty sure that voice belonged to Karen. It had that familiar grating quality about it.

That lying slut.

“Fuck,” he breathed.

Incredible.

A guy gets his guts ripped out by a girl he really does kinda care about, an experience without parallel in his past, and the bitch doesn’t even have the grace to allow him to do his business in peace. The indignity of it all made him fume.

Why would a foxy number like Karen bump uglies with a doof like Chad Robbins?

It offended his sense of order in the universe.

Basic rule of existence No. 1: Hot chicks don’t fuck nerds.

With the obvious exception of software billionaires.

Besides, girls didn’t cheat on Shane Wallace. Ever. Karen’s transgression was utterly without precedent in the long and varied history of his sexual conquests. Sure, he’d fooled around on every babe he’d ever boned, but that was different. Guys were allowed. They were slaves to what his old buddy Steve Wade, the captain of the SHS football team, used to call the “random jism-dispensation imperative.” Guys, in other words, were impelled by biology to spread their seed far and wide.

Girls had no such excuse.

Therefore, cheating was okay for guys but not for girls.

What could be more obvious?

A girl like Karen, well, you just couldn’t respect her, could you?

He glanced down at his still half-engorged member and experienced a rare flash of shame. Well, it just wouldn’t do to be caught flogging the dolphin by that pack of estrogen carriers. He got to his feet and pulled his pants up, pulling the zipper taut over his wilting erection. Resentment promptly displaced embarrassment.

It was their fault this was happening.

Karen’s friends were just too hot. He’d spent the bulk of the vacation and the long trip back thinking about what he would like to do to them. Oh, he thought they were ignorant, politically correct bitches, but he longed to bone one of them. Or both. That was the image that had pushed him over the edge, a vivid fantasy of being double-teamed by the blond bitch and her black friend. He’d spent the last hour of the ride staring at Dream’s bare shoulders and slender neck, exposed as they were in the orange tank top. Then Dream had her little meltdown and he’d unexpectedly been presented the opportunity to release some spare sperm.

Feigning more emotional trauma at Chad’s revelation than he really felt, he’d ventured into the woods, wandering a little farther out than necessary, just to ensure he wouldn’t be caught in the act. He figured he needed maybe five minutes, then the deed would be done. Things were going great for a couple of minutes. He was imagining the black bitch going down on him while Dream rubbed her sizable tits in his face. Then all hell broke loose.

Somebody-a woman, from the sound of it-was in a world of hurt somewhere deeper in the woods. There’d only been the one scream from that direction, and there was something ominous about that. There’d also been a flurry of movement in the vicinity, a wild rustling of leaves and branches-the sound of something enormous stomping about. Its location was hard to pinpoint-not that he felt particularly compelled to find it anyway, especially since whatever was making the goddamn racket had probably done something unspeakable to elicit the scream he’d heard.

Shane frowned, realizing this was the kind of sound a movie hero would investigate without hesitation-and without any apparent thought given to personal safety.

He thought about inbred backwoods psychos with hunting knives.

Okay, fuck the hero shit.

It was high time he was gone from this creepy-ass place. The decision made, he moved in the direction of the street, his mind already hard at work conjuring up a good story to cover up his cowardice.

From the sound of things, that wouldn’t be too hard. There was a lot of noise emanating from a place directly ahead of him. Karen screaming again. The shrill cunt. Christ, but breaking up with her was long overdue. She was a good-looking broad, but maybe he was done with his Asian phase.

Maybe he’d get himself a blond girlfriend next.

A flaky little bitch like Dream.

Or maybe even Dream herself.

Sure, why not-she was vulnerable enough now.

Shane was so lost in self-absorption and sexual obsession that he didn’t really hear the sound of snapping branches until the creature emerged from the shadows and stood before him. It was huge, maybe eight feet tall, and covered with matted, shaggy fur.

Dog, he thought, genetic mutant big-ass dog.

But, no, there was something decidedly lupine about this creature. …

“Holy crap.” The words popped out of him unbidden. “A fucking werewolf.”

The creature bared its fangs and snarled.

Shane staggered backward, stumbled over a rock, and collided with a tree. He leaned against the tree while the creature slowly approached. He knew he should run, but at the moment the whole of his mental and physical resources were occupied with the task of keeping him upright. But he was failing even at that-his legs shook beyond his ability to control, and he began to slide down the tree. As the creature got closer, he discerned a splash of fresh blood in its fur. Shane thought immediately of the mystery woman and figured her goose was cooked.

As was his own, he realized.

The creature loomed over Shane now, causing his nose to wrinkle at its horrid breath. The thing smelled as if it gargled with raw sewage. He stared up at its long snout, wincing as huge droplets of saliva splashed on his face. The teeth, of which there were so many, looked like rows of jagged knives. Its yellow eyes glowed faintly in the dark. Shane mumbled a genuinely contrite prayer as the beast slowly lowered its massive head toward his throat.

Then deliverance seemed to arrive in the form of Karen’s nearby voice. Funny, now it sounded like the voice of an angel. An angel of mercy. The creature’s head jerked around at the sound of approaching footsteps.

A voice whispered in Shane’s head: Run, dummy.

He had to do it. This moment of distraction might be the only chance he got to redeem himself. Suddenly full of religion, he swore to God he would be a better human being if only He got him out of this. Not only that, he would do his damnedest to make amends with Karen, who really wasn’t so bad a chick at all, and-

“SHANE!” Karen was closer than ever.

There were other voices, too.

Her friends, admonishing her to be careful and slow down.

Fuck that.

This was it, baby, movie hero time.

Shane felt the strength and power return to his athlete’s body, slamming back into him like a dose of lightning. He got to his feet and charged past the startled creature, running for daylight-figuratively, this being night-just like his glory days on the gridiron. He felt a moment of pure triumph and laughed, knowing he had won.

But then the beast was upon him.

Slashing and drawing blood. The ground rushed toward him. There was a thud. Everything went black.

Dream recoiled as Karen screamed and launched herself off the ground. She backed into Chad, who grunted and gripped her shoulder to stop her. Alicia swept past her and approached Karen, who was wild-eyed and on the verge of hyperventilating. Dream was shocked by the sight of her disheveled and obviously terrified friend.

Alicia laid a tentative hand on Karen’s shoulder. “Hey, girl, calm down. Take a deep breath and tell me what happened here. You see your man out here?”

“No.” Karen started backing away from them. “You heard the scream. Something happened to him.” A note of pleading entered her voice. “We’ve got to find him.” She sobbed. “You’ve got to help me.”

Alicia gripped her shoulder tighter. “Whoa, hold on. We heard the scream, sure, but I’ll tell you right now that wasn’t Shane Wallace.”

“It was obviously the sound of a female in distress,” Chad chimed in.

Alicia’s gaze never wavered from Karen. “Much as it pains me to agree with dickhead here, he’s right. The boy wouldn’t acknowledge pain that way. He’d be cursing up a storm.”

“The forest primeval would resound with ‘fuckers,’ ‘motherfuckers.’ and all the usual variations thereof,” Chad added.

This did little to calm Karen. “But you didn’t see that… that thing.”

Alicia frowned. “What are you talking about, sweetie?”

Agitation showed in Karen’s restless eyes. “I tripped over a rock.” She pointed to a spot near Dream and Chad. They were standing in a small circle of moonlight between the trees, a space just large enough to qualify as a clearing. “Knocked myself woozy. I wasn’t out, but everything went fuzzy for a minute. There was… something. Something big.” Terror edged back into her voice as she described what happened. “Something that wasn’t a man. Something that wasn’t even human. But it walked on two legs like a man. It was … it was …”

She started to sob again.

Chad quietly hummed the familiar notes of the X-Files theme.

Dream successfully resisted an impulse to ram an elbow into his stomach, but she wrenched her shoulder free of his grip and approached the other women. “Karen, what did this thing look like?”

Chad snorted. “You can’t be taking her seriously.”

Alicia said, “Ignore him.”

Frustration showed in Karen’s eyes. “I don’t know. I didn’t see it so much as sense it.” She sniffled. “Everything was shadows, shapes. But I could feel it standing over me. I could sense how big it was. And I could smell its breath. Oh, God …” She put a hand to her mouth. “I can’t tell you how awful that smell was.”

They all heard Chad’s exaggerated sigh. “Oh, Christ. So what we’re really talking about here is a tall hermit who hasn’t brushed his teeth in ten years. A deranged former Harlem Globetrotter, maybe. But we’re certainly not talking about, what, a monster?” He sneered at them. “Karen, do you realize how insane that sounds?”

Dream breathed a weary sigh. “You’re neither needed nor wanted here, Chad. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you’d go back to the car and wait while we sort things out with Karen.” An alien flicker of cruelty stirred within her, causing her to speak before she could reconsider the harshness of her words. “You heartless piece of shit. Somehow you got to be as ugly inside as you are outside.”

Dream winced at the sharp intake of breath from Alicia. She was instantly horrified at the sound of her own voice. That wasn’t her speaking those hurtful, terrible words. It couldn’t be. And, oh, how the tables had suddenly turned. A tide of shame welled within her. “I’m sorry, Chad.”

But the damage had been done.

Chad looked away from her. His chin trembled. “See, girls. Maybe this is why I’ve spurned her all these years, the monster lurking beneath the pretty exterior. Maybe I knew it was there all along.” His voice broke. “Good-bye, Dream. I’m out of here.”

He spun around, stepped back through the line of trees, and disappeared from view.

Dream’s heart lurched. “Chad-“

“Let him go.” Alicia’s voice was stern. “The sheer quantity of dysfunction is making me dizzy. He’s been goading you all night. You snapped and said something out of character. Let it go at that. We’ve more important things to tend to.”

Dream met Alicia’s unwavering gaze, derived some strength from it, and nodded. “Okay, what now?”

“We find Shane.” Karen’s voice was insistent, rife with impatience. “He could be hurt. He could be dead.”

She made a move to plunge again into the gloom, but Alicia restrained her. “Hold on. Let’s do this right this time. There a flashlight in your car, Dream?”

Dream nodded. “In the glove compartment.”

“Go get it, girl.” Alicia held Karen’s gaze. “We’ll go find your man when she gets back, okay?”

Dream moved in the direction of the road.

Karen said, “Wait!”

Dream hesitated, glancing first at Alicia then meeting Karen’s gaze. “Yes?”

“Shane didn’t want anyone to know, but there’s a gun in his bag. A Glock.” The admission seemed to pain her. “I don’t care what Chad says, there’s something out here.” She swallowed hard. “You should get the gun.”

Dream looked at Alicia. “I don’t know anything about guns.”

Alicia shrugged. “Shit, I sure don’t.” There was a new hint of nervousness in her voice. “And I’m not sure we should be fucking around with firearms anyway.”

Karen said, “Shane took me to the shooting range.” She was trying to sound confident, but her voice was still all ragged edges. “I know how to use it.”

Dream said, “I’ll look for it.”

But she thought, And I’ll leave the goddamn thing right where it is.

She decided to keep the sudden flare of anger she felt toward Shane to herself. The son of a bitch had transported a firearm over several state lines.

In her car!

Karen said, “Thank you.”

Dream moved again toward the road, but pulled up short when she heard Alicia say, “Hey… hear that?”

Dream frowned, and listened. “What? I-“

Alicia made a low shushing noise. “Listen!”

There was a moment of absolute stillness.

Then they heard it.

The sound of something approaching from deeper within the woods. Dream was suddenly very afraid. The rational part of her understood what they were hearing was probably just Shane finally returning from whatever he’d been doing-Dream had a strange, almost extrasensory inkling about that-but she was surprised to find a part of herself suddenly buying Karen’s giant monster story. The now significantly louder approach of lumbering footsteps filled her with dread. Her imagination supplied a very vivid image of some horror-movie abomination emerging from the darkness to eat them alive.

Something was flailing about out there. Something very clumsy, to judge from the sound of it. Then Dream detected another sound. She couldn’t quite make it out. It could have been a moan, or a low growl-the kind of sound a monster might make.

A nearby snapping of twigs made them all flinch.

Dream gasped.

It was even closer than she’d thought.

Run! her mind implored her.

Her feet managed a backward a step or two before the presence finally emerged from the darkness and into the little clearing.

It was Shane.

Only, he was nearly impossible to recognize. He was covered in blood, and his clothes were shredded rags. He staggered toward them, his mouth opening as he attempted to tell them something, but blood burbled out instead. He took one more unsteady step, wobbled, and crashed to the ground.

Karen sank to her knees beside him and wailed.

Dream heard another scream.

Her own.

Chad was more than a quarter mile down the road by the time the situation he was leaving behind attained genuine crisis status. His travel bag was slung over his right shoulder, and he was walking briskly. He was in excellent condition from daily workouts at the neighborhood gym, so a walk into town wouldn’t be too taxing. Of course, he wasn’t so sure how far away this theoretical town was, but he had little doubt an oasis of civilization would be nearby. Soon he’d reach one of those little clusters of mcDonald’s restaurants and Holiday Inns that were so liberally interspersed at regular intervals along the major highways. Any minute now he’d round a bend in the road and the golden arches would be looming in the distance. He didn’t doubt he was doing the right thing by leaving his former friends. Alicia was right, damn her-this break was long overdue. He’d outgrown them. The prospect of a future without the girls was at once exhilarating and frightening. He would establish an identity that wasn’t informed by mostly female perspectives. Yet he couldn’t deny the encroaching feeling of bittersweet regret that was gaining a foothold in his heart. It was a kind of grief, he supposed, the loss one feels at the passage of youth. They’d been such good friends in the old days. He’d always been closest to Dream, but he’d known Alicia since high school and Karen since sophomore year of college.

A sliver of doubt slowed his pace somewhat.

Don’t! a stern voice in his head admonished him.

This was the voice of independence, he realized. The voice he’d been listening to as he stormed out of the woods with Dream’s words echoing in his head. He didn’t like to make major life decisions based on emotional impulse, but he felt now was the time for a bold, unusual move. So he reached inside the unlocked Accord, popped the trunk open, retrieved his bag, and started moving.

And those first steps down the path toward a new life had been so intoxicating. So much so he resented this new infusion of doubt. He wanted to believe himself righteous, but his conscience betrayed him, reminding him of his shameful series of trysts with Karen Hidecki. The guilt he’d been holding at bay for months threatened to emerge from a locked door of his subconscious. His pace slowed, and he realized he was contemplating a return to the Accord.

No! railed the admonishing voice.

It was almost a scream now.

Chad suspected it might not really be the voice of independence. That instead it was a manifestation of intense emotional pain. Of deep hurt. A memory of Dream in high school entered his mind like a taunt from the nether regions of his psyche.

One day after school he’d made the mistake of wandering too near the football team’s practice field. He was new to the school, but he’d already been marked as a loner and a geek. Nobody liked him. Nobody talked to him. This kind of exclusion from the social hierarchy of high school-he wasn’t even a Loser, a status that would have at least afforded him membership in a recognized clique-might have bothered him more if not for the transitory nature of his childhood.

His father was a military man and they moved around a lot.

But he was oblivious to all that now as he walked in the late-summer sunlight, reading from an open paperback as he walked. A group of the football players saw him as he strayed from the path that led from the rear of the school to the nearby public library. He was drawn by the sight of a picnic table. The Gatorade dispensers and stacks of plastic cups should have served as warning, but he was blissfully ignorant of the lurking danger. All he knew was that he was a little tired from the heat and needed a place to rest for a few moments. The picnic table had seemed like a good solution.

Until three very large football players were looming over him.

He remembered looking at their hostile faces and naively asking, “There a problem, guys?”

One of the players repeated his question with an exaggerated lisp.” ‘There a problem, guys?’”

He started to get up, but a big hand clamped around his wrist, wrenched his arm behind his back, and pushed him to his knees. Another player stood in front of him, flexing the fingers of a hand wrapped in tape. “I bet you wanted to watch us run around in our tight uniforms, didn’t you? You fucking butt pirates make me sick.”

Chad started to cry. “Please don’t hurt me.”

The tears and the plea elicited only more of that ugly laughter. Chad wanted to scream for help, but who would help him? Some of the other football players? That didn’t seem likely. A sense of hopelessness began to suffocate him. He wasn’t gay. Not that it mattered. The fucking jocks assumed anyone the slightest bit fey was homosexual. The word “tolerance” wasn’t in the jock dictionary. Their social order was simple, guided by one unyielding principle-the strong of the world exist to subjugate the weak.

They were the strong.

And he was definitely the weak.

Hence, he was fucked.

But then he became aware of another presence. There was a subtle shift in the stance of his tormentors, though they weren’t yet backing off. He heard female voices. A group of girlfriends, maybe, or cheerleaders. Great, they could do a sis-boom-bah routine while the athletes took turns using his head as a punching bag.

“What’s going on here?” he heard one of them say.

A leggy blonde pushed through the circle of players, saw Chad pinned to the ground, and unleashed an impressive display of verbal indignation. “What the fuck are you primates doing to this kid!?” She stepped right up to the player holding him down. “Let him go, Moose, or I’ll make sure Mr. Chandler hears all about this.”

Chad recognized the name of the school’s principal, and he was instantly filled with a new source of dread-the prospect of his father hearing about the incident. Chad liked to believe his father had no idea what a reject he was, and he desperately wanted to maintain the facade of a normal kid. A beating at the hands of strangers was infinitely more acceptable than that awful possibility.

But he didn’t yet know that Dream Weaver was one of the most popular girls at his new school. Or that her father was a close friend of Principal Chandler. So he was amazed when the football player who’d been holding him released him and began apologizing profusely to Dream.

“Hey, Dream,” he said, his voice full of patently false good humor. “We didn’t mean any harm, really. We were just messing around, giving the new kid a hard time. So chill, okay? It’s no biggie.”

Dream stepped right up to him. “Yeah, no biggie. Like your dick, Moose.”

Some of Dream’s girlfriends laughed.

The football player’s face went a bright shade of scarlet. “Come on, Dream. Lighten up. You know how it is. He’s a geek.”

“No, Moose, I don’t know how it is.” Chad listened to her in awe, unable to believe this girl was showing no fear as she assailed a boy more than twice her size. “But I know that beating up people smaller than you is a real limp-dick thing to do.”

They were gone moments later, thoroughly cowed by this amazing girl.

She helped him to his feet and brushed a fleck of dirt from his face. She smiled, an expression so radiantly beau-beautiful it stirred his heart in a way he could only compare to the way watching a sunset at the beach made him feel. Something about looking at Dream made him feel good, like he was gazing into some marvel of nature when he looked into her eyes. He would soon realize this was part of Dream’s gift. Kindness was her life’s guiding principle. She’d been raised to treat people-all people-with decency and respect, and it was this inward beauty people responded to when they fell under her spell. Her outward beauty only enhanced her admirable personality traits, making her a kind of goddess figure to nearly everyone who met her.

Chad knew this was the real reason her love life was such a shambles. Everything about her intimidated the men who might have been a good match for her. So she screwed a lot of unworthy people.

Like Dan Bishop.

All the while believing he was the only right one for her.

The memory of that afternoon on the practice field stung him now as he thought about his indiscretion with Karen Hidecki. The enormity of the betrayal finally hit him, and he recognized the way the revelation pushed every one of Dream’s emotional hot buttons. To think he’d described her as the “passive-aggressive” side of their relationship.

So here it was, the self-confrontation he could no longer avoid.

He came to a stop, set the bag down on the road, and sighed. “Fuck me.”

Everything was his fault.

Well, what now?

Part of him wanted to run back to the Accord and pour his heart out to Dream. To let her know how much she’d really meant to him over the years. To apologize until his voice was hoarse. To cry on her shoulder while she held him. He could do that. She would forgive him. He knew her too well. But he wasn’t about to forgive himself. There was only one right thing to do, and that was to let Dream get on with her own life. His initial reasoning had been all wrong, but leaving was still the right thing to do.

He picked up the travel bag, slung it over his shoulder again, and resumed walking. But his legs didn’t feel lighter than air anymore. A heavy conscience weighed him down, a burden that imbued every step with lethargy. He was only a few more yards down the road by the time he finally perceived the approach of heavy footsteps somewhere behind him.

The sound of bare feet thumping on the asphalt.

He sensed speed and feral intent.

Chad gripped the shoulder strap of the travel bag tighter, readying to sling it in the face of anything that came near him. The bag left lots to be desired as a weapon, packed as it was with clothes and a few chintzy souvenirs. A pillow might pack a little less wallop. But only a little.

Running didn’t seem like a viable option, either.

His heart pounded as whatever it was pulled up short behind him. He heard moist, smacking sounds, and felt hot breath at the back of his neck. He flashed on Karen’s vague description of a monster, and he muttered a silent apology to her.

Because he really didn’t need to see the thing behind him to know he’d been wrong.

Her monster was real.

And it had found him.

He turned slowly around, a thick lump of fear lodged like a sardine in his throat, and the paper-thin wall separating his conscious mind and an incapacitating wave of terror gave way.

A snippet from an old Monty Python movie floated into his head as he stood there paralyzed by this up-close encounter with the outright surreal: Run awaaay!

Yes, a dash into the woods might be the best idea all around.

Too bad he felt nailed to the asphalt.

The creature commanded his attention, obliterated rational thought. It was big-really big. A huge, misshapen head with a long, leathery snout sat atop a massive body covered with fur and corded with impossibly huge muscles. It leered at him, hissing through a lot of sharp, glittering teeth.

Saliva dripped from its mouth, splashing the pavement.

Chad’s head hurt.

He felt dizzy.

Why was it just staring at him like that?

Was it toying with him?

Maybe.

The fucker.

But then it was reaching for him, extending one of the unnaturally long, distended arms. …

Chad slumped to the pavement unconscious.

And the creature scooped him up in its arms.

Eddie dreamed of white-water rapids, the heat of the summer sun, and a spray of water against his face as his raft slapped the roiling river. He was with friends he hadn’t seen in what seemed like a span of lifetimes. He dreamed of rum and sweet, slow sex with an island girl on a beach in the Caribbean. He experienced the reassuring solidity of rock beneath his hands as he scaled a mountain in some other exotic place. And now he was with another woman, a stunning blonde like something ripped from the pages of a fashion magazine. She was wearing a flimsy blue shift; it billowed around her and her long hair swirled gently about her head as a breeze redolent with the scent of the sea brushed over him. She stepped into his embrace, held him close, and he shuddered as her soft lips met his own. The wet tip of her tongue probed his mouth, sending another shudder through him, then she slipped free of his embrace and stepped away from him.

God, how beautiful she was!

He swallowed hard. “I need you, Dream.”

So the dream girl was named Dream. This was amusing to him even behind the wall of sleep. Her smile became a seductive pout as she began to disrobe. “Worship me, Eddie.” She turned her head to the sky as the wind stiffened, buffeting her hair like a boat’s sail on the open sea. She raised her hands above her head as the shift fell away. “Worship me.”

No problem there.

Eddie fell to his knees in front of her. “Oh, Dream-“

But something was wrong.

The blue of her eyes was displaced by a yellow gleam, and there was something about the tone of her bare flesh that suggested elasticity. He shuddered with fear as she began to morph into one of those awful things. Her face elongated and there were several audible pops as new bone matter and cords of muscle formed in her body. Her formerly lovely head swelled to the size of a Halloween pumpkin, and thousands of strands of fur sprouted from her flesh like a fast-spreading fungus.

The transition from human to beast was complete.

Droplets of saliva spilled from the corners of her mouth, which had become, let’s face it, a snout. She was drooling, watching him the way a fat man at a burger joint watches the arrival of his burger and fries.

Eddie thought now would be an excellent time to wake up.

Because this didn’t seem at all like a dream. He was not only awake, he was face-to-face with, well, a werewolf, and it was going to scarf him down like a Happy Meal. The beast loomed over him, opened its enormous mouth wide to display rows of killing teeth, growled at him, then swooped in for the kill.

Eddie woke up with a gasp.

And then he was screaming, because the monster had somehow slipped through a dream matrix. It was here with him-in the closet-teeth clamped to his throat, poised to rip his life out. He clutched at his throat, seized the presence there, and realized he’d been frightened nearly to death by a ball of fur no bigger than one of his hands.

He ceased screaming immediately.

Still, why had the creature attached itself to his throat that way? He looked now into its strange yellow eyes and was struck by how strongly they resembled the eyes of the she-wolf thing in his dream, which were so like those of the shapeshifters that prowled the tunnels Below. The usual subliminal dream alchemy.

Yeah.

But—

He held it well away from his body, waiting for it to change into something else. A werecat, maybe. The kitten felt too substantial in his grip, stronger than something its size should be. His hands tightened instinctively around it, and he had a nearly overpowering urge to snap its little neck.

The animal seemed to sense his intent.

It hissed and thrashed in his grip.

There was an instant when it almost slipped free, but he caught it about the neck and began to choke it. The hell with it. He had to kill the goddamn thing.

Then, just as he began to feel cartilage give way beneath his strong hands, the closet was flooded with light. Eddie blinked. He sensed a physical presence rushing into the room. Panic gripped him, instilled a renewed urge to flee, but there was nowhere to go this time. The row of dresses he was hiding behind was swept back. The beautiful mute girl glared down at him, her eyes gleaming with a fury that made Eddie gulp, and she ripped the cat free of his grip.

There goes my insurance policy, Eddie thought.

The girl glared at him another time, then shifted her attention to the kitten, whose demeanor had undergone a radical change. A loud purring emanated from its throat. The girl held it close and made strange cooing noises at it.

A dark thought occurred to Eddie-he might have to kill the girl. He tried to picture himself doing it. Perhaps with some blunt instrument in the room. The idea repulsed him. Maybe he would do it-if given no other choice-but a very large part of him doubted his ability to kill her. Bashing in a woman’s skull, especially that of a very young woman, would put him in league with the sleazy likes of Ted Bundy.

And Eddie had already lost quite enough of his humanity and self-respect, thank you.

He realized the girl was staring at him, an expression of cold calculation evident in the set of her features. Then she wheeled about on her heels, the train of the long dress swishing about as she moved, and was gone from the closet. The part of his mind that valued survival above all else went into a state of high alert. He should get to his feet, charge after the little bitch, and take her down.

Eddie thought about it a moment longer.

Saw himself doing the Bundy thing.

And stayed right where he was.

Shit, he was tired of running. Tired of fighting. The crazy flight to freedom that had begun at one of the several checkpoints Below had taken too much out of him. Just getting this far had required a nearly superhuman effort. He was drained. Out of gas. Which was why he’d fallen asleep in such short order. He yawned, rubbed his bleary eyes, and slumped back against the wall.

How long had he been out?

Ten minutes?

Fifteen.

Just long enough to slip into dream mode.

Hell, he thought, I could sleep again right now.

Let the little goth girl bring the reinforcements.

Maybe they’d do him the favor of killing him while he slept. He felt ready for that ultimate acquiescence. He’d prefer an eternal sleep to another six months-or longer-Below. He was beginning to think he might even prefer it to a renewed effort to get out of this place, mostly because escape didn’t seem possible. He suspected he was a rat in a glass-covered maze, and The Master was watching his every move, laughing softly to himself at each of Eddie’s hopeless attempts to extricate himself from this nightmare.

The hell with fighting this impossible battle.

Better just to sit here and await the inevitable.

But as Eddie sat there considering surrender, he was troubled by thoughts of how far he had come, how tantalizingly close those visions of freedom regained had seemed to becoming reality. The prospect of just giving up ignited an ache in his heart, pangs of regret that taunted him like the remarks of crude schoolyard bullies.

Yeah, Eddie, take the easy way out.

You wouldn’t want to put yourself out.

You fucking wimp.

What’s the big deal, anyway?

It’s only your life we’re talking about.

He thought about being free again. A free man in a free land. He thought again about how things would change if he ever accomplished that goal. He knew one thing-his days with the company were over, regardless of whether they would take him back after an extended and unexplainable absence. The idea of surviving this insane place only to plunge back into the corporate realm was laughable. He would liquidate whatever property and holdings remained, sell all his personal possessions, and venture forth into the world. He would savor every sunrise and every sunset. He would visit other lands all over the globe. He would find that island girl or one very much like her. Most of all, he would never take anything for granted ever again.

The closet door swung open again, admitting a sliver of light.

Something pointed and hard struck his shin.

It felt like the tip of a high-heeled shoe.

“Ouch.”

He looked up and saw the face of the mute girl.

She was alone.

Well, that was curious. Where were the reinforcements? Where was lisa the housekeeper?

Why am I not dead? he thought.

The mystery deepened as she beckoned him forward with a bent forefinger.

Eddie cleared his throat. “Um … you want me to get up?”

She nodded.

Eddie sighed. “Sure, whatever.”

Something vaguely like a smile touched the corners of her mouth, and he didn’t even detect a spark of malice in it. Then she swirled out of the room again, leaving Eddie to ponder the bewildering turn of events.

Enigmatic, Eddie thought.

God, I hate that in a woman.

Eddie walked out of the closet and entered the bedroom. The girl was sitting at a small round table in a corner of the room. She looked up as he stepped into the room. There was an unoccupied chair next to her. Eddie steeled himself for any weirdness that was about to ensue, and sat down next to her.

There was a pad of paper on the table, pink teenage girl’s stationery. The girl’s gaze shifted to the empty page before her, dipped a pen in an ink quill, shook it, and began to write.

Eddie grunted. “Huh … a quill pen. How … retro.”

Eddie wanted to slap himself-the weirdness of the situation had apparently rendered him incapable of intelligent discourse.

She turned the pad toward him, fixed him with a serious gaze, and tapped the top page with the pen.

Eddie looked at what she had written.

YOU ARE PROBABLY WONDERING WHY I HAVEN’T SUMMONED THE MASTER.

Eddie raised an eyebrow. “Well, now that you mention it, yeah.”

She repositioned the pad and wrote some more. Eddie’s eyes followed the words as she penned them with finely turned strokes.

BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT HERE BY CHANCE.

Eddie was suddenly apprehensive again, recalling the passing thought he’d had at the last checkpoint-that he was being herded instead of chased. Well, here was the first inkling that bit of intuition wasn’t so far off track.

He tried to keep the fear out of his voice as he said, “So … why am I here?”

She dipped the quill in ink and wrote some more.

I SUMMONED YOU.

Eddie gaped at her. “But… why?”

I AM NOT READY TO TELL YOU THAT, she wrote.

Eddie squinted at the infuriating words. “Not… ready… to … tell… me.” He cleared his throat. “Well, that’s just great. You let me know when you can spare a minute to clue me in to whatever sadistic game you and The Master are playing.”

He started to get up.

“Meanwhile, I’ll catch some shut-eye.”

She hissed at him, displaying rows of perfect teeth as white as oysters-movie-star teeth. Eddie’s upward motion ceased, and his eyes widened at the incongruous sight. She was one of the loveliest women he’d ever seen, possessed of a delicate beauty that made his little soldier want to stand up and salute, and yet she looked so vicious.

So deadly.

He sat back down.

The feral quality vanished from her face, and her attention returned to the page of pink stationery, where one slim, pale hand was again spinning beautifully rendered handwriting from margin to margin at a startling speed. She filled half the page, then turned the pad toward him.

Eddie read with mild interest some dry biographical information about the girl, but boredom gave way to shock and terror as his gaze moved down the page.

Her name was Giselle Burkhardt, and she’d first come to this place in 1973, when she’d been seventeen years old and a senior in high school.

Eddie’s brow wrinkled at that bit of impossible information-Christ, the girl looked seventeen right now, thirty years after the claimed date of her arrival in The Master’s world.

But that was easy to swallow compared to what came next.

She’d been on what was to be her last vacation with her family before embarking on a new phase of her life-college in New England. The car carrying her parents and younger brother experienced engine trouble east of Chattanooga, and her father had been forced to pull off the highway. Thus began a long night of terror that culminated with the mutilation deaths of her parents. Her brother was taken to another room, and she was chained and stuffed in a crawl space, where she remained until The Master was ready to initiate the second phase of her indoctrination. She was removed from the crawl space and tortured by Ms. Wickman until she was screaming her willingness to do anything to end her agony.

Her brother was brought before her.

She remembered how heartbreakingly brave he’d looked as he stood there trembling.

It hadn’t been easy.

She wanted Eddie to know that.

But the pain was more than she could take. And she knew they could keep inflicting pain every bit the equal of what she’d already experienced-and perhaps worse-should she refuse to do their bidding.

She didn’t refuse.

Ms. Wickman gave Giselle a straight razor.

Giselle used it on her brother.

Over a long period of time.

Then finished him.

“Oh my God,” Eddie breathed as he read this. “Oh, sweet jumpin’ Jesus…”

I MURDERED MY BROTHER, the tale’s concluding paragraph began. THE MASTER ALTERED ELEMENTS OF MY BODY CHEMISTRY AND ARRESTED THE AGING PROCESS, ALLOWING ME TO SERVE HIM HERE AS HIS APPRENTICE INDEFINITELY I HAVE SERVED HIM WELL. WELL ENOUGH TO FOOL HIM. I HAVE WAITED THREE DECADES TO ATONE FOR MY SINS, AND THE TIME FOR ATONEMENT IS NEARLY AT HAND.

Eddie stared at the disturbing words a moment later, horrified by the cruelty they described, then he wrenched his gaze away. He didn’t want to look at Giselle, didn’t want to have to look into those dark eyes. He could feel them on him, studying him, taking the measure of him. He cast his gaze about the room, looking for something, anything, to divert his attention-and he realized the cat was missing.

He still wasn’t looking at her when he said, “What happened to furball?”

Giselle turned the pad to a fresh page and wrote, GONE.

Eddie frowned. “Gone?”

She elaborated: THE CAT IS A SHAPESHIFTER, ALBEIT A MORE HIGHLY EVOLVED EXAMPLE OF THAT SPECIES. IT FUNCTIONS AS MY PERSONAL MESSENGER AND SPY

A shapeshifter.

Well, sure.

Eddie had only seen the Lon Chaney wannabes Below, but he remembered his struggle with the creature in the closet and knew she was telling the truth.

Eddie was finally able to meet her gaze again. “What happened … have you always been mute?”

She scrawled a single angry word in big block letters: NO.

Eddie winced. “The Master? He …”

She wrote, I WAS A SHRILL TEENAGER. HE TOOK MY VOICE, A REMINDER THAT MY STATUS AS APPRENTICE DIDN’T MEAN HE WOULDN’T PUNISH ME HE REVELS IN SUCH PETTY CRUELTIES.

Eddie shook his head, “That’s fucked up, Giselle.”

IT WAS A VALUABLE LESSON, she wrote. I LEARNED PATIENCE. I LEARNED TO THINK. I TURNED INWARD AND GREW STRONG IN MY MIND. I HAVE MANY THINGS TO TELL YOU, BUT FIRST YOU MUST LEARN A LESSON OF YOUR OWN.

Eddie tensed. “Whoa, wait-“

She was still writing: YOU MUST KNOW YOUR PLACE. I ALLOWED YOU THE ADVANTAGE LAST TIME, BUT YOU CANNOT OVERPOWER ME.

Eddie started to push the chair away from her.

“Giselle-“

She seized him about the wrist, gripping him hard with one slender hand. Eddie attempted to yank free, but she held him fast-and with little apparent effort. She steadily increased the pressure until he could feel bones grinding. Tears welled in the corners of his eyes. Maintaining her grip on him, she stood up and pulled him away from the table. He stumbled along beside her as she led him to the bed. She spun him about at the foot of the bed, spread both her palms open over his chest, and pushed with all her considerable strength.

Eddie flew backward, then momentarily experienced a kind of drowning sensation as he sank into the plush comforter. The girl climbed onto the bed and stood over him. She prodded him with the tip of a high-heeled shoe, urging him toward the headboard. Eddie scooted backward, too intimidated now to do anything but her bidding. The display of strength had frightened him, all that power in that small body.

His gaze was riveted to her face-her beautiful, cruel face.

Then he felt the folds of her long dress brushing his bare torso as she planted a foot on either side of him. She neared the headboard and velvet darkness engulfed him.

A moment later he couldn’t breathe.

Dream went to Karen’s side, knelt beside her, and draped an arm over her heaving shoulders. Karen turned into her friend’s embrace, clutched at the thin fabric of her top, and began to sob even harder. Dream cradled Karen’s head against her chest, felt the wetness of tears against her breasts, and felt moisture appear in her own eyes. She stroked Karen’s hair and made painfully useless cooing noises.

Alicia’s face was a mask of intent concentration as she held Shane’s limp right wrist. She dropped the wrist and leaned over Shane’s face. Dream wasn’t sure what Alicia was looking for, but something in her friend’s expression told her she wasn’t finding it. Alicia pressed two fingers against the man’s throat, waited a few moments, frowned, and sighed. She made eye contact with Dream, who asked the pertinent question with a lifted eyebrow.

Is he…

Alicia answered with a tired nod.

Yes.

And now a tear did slide down Dream’s face.

All my fault, she thought.

She’d taken the stupid detour because she was a fucking flake. Memories of the escalating tensions in the car in the moments preceding the detour were temporarily banished from her conscious mind. All she knew was that a human being was dead due to her foolishness. She was such a worthless shit. If only… if only …

If only I’d gotten it right that time, came the inevitable conclusion.

The thought made the scarred area around her left wrist tingle. She experienced again the sense-memory of the blade penetrating her flesh. There had been pain, yes, intense pain, but there had also been relief. Tremendous relief. There’d been a sense of falling, of plummeting from a great height, and then the sweet release of unconsciousness.

If only …

Dream’s tears flowed unimpeded now.

She made a shushing noise, slipped an arm around Karen’s neck, and again eased her into a sitting position. She cupped a hand under Karen’s chin, held her head steady, and said, “Honey, I’m gonna need you to get up now, okay?”

Karen’s shoulders sagged. “Shane …”

“I know, sweetie, I know…” She glanced at the man’s ravaged body, winced at the tickle of nausea at the back of her throat, and brought her gaze back to Karen. “He’s just resting.”

“That’s right,” Alicia said, taking the verbal baton from Dream. “He’s resting. We’ll get him some help real soon, but first we have to get you out of here.” A forced smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “Okay, sweetie?”

Karen swallowed a lump in her throat, sighed, and looked at each of them in turn. Dream and Alicia each felt a flash of shame at the look of desperate pleading in her eyes. “Don’t coddle me.” She sniffled. “I know he’s dead.”

She tried to get to her feet. “Whoa …”

Dream and Alicia caught her as she wobbled, held her until she was steady, and began to walk her back to the car. As they stepped through the line of trees, Dream heard something behind her. Something stealthy. She risked a backward glance, saw a flicker of shadow at the periphery of her vision, gasped, and stumbled over a rock. The other women gave out a shout as she pitched forward and tumbled down the incline.

Her uncontrolled descent came to a painful and abrupt stop in the ditch. Her body was gouged and scratched, and she ached all over. She tried to move, but a line of pain arced through her like a jolt of lightning. She cried out again and looked up to see a panicked Alicia kneeling over her.

“Goddamn, Dream, try to give me a heart attack, why don’t you?”

Dream winced as she turned her head toward the dark line of trees. “I saw something back there, Alicia. I looked back and … saw something.”

She shuddered at the memory.

Alicia frowned. “What?” She glanced in the direction of the woods, then looked again at Dream. “What did you see?”

“She saw what I saw.”

They both looked at Karen, who was sitting up on the guardrail now, staring at the line of trees, that green wall that now seemed like the demarcation between the sane, natural world and a land of nightmares.

Her voice had a faraway, dreamily detached quality to it. “The thing that got Shane. A real, honest-to-gosh monster.”

Alicia sighed. “Jesus…”

Dream seized Alicia’s wrist. “She might be right.” The other woman’s skepticism was immediate and obvious, but Dream plunged on. “Or maybe not. But there’s something out there. Something that didn’t leave when it was done with Shane.”

Alicia’s gaze again went to the line of trees. “Fuck me.” She swallowed a lump in her throat and fixed Dream with a serious expression. “I don’t believe in monsters, girls, but I do believe in mad dog killers. So maybe some Hannibal the Cannibal wannabe is out there. And I don’t know about either of you, but I don’t aim to be another notch on his knife handle.”

Dream recognized the logic in Alicia’s words. Her theory made so much more sense than the idea of some supernatural abomination, but there was something about her memory of the barely perceived thing at the edge of her vision that snickered at concepts like logic and reason. Something in that flicker of shadow that made the idea of monsters resonate in her heart with cold certainty.

She held tight to Alicia’s wrist and began to haul herself up. Bits of dirt and bramble tumbled off her, and various parts of her body complained. Alicia cried out, surprised by the abrupt movement, but Dream managed to get to her feet. She tightened her grip on Alicia’s wrist and began to move toward the guardrail. Alicia stumbled along with her, protesting every step of the way.

“Hey! Shit… hold up. …” She stumbled again, but Dream’s arm went rigid and held her upright. “Jesus … what’s gotten into you?”

A moment later they were at the guardrail, flanking Karen, who regarded them with the kind of distant expression a combat veteran would have recognized, the hollow gaze of a person who has walked straight through hell’s front entrance, fought with demons, and somehow emerged physically intact. The same couldn’t be said of her mental health, however, which was in obvious tatters.

Her eyes didn’t reflect the smile she showed them. “Monsters,” she breathed. She hugged herself and shuddered. “I can feel them watching. Can’t you?”

Dream looked at Alicia. “I don’t care which of you is right. All I know is our odds of getting out of here alive are dropping by the second. Let’s get the hell out of Dodge, girls.”

Alicia grunted. “You see me arguing? Let’s go.”

They climbed over the guardrail and began to walk toward the empty car. The Accord’s trunk was standing open, Dream’s keys dangling from the lock. Dream slid a sidelong glance in Alicia’s direction, noted that her friend seemed a bit distracted, and said, “Alicia.”

Alicia blinked and looked at her. “Yeah?”

Dream strove to keep her voice nonchalant as she said, “Get Karen in the car. I need to get something out of the trunk.”

Alicia shrugged. “Sure.”

They arrived at the Accord. All four doors stood open, and its dome light was on. The empty car looked like an abandoned spaceship in the dim moonlight. Alicia busied herself with Karen, who was mumbling something else about monsters, and Dream went to the open trunk, where she began a quick inspection of its contents. Shane’s Eddie Bauer bag was tucked in a corner behind Alicia’s scuffed green suitcase.

Dream’s heart accelerated as she reached for the bag, grasped it, and pulled it closer. She peered around the open hood, saw that Alicia was in the backseat next to Karen, who apparently was again in need of comfort. Dream relaxed a little, tugged the zipper open, and began to sort through Shane’s things.

There was an array of typical vacation wear, ranging from Hawaiian shirts and sandals to ugly, floral-print boxers and droopy cargo pants. Wedged into a side panel was a porn magazine devoted exclusively to depictions of girls getting it on with other girls. Poor Karen. The deceased sleazebag didn’t merit her grief. She experienced a dark awareness-that she was bothered more by the manner of Shane’s death than the actual fact of his death.

She waited for a flicker of guilt.

She sighed.

It wasn’t forthcoming.

Forget about shadowy creatures lurking in the woods, she thought, the real monster is right under your noses, girls.

The gun was tucked into the same side panel. Dream carefully extracted it, set it down in the trunk well, and zipped up Shane’s bag. She put the Eddie Bauer bag back in the trunk, opened her own bag, and slipped the Glock beneath a pile of flimsy tops and panties. She zipped the bag shut, closed the trunk, took the keys from the lock, and got into the car.

Alicia said, “Find what you were looking for?”

Dream thought she detected an accusatory note in her friend’s voice. Alicia wasn’t dumb. She knew Dream was vulnerable, and she no doubt remembered Karen’s remark about the gun. It was a simple equation-suicidal friend plus availability of deadly weapon equals a ton of trouble.

“No.” Dream put a key in the ignition and started the Accord. “I was looking for Shane’s gun.” She amazed herself by keeping her voice steady as she slightly embellished the part of her statement that was a lie. “I thought we might need it, but I didn’t see it right away, so I gave up.”

She put the car in gear and pulled away from the shoulder of the road.

Alicia grunted. “Yeah, okay”

Dream was able to read Alicia pretty well after all these years. She didn’t entirely buy Dream’s story, but she wasn’t too concerned by it either. Or maybe she was just too tired to voice open skepticism. Whatever the case, she obviously wasn’t about to give Dream a lot of grief over it.

Dream relaxed a little.

Things were falling into place.

Soon they would reach a place where Shane’s death could be reported, and a little while after that they would retreat to hotel rooms. There, alone at last, she would open her bag and meet her fate.

She drove deeper into the night.

And tried to imagine how it would feel to finally be free.

The shapeshifter stepped through a line of trees and surveyed the access road that lead to Below’s primary tunnel entrance. There was no indication of shapeshifter activity in the vicinity, so it stepped onto the road, slung its unconscious human cargo over its shoulder, and began to run.

The creature experienced an echo of emotion from another lifetime. From the time before the change-before he’d come to this land of strange creatures and dark forces, a land where he lived a very different existence from the one he’d known before. Here he roamed the haunted woods, hunting and eating in the old ways, feasting on the flesh of unfortunate wanderers who’d found themselves lost in this place. It was a primal, sensual existence, exhilarating in ways savage and oddly wonderful. He loved the taste of raw flesh, of blood spurting fresh from severed arteries into his mouth.

Yes!

The glorious exultation of bloodlust indulged was a delight without equal. Something like sadness filled him now as he began to realize he had tasted human flesh for the last time. He regretted that his time in this nocturnal wonderland was nearing an end, but this angst was tempered by the promise of an even better place. An exalted place beyond this physical realm. A paradise. The word emerged from long-dormant memory banks, those reservoirs of human knowledge he’d rarely tapped since The Change.

Paradise.

That place promised him by The Other.

She’d come to him in the forest one night, naked and beautiful, long raven-black hair spilling over milk-white breasts. Walking into the clearing where he sat finishing his latest meal, the forearm of a man whose guts lay steaming on the forest floor. He didn’t experience the expected fresh flare of hunger, and he soon realized why-the woman, The Other, wasn’t human.

Not anymore.

The Master had changed her.

Her dark eyes instilled fear in him. He wanted to drop the food and run, to plunge deep into the forest and erase from his memory the image of the woman’s compelling countenance. He was guided by pure instinct most of the time now, ancient and primal urges, but the woman exuded a power that overwhelmed instinct-that overwhelmed, obliterated, any ability or desire to rebel or resist her will.

She was almost as powerful as The Master.

And he belonged to her the moment she projected that power Into his mind, telling him with images the things she wanted him to do. Tempting him with images of a reward so sweet his fear of The Master’s wrath was all but extinguished.

She had taken him on the forest floor.

Plying him with sex magic.

Inducing a temporary reversion to his human form.

Still, he’d howled at the moment of release, bucking into her like the wild beast he would again be when she left him, and the feeling was better than the taste of warm blood in his mouth. Better than anything.

And it was only the beginning.

She showed him this, too.

It was a promise of things to come.

A glimpse of paradise.

A glimpse that allowed him to put aside the dimmer sense of loss and plunge through the tunnel mouth without hesitation. Long legs took him through the winding tunnel at a rate even the fastest human couldn’t hope to match, taking him deep beneath the surface of the earth. He knew the terrain of the tunnel as well as he knew his hunting ground Above, and he moved nimbly through the darkness, never once stumbling.

Down he went.

His passenger light as a feather over his shoulder.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Until he came around a bend and saw light. The light illuminated a building surrounded by a chain-link fence. A human stood at an open gate. The shapeshifter’s nostrils twitched and his mouth filled with drool, but he understood he was not to eat this human. The Other compelled this denial of his nature. The human, a man attired in the militaristic uniform of Below’s police force, waved a flashlight at him.

The man’s expression was grim. “You’re late.”

He turned away from the shapeshifter.

“This way.”

The shapeshifter followed the guard through the gate and then through a propped-open door into the building. The man led him through a long corridor, then a shorter one, at the end of which was a small holding cell. The guard took a ring of keys from his belt, selected one, and slid it into the cell door lock. He gripped the door and pulled it open, then beckoned to the shapeshifter.

There was another human inside the cell. A woman. Strong and healthy. She sat on a cot with her legs crossed, not looking at them, her face a study in apparent disinterest. Hot saliva dripped from the shapeshifter’s mouth, and he looked at the tasty morsel longer than appropriate.

The guard prodded him with the flashlight. “Over there.”

The shapeshifter set the unconscious man down on an empty cot, glanced once more at the woman, who still hadn’t acknowledged the presence of her new cellmate, then he followed the guard out of the cell. The guard threw the cell door shut, relocked it, and led the creature back out of the building.

The shapeshifter was happy.

It had done The Other’s bidding.

Paradise was assured.

He was thinking of that place, of his sweet reward, when a bullet from the guard’s side arm tore out a big chunk of his head. The guard sighed and holstered his piece. “Sorry, big guy

He regretted having to kill the poor deluded thing, but he consoled himself with the knowledge it had given its life to a higher cause.

He sighed one more time.

Then got to work hauling the carcass out of sight.

Chad came to slowly, his aching head full of nightmare images of things that couldn’t be real. He saw a creature that shouldn’t exist, a hideous, snarling thing that looked like a werewolf.

Which wasn’t possible, since werewolves didn’t exist.

Except that, well, they did. Apparently.

His last conscious memory was of the beast opening its elongated snout to bare a distressing number of very sharp teeth. Everything thereafter was cloaked in darkness. The empty, eternal darkness one knows at the moment of one’s death.

But he wasn’t dead.

Which was nothing short of fucking miraculous.

He felt something solid beneath him, a padded, uncomfortable thing that made him think of dorm rooms and camping excursions. Tangible, physical evidence that he was back in the land of the living. His eyes fluttered open, and he saw that he was sprawled across a cot in a dimly lit holding cell. He glimpsed a graffito on the wall, a simple two-word legend: LAZARUS SAVES. There was another cot above him, and there was another pair of stacked cots against the opposite wall. Bunks. He hadn’t slept in a bunk bed since a miserable two weeks at summer camp when he was in junior high. There was an overhead light in the form of a dangling bulb that crackled and popped, making the room’s shadows caper like epileptic phantoms.

He had company.

A slim woman clad only in a leather loincloth and a matching top paced restlessly about the room. She had straggly brown hair and wore thin-soled sandals that slapped against the cement floor. There was a tattoo of some sort on her neck, something that vaguely resembled chain links. An unpleasant odor emanated from her vicinity. It wasn’t overpowering, but it was strong, almost a physical presence in the cell. She smelled like a person who’d been homeless and living on the streets for a while. On the other hand, her long legs were shapely and toned with muscle. Her belly was flat and her bosom ample. And that getup made her look like a refugee from a sci-fi movie, a warrior babe from a post-apocalyptic world.

When she noticed he was awake, she ceased pacing and focused in on him. She had vivid green eyes that added to her exotic appeal. “I’m not gonna beat around the bush here, new guy-if you’ve got anything of value left on your person, hand it over.”

Chad swung his legs around and sat on the edge of the cot. He felt weak, exhausted, the way he would after a long day of physical labor.

He said, “Hold on, give me a second here. Did you say-“

Then she had two handfuls of his shirt and was lifting him off the cot with little obvious effort. “Shut up!’ She shook him so hard, Chad thought his head might snap free of its moorings. Moisture sprayed his cheeks. “Don’t trifle with me, idiot. I want everything you’ve got. Now.”

Chad gulped, struggled for a moment to find his voice, then said, “Okay! Okay! Just please let me down. I’ll do whatever you want.”

She released him immediately, and he swayed back on his feet. He required a moment to regain his footing, then, with a last, sweat-inducing glance at the woman’s flashing eyes, he began turning out his pockets. There wasn’t much. A handful of change, which he relinquished to her as soon as it was in his hands. But she cast the coins aside with a swat of his hand, sent them spinning across the floor. He patted the rear pocket his wallet usually occupied and realized with a start it was gone.

“Hey!” Absurd indignation momentarily colored his voice. Then he remembered the fucked-up nature of his situation and met the woman’s stony gaze. “Wallet’s gone.”

She seized his left wrist. “Of course it is.” She stripped the fake Rolex he’d purchased from a street vendor in Key West, making it disappear inside a pouch strapped to her loincloth. “That’s mine now. Everything you have is mine.”

Never at any point in his life-not when facing the stern punishments doled out by his father; not when enduring the taunts of jocks and other bullies; never-had he ever felt so intimidated by another human being.

He strove to keep the tremor out of his voice. “O-okay!”

“Now your shoes.”

She drove the heel of a palm into his chest and he was thrust backward, landing painfully on the cot. The back of his head struck the wall, eliciting a yelp of pain. Then her hands were on him again. Strong, probing hands. Hands that would not be denied. Chad was incapable of mounting a physical resistance against this degree of brute strength. He was a slight 5 foot 6 and weighed maybe 150 pounds. He was, he had to admit, a bit of a loud pipsqueak. Knowing all this, however, did little to alleviate the bruising his ego was receiving. What kind of self-respecting guy got pushed around by a woman! An impulse to rebel flared to life within him. But how? He considered falling back on his most reliable weapon, the cutting remark.

But even that skill failed him.

“Hey …”he managed. “Not so rough, okay?”

But she wasn’t listening to him. She had his shoes now and was sitting on the cement floor. She kicked her sandals off and replaced them with the almost-new Reeboks Chad had worn less than a week. She got to her feet again and resumed pacing the cell, testing the shoes out.

She showed Chad a feral grin. “Fuck, yeah.”

A while later-Chad wasn’t sure how long, since he no longer had his watch-they heard footsteps padding down the corridor outside the holding cell. Chad was sitting on the cot again, the pendulum of his emotions ticking wildly, alternating between boredom and apprehension bordering on terror.

He’d figured he wouldn’t speak to Sheena, as he thought of her, again unless prompted, but a question sprung to mind that he just had to ask. “Is this hell?”

She turned a cold gaze on him. “Shut up. We have company!”

The footsteps grew louder and in a moment two burly guards appeared at the cell door, a cuffed prisoner between them. Sheena didn’t acknowledge their arrival. She lit a handrolled cigarette from her pouch. Chad, however, got off the cot and walked over to the door. “Is this a real jail?” he asked no one in particular.

A collapsible nightstick appeared out of nowhere and whickered through two of the bars. Chad gasped at the sudden sensation of pressure against his abdomen. It was like being jabbed in the stomach-hard-with the end of a broom handle. Then the door clanked open, the prisoner was uncuffed and pushed inside, and the door was reclosed with an emphatic clang.

One of the guards said, “Now, y’all be good.”

Guard number two laughed. “Try not to have too much fun in here.”

General snickering ensued from the non-incarcerated side of the door. Then the two behemoths were lumbering away, their idiot laughter reverberating in the hallway. Chad rolled onto his back and saw Sheena lunge forward to clamp a hand around the newcomer’s throat.

Great, Chad thought.

I’m in jail with a homicidal maniac.

The new arrival was also slightly built, maybe just a touch pudgier around the middle than Chad, but he was older-Chad had him pegged at around fifty. He had salt-and-pepper hair and a small bald spot at the crown of his skull. Sheena dragged him like a rag doll to the opposite end of the cell, where she commenced banging his head off the wall. Chad gaped in astonished horror at the smear of red that suddenly brightened the drab beige wall. Then there was a sound so grisly in tone his stomach revolted. A splintering sound, the stranger’s skull collapsing. Chad rolled over again and deposited the contents of his belly on the floor.

The body tumbled to the floor. Chad cleared his throat, hocked a mouthful of spit onto the floor, and tried to breathe. He looked at the body, a darting glance, and his stomach knotted up again. He braced his palms on the floor, got slowly to his feet, and turned his gaze to Sheena, whose expression of nonchalance was chilling. A thin sheen of sweat was visible at her forehead, but it was the only evidence of the violent episode she exhibited. She looked-satisfied. Content. As if she’d just returned from a jog around the park, flushed with good health and vigor.

Chad couldn’t believe it.

A human being had been murdered right in front of him.

His eyes widened behind his glasses. “Why? Why did you do that?”

Sheena strolled over to him. She put her face right up against his-their noses touched. “Did that scare you?”

Chad started in disbelief. A peal of humorless laughter wrenched free of his throat. “I’ve never been so goddamn scared. What’s wrong with you? You killed that guy for no reason.”

“That was my stepfather.” Her face was expressionless, but Chad detected a deep well of anger and resentment, unknowable angst. “Last time I saw him, he was slitting my little girl’s throat. Three years ago, man.”

Chad thought about that a moment.

The emotional pendulum now seemed permanently anchored in the red zone of terror. “What the hell kind of place is this?”

“He deserved to die.”

She ignored his question. Or maybe she hadn’t heard it. She seemed intensely focused on making him believe what she said.

Fine.

“I believe you.” He swallowed a lump in his throat. “He deserved to die.”

It wasn’t a lie.

What else could you say about a child killer?

The woman’s expression softened some, and she backed away from him, resumed her perpetual pacing of the cell.

Chad could make no sense of this place. That thing, that shapeshifter, had brought him here, but why? There had to be some reason he was here instead of dead. The mystery of his circumstances bothered him, made him crave more information, something-anything-that might point to a way out of this insane dilemma.

“Look-” he started.

She slapped him. “Stop.”

He stopped.

Despite the burst of violence, there was something new in her expression, a hint of feeling he wouldn’t have expected. It took him a moment to recognize what it was, and when the realization came, he was surprised.

It was compassion.

“A few minutes ago, you asked if this was hell.” She gripped one of his hands, but not in an unfriendly way this time. “Well, Below’s not the hell of the Bible, but it is a hellish place. A suburb of hell, I guess you could say.” Her grip on his hand tightened, but, again, not in an aggressive way. “Forget all the rules of civilized society, they don’t apply here. Don’t trust anyone. Be prepared to kill. Sleep with one eye open, because someone is always out to get you.” Her eyes riveted on him. “Most of all, and I hope like hell you believe me, I’m the best friend you’ve got.”

Chad sputtered, “But… but that’s absurd. You just kicked my ass and took my shit. If you’re my best friend, my worst enemy’s gotta be one charming son of a bitch.”

Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “I can’t tell you everything yet, but this much you can know-what I did to you was a case of keeping up appearances.”

Chad showed her a baffled frown. “Say what?”

Her voice dropped yet another notch, to the point where she was nearly inaudible. “An act. That’s all it was. I treated you the way banished people are expected to treat newcomers-mercilessly.”

Chad’s voice was choked with incredulity. “Banished people? Banished from where?”

“From Above.”

Chad grunted. “Oh, thanks. That clears it up.”

She ignored the sarcasm. “We’re getting out of here. You and I. See that dead fucker on the floor?”

Said “dead fucker” twitched intermittently and oozed brain matter on the floor.

“How could I miss him, Sheena?”

She smiled, and there was a wicked gleam in her green eyes. “You don’t think his presence here, after all these years, was coincidence, do you?”

Chad gave his head a weary shake. “I suppose not.”

“Damn straight it wasn’t.” She glanced at the steaming corpse, and her smile faded. “That was a favor to me.” Her gaze returned to him, and there was something so haunted in the look she showed him that Chad had to fight an urge to avert his eyes. “A show of gratitude for agreeing to be here. Arranged by our benefactor Above.”

Chad chewed his lower lip. Something about the circumstances was bothering him. “You keep hinting at an arrangement. A conspiracy. But I don’t get it. What are you trying to accomplish?” He glanced at the dead man. “Other than revenge, I mean.”

“Accomplish?” But the interrogatory tone was rhetorical. “Revolution. The overthrow of The Master.”

Chad’s brow furrowed. “The Master?” He shook his head in puzzlement. “Above, Below, The Master… all this means shit to me. What-“

She shushed him again. “Shut up and listen. I’m about to tell you everything you need to know.”

Chad considered this. There was something disquieting about the way she was suddenly opening up to him. Something he couldn’t quite pinpoint. “Why?”

She began to smile again, just a small smile that barely turned up the corners of her mouth. “Can’t you guess?”

An icy finger of dread scuttled along Chad’s spine. “Um…”

“You’re coming Below with me.”

Chad felt suddenly queasy.

“I think it’s time we were properly introduced. My name’s Cindy.?

She extended a hand.

Chad took her hand, shook it numbly. “Chad.”

She squeezed his hand. “Welcome to the revolution, Chad.” Her eyes and voice radiated intensity, a suppressed excitement. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Chad felt faint.

The Master stirred from a state of repose that wasn’t quite sleep but wasn’t full consciousness, either. The condition was more akin to a deep turning inward, a period of intensely focused introspection that sharpened his already keen senses and replenished his appetites. In these ways it approximated the sleeping state of humans and the lower animals; however, he remained aware of his surroundings at all times-albeit in the dim way one perceives background details in paintings or films-and possessed the ability to instantly return to full consciousness should circumstances compel it.

This was one of those times.

There had been an unusually high level of activity in his home tonight. There was the matter of the escapee from Below, a foolish man who likely believed he’d succeeded in evading his pursuers. This was not the case. The Master knew the man was in one of the rooms on the second floor. He even knew which room. He smiled, thinking of the wicked little girl with no voice.

His most facile and talented apprentice.

He was content to allow her to have her fun with him.

The man was a gnat.

Less than insignificant.

As had been the case with tonight’s first new arrival, Mark Cody, whom he’d dispatched from this world simply because he’d been a dullard. The Master preferred lively torture sessions with interesting, intelligent humans. There was nothing as stimulating as an evening spent listening to smart people plead their cases between moments of intense agony.

There were people of this sort en route even now. He could feel them out there, wandering, lost souls growing more desperate and afraid by the moment. Soon they would arrive at the false succor of his home. He could not read their minds, but he could sense things about them. There was one among them who radiated something special, an inner energy that hinted of gifts she likely didn’t know she possessed. A female. A charismatic figure adored by many. But he sensed a deep vein of vulnerability there, as well.

He wanted to know more about her.

He closed his eyes again, entered another meditative state, and focused the power in his mind, that living mass of energy that was almost like a separate organism existing within the shell of his physical body, an intimate symbiosis of unique beings. His mind thrummed with the power, and he felt the fine edge of electricity that always accompanied these moments sweep through him.

His mind sent out energy pulses like psychic tendrils.

A radar that detected usually imperceptible brainwaves.

And, sometimes, deciphered them.

Dream, he thought.

He had her name now, snagged like a firefly out of the air. He sensed more about her by the moment. She was getting closer and closer. Dream was a moral person. She was perceived by most people as a force for good. A truly decent human being. The strength of his perceptions about her was unusual, another indication of the rare gifts she didn’t comprehend.

The Master’s eyes snapped open.

He went to the bar and poured himself a drink. Old scotch over ice in a lightly frosted glass. Alcohol’s intoxicating effects were largely lost on him-his body processed the alcohol more efficiently than a human body-but it did have a soothing effect.

He was surprised to find himself in need of the liquid comfort.

Dream.

He repeated the name silently several times, savoring it like a fine wine.

He poured another drink.

Something was happening in his domain. Something unusual and troubling. Troubling because none of his efforts to pinpoint its nature had been successful. His powers of perception had waned of late, flickering in and out like radio transmissions from a remote location. This insight into the woman’s psyche was the clearest signal he’d received in months.

Even his gods, the death spirits, were silent.

He called to them again, now.

Beseeching them for guidance.

Shivar!

Mindragin!

Nothing.

Just the same aching celestial void.

He poured yet another drink.

Dream, he thought.

The new obsession grew in his soul like a malignancy.

Dream?

What are you?

How will I corrupt you?

The Master’s assumption about Eddie King’s circumstances was correct. He was a prisoner again. A slave again. He was spread-eagled on his back on the mute girl’s plush bed, staring up at the velvet canopy. His arms were lashed to headboard rails, and the leather straps of a ballgag were affixed firmly about his face. His ankles were tied to the posts at the foot of the bed. His bonds grew tighter and more uncomfortable each time he struggled against them, so much so he was worried the circulation in his extremities would be cut off.

He was fixated on the discomfort now. The circumstances that had brought him to this place had-at least temporarily-been rendered irrelevant, overwhelmed by the panic filling his mind, panic that cranked up another notch every time the knots about his wrists and ankles tightened a little more. And there was the lump of plastic in his mouth-the word “gag” was apt in more ways than one. He knew it was firmly attached to the device encircling his head, but he couldn’t suppress the growing fear he would swallow it and choke on it.

Giselle was at the writing table, bent over the stationery pad. She’d been at it for nearly an hour now. The quill pen in her hand was a nonstop flurry of motion that ceased only when she paused to flip to a fresh page. Eddie had no idea what she could possibly be writing about. She couldn’t be going on and on about what she had done to him. There just wasn’t that much to tell. He’d misjudged her. Well, that was an understatement of epic proportions. She’d asserted her dominance over him with embarrassing ease. So perhaps she was writing about something else.

The long velvet dress was gone. She was naked now, with the exception of a pair of lacy black panties and high-heeled shoes. Her legs were crossed at the knees, and the dangling foot jiggled like a teenage girl’s would during a boring math class. Physically, of course, she still was a teenager, frozen in time at the age of seventeen. Eddie, who was pushing forty, knew she was actually older than him by more than a decade. Knowing this on an intellectual level was one thing. But yet her body was still ripe with the perfections of youth.

A perpetual Lolita.

She put the tip of the pen to her chin in a contemplative pose. Her brow furrowed and the jiggling of her foot slowed. Miracle of miracles. The runaway prose train was at an impasse. She stared into the middle distance for a time before redirecting her gaze toward Eddie. The pensive look vanished and was replaced by an expression that was equal parts smirk and lascivious grin.

He shuddered.

And thought, Oh, no …

A sound that was almost like a hideous laugh issued from Giselle’s mouth. She had seen the terror in Eddie’s eyes and been amused by it. She set the pen down, tore a page from the pad, then stood up and came to the bed.

A dark, undeniable thought came to him.

I should’ve killed her when I had the chance.

He remembered how supple, how yielding, her flesh had felt beneath the pressure of the blade. Parting that flesh would be no more difficult than carving a Thanksgiving turkey. The idea repulsed him, the notion of murdering a woman, but now he wondered whether his ingrained chivalry might really desert him should he again have her at his mercy. Maybe things would happen another way.

He thought about it some more.

He also thought some more about the ballgag in his mouth.

And he struck the “maybe” prevarication from the thought.

Eddie’s heart lurched as she leaned over him. Her lips parted and she ran her tongue slowly along the edge of her teeth. Her nostrils flared. She looked more like a hungry lioness than something as mundane as a woman with a mean streak. She reached behind his head and the snaps fastening the leather straps about his head came away. Eddie experienced an absurd wave of gratitude toward her. He drew in deep lungfuls of air, suddenly, blessedly able to breathe properly again. Christ, he was practically ready to nominate her for sainthood for these things alone.

Giselle showed him the piece of stationery from the pad.

His heart went momentarily still at the words written there.

I KNOW YOU BETTER THAN YOU KNOW YOURSELF it read.

Now Eddie’s heart was racing.

THIS IS WHAT YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED.

She cast the note aside.

“No,” he breathed-and heard the lack of conviction in his voice.

She smiled.

And patted his cheek.

Then she climbed onto the bed, got carefully to her feet, and leered down at Eddie.

Jesus, he thought.

Here we go again.

His gaze shifted from the oddly sympathetic set of her features to her shoes. He didn’t like the way they deeply indented the mattress. At least they weren’t stiletto heels. She shifted a leg and placed the cold sole of one shoe on his chest. There was almost no pressure. She maintained perfect balance and a light touch for an amazing stretch of time.

Then the pressure increased a little.

And a little more.

The heel gouged his flesh and Eddie cried out.

She suddenly applied her full weight to him. His face contorted with agony. She was standing on him now with both feet.

Then she was stepping forward.

Walking on him.

The flat sole of one shoe touched his left cheek and drove his head sideways, and the heel dug into the soft flesh at the base of his throat.

Eddie saw the note on the floor, its message a condemnation.

THIS IS WHAT YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED.

To his dismay, he found he couldn’t immediately answer the question that came to mind: Is it?

Oh my God … is it?

The pressure on his face increased again.

Dream was scared. She marveled for a moment at the spectacular irony of the notion, but it was without doubt the absolute truth. Here she was, a person committed to ending her life before the next sunrise, and she was scared. Except that maybe “scared” didn’t quite convey the depth of what she was feeling. Scared was how you felt when you were sitting in a darkened movie theater watching a good horror movie. The word implied a degree of detachment from the source of the fear. Maybe the movie would wig you out a little, but it would end soon enough, the lights would come on, and you would soon emerge into the warmth of the sun.

No, this was a sick, creeping sensation of enervating terror. It drained every bit of remaining strength and left her feeling ill. She gripped the Accord’s steering wheel harder to still the trembling in her arms. “Guys, I’ve gotta stop.”

Alicia’s eyes narrowed with concern. “You okay?”

Dream gave her head an emphatic shake. She twisted the steering wheel and the Accord swerved to the shoulder. She parked the car, opened the door, and leaned over to be sick. Her stomach spasmed, and she retched up a thin stream of acid. There was nothing in her stomach to throw up, but she was helpless to quell the spasms for a time. When they at last subsided, she pulled the door shut and settled back into her seat.

“Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry”

Alicia was looking at her the way a nurse might regard a seriously ill patient. “Oh, hush.” She cupped a hand behind Dream’s neck. “It got to you, that’s all.”

Meaning the image of Shane’s slashed body.

Well, it was a feasible explanation. The memory was gruesome enough to trigger nausea. Still, it wasn’t the true reason for her sickness, and she was about to say so when Karen started talking.

“Please.” There was an uncharacteristic caustic quality in her voice. “I love both of you, but don’t offend me with this shit. Neither of you were ever members of the Shane Wallace fan club.”

Alicia protested. “The fuck does that have to do with it? Nada, that’s what. Not a goddamn thing. We’re human beings, girl, and our personal feelings go out the fucking window when something like that happens to another human being.”

Karen huffed. “Whatever. I only bring it up now to make a point. Dream’s not upset by what happened back there-” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “She’s upset by what’s happening right now.”

There was a long moment of silence. The tension was stifling. Dream’s only point of comparison to the atmosphere in the car was the first stilted conversation she had with Dan after finding him in the arms of that… man. The short exchange had been the most awkward moment of her life.

But this moment ranked a close second.

Dream sighed. “She’s right.”

Karen said, “No shit.”

Alicia sniffed. “Well, damn, I guess I’m just a dumb-ass bitch, ‘cause I don’t know what the hell y’all are talkin’ about.” Her hand came away from Dream’s neck. “So maybe one of you should spell it out for my clueless black ass.”

Dream looked at Alicia. “How far do you think we’ve come since we left the interstate?”

Alicia shrugged. “Ten miles? Maybe a little more?”

Dream shook her head. “Try more than twenty.”

She let the information sink in for a moment before continuing. “And when was the last time you drove this far off an interstate exit without seeing an Exxon or a Holiday Inn? Even in a sparsely populated area there ought to be something. A mom-and-pop motel, a general store where you can buy gas and live bait, something.” She paused and noticed the way Alicia’s attention was riveted to her now. “But there’s been nothing, and I do mean nothing. There haven’t been any other cars. There haven’t been any road signs, either. No road signs. No billboards. Nothing.”

There was another moment of silence. An oppressive silence. They could almost feel the night closing in around them. Alicia’s voice was uncharacteristically shrill when she said, “So what are you saying?” There was some anger in her voice, but there was also something very much like the beginning of real fear. “Because you can’t be saying what I think you’re saying.”

Karen laughed without humor. “You bet your ass she is.”

Alicia chortled. “So that was exit 666 back there, huh? We’ve driven off into another dimension.” Another pause; another disdainful chuckle. “Bullshit! That wasn’t the Tennessee portal to the Bermuda goddamn Triangle! You’re both letting your stressed-out imaginations get the better of you.”

“Nobody’s getting worked up, Alicia.” Dream spoke in measured, calm tones. “All I’m saying is, we’re lost in a very rural area. We’ve got maybe a quarter tank of gas. A little less, actually. I don’t know about either of you, but the thought of being stranded out here for the night scares the shit out of me.”

Alicia seemed to relax now that one of her friends was sounding sane again. “Look …” She sighed. “I bet the gas will hold out long enough to get us to help. A quarter tank will get us, what, another forty to fifty miles down the road?” She laughed. “I can’t imagine all this nothing going on another fifty goddamn miles. Can you?”

Dream didn’t want to imagine that. “No.” She shook her head and released a shuddering sigh. “Definitely not.”

Karen snorted. “Nice cop-out, Dream. Well, little Ms. Diplomacy, you’ll have to excuse me, but my own humble opinion is that we’re fucked.”

Alicia rolled her eyes at Dream, a conspiratorial gleam there. Dream didn’t acknowledge the expression beyond a subtle shrug. She didn’t want to rock the boat, not when she believed steady and reliable Alicia was the crucial linchpin keeping them afloat. But she secretly sided with her other friend.

Something wasn’t right out here.

Something unnatural.

Alicia, however, was a confirmed skeptic. She was unable to keep the snide tone out of her voice when she said, “And your opinion has been duly noted, dear.” She winked at Dream. “But I think we should press on now. You up to driving, Dream?”

Dream wasn’t at all sure about that-her stomach still did a little flutter every few seconds-but she didn’t want to relinquish control of her own car to anybody else. The feel of the wheel beneath her hands was the only thing keeping her tethered to reality.

“Yes.” The word was a barely audible hiss.

Alicia squinted at her. “You sure?”

Dream answered by twisting the key in the ignition, putting the car in gear, and pulling away from the shoulder of the road. She put the accelerator to the floor for a moment and quickly achieved a good escape velocity. She eased off the pedal after the Accord screeched around a hairpin turn. Karen, who wasn’t buckled in, swayed from one side of the car to the other.

Alicia said, “Jesus Christ, girl!”

Karen groaned. “Damn, Dream, who’d you bribe at the DMV to get your license?”

Dream felt another surge of embarrassment. “Sorry, guys.” There was a plaintive tone in her voice, an unspoken plea that they not be too mad at her. “I’m just a little jumpy, I guess.”

Alicia shook her head and rubbed at red-rimmed eyes. “Ain’t we all?”

They drove on without speaking for a while. The swooping road traced the winding curve of a mountain. The air was getting thinner, making their ears pop. Dream put on the Accord’s brights each time they neared a particularly hazardous loop of road, always cutting off the high beam after just a moment or two for fear of blinding the drivers of cars coming from the opposite direction.

Dream tried not to think about how pointless the precaution was becoming.

They had the dark mountain road to themselves.

Alicia cleared her throat. “Sorry to dredge this subject up yet again, but you guys have to see my point by now.”

Her voice sounded cheerier than it had for some time. Something about Alicia’s lighthearted tone disturbed Dream, something that hinted of a growing, quiet desperation.

She was careful with her response. “What… do you mean?”

“This.” A wave of her hand made it clear she was talking about something outside the car, and her tone indicated what she meant should be obvious. “All this.”

Dream frowned. “Um …”Whatever was so apparent to Alicia remained a mystery to her. “Alicia, I don’t get it.”

Karen said, “Ditto.”

Alicia made a sound of exasperation. “Jesus, are you both blind?” She rolled her eyes. “The road. Look at it. That’s asphalt. Those yellow stripes running down the middle, one solid, one broken at regular intervals, those are paint.”

And this, Dream thought, is a study in condescension. “No kidding. Your point?”

Another roll of the eyes. “No need to be snide, Dream. I’m only trying to point out the good news all around us.”

Karen erupted. “Stop talking in goddamn circles!”

Alicia winced. “I’m not-“

“Yes, you are,” Karen continued, quieter now. “And not so long ago you were the one wanting things spelled out for you in big block letters. Please, I’m begging you, show us the same courtesy, because we don’t know what you’re babbling about.”

A look of hurt flashed across Alicia’s face. “I’m giving you something solid to focus on, something we should all find reassuring.” She nodded at the road. “This road was paved by men. A road crew working a government contract. That paint was put down by man-operated machines. Same with the guardrails.” She flashed a grin at Dream. “Can you see the state of Tennessee making room in its budget to pave the road to hell?” A laugh, vaguely derisive, stuttered out of her mouth. “I think not.”

It sounded good. Alicia’s argument was a sensible one. But the road kept unfurling before them, a faded gray ribbon walled in on both sides by dense stretches of forest, and the absence of fellow travelers out here in the mountain darkness remained ominous.

Karen said, “Shouldn’t we have run into Chad by now?”

Dream gasped. “Oh, shit. You’re right.”

She’d been so wrapped up in their immediate dilemma she’d forgotten about her suddenly estranged friend, but now awareness of his absence ratcheted up the fear consuming her yet another excruciating notch.

Alicia stiffened beside her, but she didn’t say anything. The stark fact of his disappearance seemed to disturb her into silence. Understandable. Despite everything-the betrayals and harsh words exchanged-Dream found herself worried about Chad.

She began to scan the sides of the road more closely.

Looking for a body.

Goddamn you, she thought.

Where are you, Chad?

He wouldn’t have returned to the interstate, not with the prospect of a hotel room and a bed tempting them all in the other direction. He was on foot, so they should have seen him already. Maybe whatever had gotten to Shane had gotten to him. Dream thought of the scrawny boy he’d been when she rescued him from the clutches of those jock assholes. He wasn’t much bigger now. compared to Shane, who’d been big indeed, he was a human toothpick.

The image of Shane’s ravaged body came to her again.

She tried not to cry.

She might have been sick again, but a flash of inspiration drove the unpleasant images from her head. She pressed the radio’s power button, turned up the volume, and said, “Karen, you grew up around here. In the area we think we’re in, I mean. Can you remember which radio station had the clearest, most powerful signal?”

Karen didn’t hesitate. “Rock 106, if it’s still around-106.7.”

Dream tuned the radio to the frequency, turned the volume up some more, and said, “So right about now Metallica ought to be piercing our eardrums.”

“Yeah.”

Alicia said, “Girl hasn’t lived here in ten years. The goddamn radio station probably isn’t on the air anymore.”

Dream put the radio on scan. “Watch.”

The digital display moved from one end of the spectrum to the other. Then again. And again. There was nothing to lock on. No static. No faintly heard signal. Dream turned it off. “What do you make of that, Alicia?”

Alicia shrugged. “It’s obviously defective.”

Dream groaned inwardly.

Pull your head out of the fucking sand, she thought.

She said, “It’s not defective. And the radio was on before we left the interstate.” She wasn’t arguing anymore, was just stating irrefutable facts, and her voice had grown quiet. She was scaring herself. “And we should’ve seen Chad.”

Alicia pursed her lips. Her brow furrowed. She sighed. “Look, I’m not conceding anything here. There’re reasonable explanations for everything going on.”

Karen laughed. “You bet, Scully.”

“You didn’t let me finish.” Dream, who had been slightly annoyed with her friend’s oblivious attitude, detected a return of reason in her tone now. “Yes, I’m a skeptic. That said, I think enough is enough. We should turn around and head back to the interstate. We’re not accomplishing anything by staying out here and freaking each other out.”

Dream glanced at the fuel gauge. “That’s not an option anymore.”

The needle was already at a dangerously low level, and it dipped a little lower as she looked at it. Another increment lower and they would be running on fumes.

Alicia leaned over to have a look. Concern-and maybe the beginnings of true panic-creased her brow. “Aw, shit.”

Karen groaned. “We’re about to be stranded, aren’t we?”

Alicia settled back in her seat. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“This can’t be happening.” Karen’s voice edged closer to a whine. “Why isn’t there anything at all out here?”

Dream put the Accord’s brights on again and took the car around another curve. The smooth glide of tires on paved road came to an abrupt end, and they were jouncing up and down in their seats as the car rumbled over the ruts of a dirt road. The road still wound through dense stands of trees, but the darkness was no longer quite so impenetrable.

The car’s interior resounded with gasps and shouts.

Dream detected a twinkle of light through the trees.

She cleared her throat. “Hey, guys-“

“Turn us around!” Karen yelled. “Fuck getting us back to the interstate-just get us the hell out of here.”

But Dream took the car around another bend in the road, and the light through the trees grew brighter. The road rose around the mountain at a steep angle, and when they entered a straightaway, they saw a gleam in the middle of a large clearing, barely visible over a hill. Dream pushed the accelerator to the floor again, and the car held steady on the hardpacked dirt.

Alicia gripped her shoulder. “Dream? What the fuck is wrong with you? Turn us around, or so help me-“

The Accord crested the hill and the terrain leveled out.

Karen whistled. “Will you look at that?”

They looked.

The protest at the tip of Alicia’s tongue went unspoken.

The Master’s house loomed before them. An array of klieg lights illuminated its exterior. As they neared the house, a big stone mansion, Dream’s friends reiterated their desire to flee this place, but their pleas barely registered. Dream was looking at the Doric columns rising from the ends of a long porch and bracketing a big balcony that overlooked the front yard.

It was imposing.

A grim sentinel hunched against the mountain.

And yet…

Dream experienced a moment of vivid prescience.

A frisson of familiarity.

She had never seen this house before, had never glimpsed its gambrel roof and gabled windows, but this first peek elicited an odd-and undeniable-feeling.

She felt as if she belonged here.

As if she needed to be here.

She drove on.

The man behind the desk possessed the aloof air of every coolly efficient bureaucrat Chad had ever encountered. He was tall and thin, gaunt-looking, with bony hands and the dark, predatory eyes of a wolf. He wore a black suit over a crisp white shirt and a narrow black tie, the sort of ensemble an undertaker might wear. His bored expression managed to convey impatience, disdain, and haughty superiority all at the same time.

“So,” he said, addressing Cindy in an oily, insinuating voice that made Chad think of Peter Lorre. “I have before me a petition for emancipation .” He nodded at Cindy. “And you, I understand, are the party petitioning for emancipation.”

Cindy nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The man, who Chad had gathered was a warden of sorts, chuckled without humor. “And what have you done to merit this privilege?”

“I’ve served The Master well for three years.”

Cindy strode closer to the warden’s desk. The armed guards flanking the desk watched her with suspicion. This, after all, was a woman who’d just physically subdued and murdered a man in her cell. She made them uncomfortable, anxious and edgy, but Cindy seemed oblivious to the danger.

She indicated Chad with a nod. “I have an endorsement from Overlord Gonzo, and this one can take my spot in his herd.”

The warden lifted a single sheet of smudged paper off his desk, glanced at it, and flashed those predatory eyes at Cindy. “Do you mean this endorsement? Signed, I see, by your owner and several witnesses.”

Cindy’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. Everything should be in order.”

Chad could not believe what he was hearing. They were speaking in very rational, measured tones-civilized tones-about things medieval and barbaric. The warden’s office added to this perception. It was a large, dimly lit room with an absurdly high ceiling. The desk was the only piece of furniture in the room. The walls were painted a dark green. Chad thought of hospital walls. Prison walls. Institutional walls. Images from movies. The world of make-believe was the only apt frame of reference, he decided. This place was just too surreal. He noticed a coiled hose attached to a spigot in one corner of the room and a rust-flecked drain set in the floor below it. His gaze shifted from the drain to a set of shackles and chains affixed to wall mounts. Then he saw the coiled whip that hung from a peg behind the desk.

He began to tremble.

The warden’s thin lips formed a wet slit of a smile, and he held the piece of paper so Cindy could see it clearly, gripping the upper corners with the thumbs and forefingers of his hands. The multiple signatures were legible from where Chad stood.

The warden tore the piece of paper down the middle, then folded the separate pieces together and tore them again.

And again.

Cindy shook with silent rage.

The man pursed his lips and stared hard at her over steepled fingers. “Oops, I seem to have misplaced it.”

Chad’s mouth opened in an astonished expression of righteous disbelief. He couldn’t believe the audacity of this man. He wanted to say something, to protest, but could think of nothing that wouldn’t sound foolish or naive. He was clearly in a place where the normal rules of decorum didn’t apply. Hell, rules at all didn’t seem to apply. Apparently, if you occupied a position of power in this place, you could just make them up as you went along. Chad’s tolerance level for brazen abuses of authority had always been low, but there seemed no means of recourse here.

They were at this man’s mercy.

Whose distinguishing characteristic seemed to be a lack thereof.

Cindy began to move toward the desk. The tall man’s eyes widened slightly, but he was never in any real danger. A guard interceded, clamping massive hands around her upper arms. She struggled in his grip, realized instantly it was useless, and gave up.

“This is wrong,” she whispered. “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Chad despaired at the defeated tone in her voice. It was disheartening to see someone so strong and so spirited beaten so easily. He didn’t much care for what it seemed to portend for him, either, which was total subjugation. He was no coward, but he was self-aware enough to know he was likely no match for anyone down here.

The tall man made a tsk-tsk noise and shook his head. “Such a stupid cunt.” He smirked. “You should know better than to threaten your betters.”

He pushed away from the desk and stood up. Chad was unable to suppress a gasp. The man was even taller than he’d guessed. NBA tall. He removed his jacket and draped it over the back of the chair, then he unbuttoned the cuffs of his sleeves and rolled the sleeves up.

The smirk deepened, becoming a sneer. “I shall administer your punishment myself.” He licked his lips, again causing Chad to think of a wolf. A wolf about to descend upon a gaggle of undefended chickens. “Twenty lashes.” He chuckled. “No, thirty!”

He removed the whip from the peg, uncoiled it, and snapped it against the floor with a crisp flick of the wrist. He nodded at the guard holding Cindy. “Prepare her.”

The guard pushed her toward the corner Chad now realized functioned as a sort of bare-bones torture chamber. He looked at the drain and the coiled hose again. A shiver went through him. The curiously equipped corner likely served a dual purpose. Torture was just the first phase of punishment. Perhaps, if you were lucky, the only phase. The second phase was certainly execution. The hose was a heavy-gauge one. It could be turned on the prisoner as an additional element of torture, but Chad believed its primary purpose was to drive blood and tissue down the scummy drain.

Chad’s stomach rumbled.

“Please don’t do this,” he mumbled.

Another guard clubbed him in the ear. “Shut up.”

The guard assigned to Cindy slammed her against the wall, causing her to cry out. Chad winced at the brutality. He had to remind himself this was far from the worst of what he would see before this nightmare was over.

The shackles snapped shut around Cindy’s wrists and ankles. The tall man approached her slowly, flicking the whip against the floor again and again. Chad sensed a terrible relish in the man’s deliberate approach. He radiated malevolence. His dark eyes reflected no hint of mercy.

He stood before Cindy and smiled. “Who do you serve, bitch?”

Tears were streaming down Cindy’s cheeks. “The M-Master.”

“Yessss.” The tall man sounded like a snake poised to strike. “As we all do. And you have offended the Master with your insolence. Now you pay.”

Cindy’s knees shook. “Please. Please don’t.” She was sobbing now. “I’ll do anything.” Chad wanted to look away, but he found himself unable to do so, as though some outside force compelled him to bear witness to Cindy’s indignity. The heartbreaking part of it was the strength that still resonated in her voice. “Anything at all. You got anybody you want dead? I’ll make them dead. Use my body in any perverted, fucked-up way you want. I’ll make it better than your sick mind ever imagined. Just please don’t do this.”

The tall man laughed. “Really? How tempting.” Laughter from the guards this time. “Of course, I’m used to pleas of this nature from people in your position, but I find this interesting.” He nodded at Chad. “Would you kill him?”

Something at the center of Chad’s being went very cold. Cindy made eye contact with him and held his gaze for a period of seconds that seemed eons long. Then she looked at the tall man. “Would you approve my petition?”

The tall man’s eyes narrowed and he turned to appraise Chad more fully. He stroked his chin with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. In that moment the warden was the epitome of a Mephistophelean figure, diabolic and crafty. It was just one more unpleasant association on top of a whole heap of unpleasantness, and Chad suddenly felt very weary.

He was really and truly fucked.

The tall man seemed amused by Cindy’s gesture of ruthless self-interest. “I would consider it a second time, perhaps more favorably?

Cindy scowled. “Fuck that. You have to promise.”

Chad had to wonder what the point of that condition was-this was so clearly not a man who honored his word. His promises would be worth less than Confederate cash. And he didn’t know what to make of Cindy’s tentative acquiescence, either. He had a hard time believing she would kill him, not if he trusted the truth of the things she’d told him in the cell, but maybe none of that mattered anymore.

Maybe all she gave a damn about at this point was self-preservation. He strongly suspected no one survived three years in this place without making that the number-one priority of every waking moment.

So, yeah, he could see her killing him.

All of a sudden, he felt a little less detached from the situation.

A little more in imminent danger of serious harm.

He didn’t know how to deal with it. Should he protest? Beg for his life? Maybe whimper and cower like the cowardly cur he secretly feared he was. Maybe there was some other angle he was missing. Wasn’t it possible Cindy was acting, playing the angles until she could work out a way to get them out of here? The helplessness he felt was humiliating. Debilitating. He’d handled some pretty stressful situations in this business world, scenarios that called for quick thinking and an ability to solve complex problems in creative ways, and he’d come to believe he was pretty damn smooth.

Well, that self-image was all shot to hell now.

He didn’t have clue fucking one what to do.

The way the warden was eyeing him wasn’t helping matters. He looked like a serial killer sizing up a lone prostitute at two in the morning. “I’ll tell you a secret. This is a personal insight I’m giving the two of you. The thing I treasure most about my position Below is the freedom to do as I wish with my inferiors.”

He started to coil the whip. “Before I came here, I ran an office of twenty. I worked my people hard, and most of them did good work. Some of them, though, were slackers. Layabouts. I did my best to get rid of them, but that wasn’t so easy a proposition with the ones who’d done enough to fake their way through the probationary period. The corporate bylaws made them almost untouchable. The niggers were the worst. That affirmative-action shit made my life hell, I’ll tell you. All that red tape. All those government regulations. I can’t tell you how much it all pissed me off. I would’ve given anything to string any of those assholes up by the balls.”

He finished coiling the whip and handed it to a guard, who returned it to the peg behind the tall man’s desk. “Here …” He spread his hands wide and smiled. “I have none of those worries. Procedure?” He indicated the pile of shredded paper on his desk. “You’ve seen how much proper procedure means to me.” He addressed one of the guards. “Release the woman.” The guard took a ring of keys from his belt, unlocked the shackles around Cindy’s wrists and ankles, and moved back as she stepped away from the wall. She rubbed her wrists as she walked slowly to the center of the room. She walked straight toward Chad, making fearless eye contact with him, and came to a stop several feet in front of him.

She said, “We do what we have to do down here.” She extended an open hand and a guard slapped a baton into it. She held out her other hand and the handle of a knife was pressed into the palm. She began to advance on Chad, who was dismayed by the gladiatorial gleam in her eyes. She smiled. “It’s going to feel good to kill.”

Chad drew in a deep, anticipatory breath.

This is it, he thought.

Ready or not, this is it.

Holy shit, say a prayer or something.

He barely perceived the rest of the warden’s monologue, but he could see Cindy was waiting for him to be done speaking. “Two more examples. Two mysteries someone else might give a damn about solving. Two people who wound up sharing a cell with you, young lady. Two people who were never signed in.”