10.

BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS.

VIRGINIA.

MOONLIGHT SHIMMERED ACROSS the polished wooden floor of the mountain cabin, mottled leaf-shadows dancing along the polished planks as the wind shifted outside. Had there been anyone present, he might have heard the soft chirping of crickets, their normally shrill song muted to a low musical throbbing by the thick plate gla.s.s. Almost peaceful. After that he might have heard a rustling overhead, the quick patter of animal feet across the roof, and a scratching sound at the top of the chimney. Then movement inside the chimney itself, and the sound of something slowly descending. Then a pause, and a dull thunk as the metal flue opened.

A large racc.o.o.n dropped down into the fireplace.

It sat there for a moment, dark eyes alert, nose vibrating as it drank in the smells of the place. Then, when it had verified that the cabin was empty, it pushed past the fire screen and entered the living area.

It began to search. Not as an animal normally does, instinctively following scent cues to their source, but methodically, geometrically, studying every inch of the place with its piercing black eyes, lowering its nose to test any item that seemed out of place.

It paused at a side table and savored the trace aroma of hamburgers and french fries. A chicken nugget had fallen onto the floor when the table had been hurriedly cleaned. The racc.o.o.n glanced at it briefly, but otherwise showed no interest. It paused at the couch, its nose wrinkling as it drank in the traces of sweat, fear, and fire that clung to the crisp chintz.

It paused in each bedroom, tasting the human scents that lingered on the sheets.

It jumped up onto the dining room table and walked over to where two neatly folded papers were standing upright, tucked between a vase of artificial flowers and a marble napkin-holder. For a moment it c.o.c.ked its head to one side, and a fanciful observer might have imagined that it was trying to read who they were addressed to.

Then, with small and dainty hands, it drew the papers out.

For Dad, said one.

For Evelyn Drake, said the other. Currently in Mana.s.sas Hospital. Pls deliver. Tx!

Opening the letters, the racc.o.o.n glanced briefly at their contents. Then it folded them again, took them in its mouth, and carried them back to the fireplace.

And up the chimney.

And out into the night.

Other than the chirping of crickets, the cabin was silent once more.

11.

OBFUSCATE GUILDHOUSE IN LURAY.

VIRGINIA PRIME.

WHEN TOMMY'S MIND FINALLY CLEARED, he found himself in what appeared to be a prison cell. The narrow metal bed he was lying on was bolted to the floor. A toilet seat without a lid was in one corner, and a sink and shelf table were bolted to the wall near another. There was a narrow horizontal slit in one wall through which a sliver of sunlight was visible, but it was too high up for him see anything other than sky. The walls were made of stone, so he wasn't going to be breaking out that way any time soon. Ditto that note for the door, which was made of metal, with a mail slot in the center. The flap was on the outside.

He didn't know where he was.

He didn't know who had brought him there.

He didn't know what they wanted with him.

He did know he must have been drugged with something pretty powerful, probably hallucinogenic in nature. Crazy, disjointed visions from the night before were still reverberating in his mind: a soaring arch with crystals exploding from its surface, a corpse-like man who trailed ghosts in his wake, a glowing pattern of golden lines that filled the air all around him. It seemed to be slowly clearing out of his head now, but the real world was still a little hazy around the edges. Whatever drug they'd given him, it had been a doozy.

But that didn't explain what he'd seen before he was drugged. He remembered with unnerving clarity the moment when he'd looked into the face of his attacker and seen something other than human features. It was the kind of face that belonged in a fantasy game, not a teenager's bedroom. Was it possible that memory was real? He couldn't even consider it without trembling.

What the h.e.l.l was that thing?

Suddenly he heard footsteps outside his door: dull and heavy, a man's stride. He levered himself up to a sitting position and then stood, trying not to look as anxious as he felt. His balance was a bit shaky, so he leaned against the bed frame to steady himself. As the door opened he drew in a deep breath, readying himself to run, or scream, or do whatever else the moment required.

Two men were visible in the doorway. One was tall and pale and wearing a knee-length black coat that b.u.t.toned up to the neck, like a priest's ca.s.sock. The other looked like a guard of some kind, and indeed, as the first man stepped into the room the second remained at the threshold, glaring at Tommy as if he expected some sort of trouble from him.

As his visitor came into the light Tommy gasped and backed away, until the stone wall at his back made it impossible to move any further.

The man wasn't human!

He had the same shape as a human being, and the same general arrangement of features, but there the resemblance ended. His eyes were too large for his head and they had slit pupils, like a cat's. His nose was tiny and he had almost no lips, which made the cat-eyes seem even larger by contrast. His skin was a strange mottled grey, and the fingers peeking out from the long arms of his coat were considerably longer than fingers should be.

Tommy recognized him. Not just from a thousand horror movies. This was what his kidnapper had looked like.

His heart pounding wildly, he felt a powerful urge to flee, but there was nowhere to go. "Who are you?" he demanded, trying to sound braver than he felt. "Why am I here?"

The creature looked at him curiously, as if Tommy was some strange kind of bug that had just crawled in the window, and he wanted to figure out what it was before he squashed it. "I am Alistair Wells, Master of the Guild of Obfuscates. I'm the one who ordered that you be brought here, and I'm the one who will ultimately determine your fate. So I suggest you do your best to remain on my good side."

The utter mundanity of the creature's name, combined with its quasi-British accent, threw Tommy completely off his guard. "What . . . what do you want?" he stammered.

"Ah. The cooperative approach." The creature nodded. "Very good."

He nodded to the guard, who closed the door from the outside. "I have an interest in your dreams, Mister Drake. If you would be so good as to describe some of them for me, I might find myself well-disposed toward you."

Tommy blinked in astonishment. "My dreams? That's what you want from me? My dreams?"

The grey man nodded. "Specifically, the ones that inspired several gaming modules you designed. Let's begin with Demon World, The Seven-Fold Path, and Pa.s.sage to h.e.l.l. Please describe to me exactly which elements in those modules were inspired by your dreams and what the dreams themselves were like."

This is too friggin' surreal, Tommy thought. Here he'd suffered what seemed to be a genuine alien abduction, and all they wanted was to know about his dreams? What happened to prodding him with giant needles and stealing his bodily fluids? What made this even crazier was that it wasn't his dreams this guy was asking about; those three modules had been based on stories that Jesse had told him, about her dreams.

Oh.

Understanding hit him like a bucket of ice water.

Oh!

They wanted Jesse's dreams. That what this was all about! She'd told Tommy he could use them for his games if he claimed them as his own, so he'd done that, and now . . . holy c.r.a.p.

They think I'm Jesse.

He started to talk, but very slowly. Forcing words out-any words-to buy himself time to think. The first thing he needed to do was confirm to this guy that they'd grabbed the right dreamer, to buy himself some time to evaluate the situation. So he started talking about his dreams, but he deliberately mixed up the details. Some bits were from Jesse's dreams, some from his own, and some was stuff he just made up on the spot. He did rip off a few ideas from World of Warcraft, but despite the fact that the grey man was the one who had brought up the subject of game modules, Tommy suspected he wasn't enough of a player to catch the references.

His captor listened to all of it with no change of expression, but Tommy could tell from the questions the grey guy asked which parts of the recitation interested him the most. And that was all stuff from Jesse's dreams. Tommy tested that theory out with a few more story twists, and soon there was no doubt about it: She was the dreamer they'd meant to kidnap, not him.

The revelation both elated and terrified him. Whatever they'd been planning to do to Jesse, it surely wouldn't accomplish their purpose to do it to him instead. So that was a good thing, right? Only here he was, trapped in this cell, and they couldn't just let him go now that he'd seen these aliens with undrugged eyes. So as soon as they realized that they'd made a mistake, and that he was of no possible use to them, they'd probably dispose of him. And so he struggled to sound useful, feeding the grey man the stories he seemed to want to hear, presenting each dream as his own.

After about a half hour of that the grey man finally held up a hand and said, "Enough for now." Which was a good thing, because at that point Tommy was mentally exhausted, and he was running out of dreams to talk about.

"Can I go home now?" he asked in his most plaintive naive-little-boy voice. He was sure the answer would be No, but he figured that the more scared and helpless he looked, the less likely it was that this guy would think him capable of misleading anyone.

The huge cat-eyes fixed on him. "Not yet," their owner said, without a hint of emotion. Not ever, his eyes proclaimed. Then the alien called for the door to be opened, and he exited without further word, leaving Tommy alone with his thoughts, and his fears.

Enough for now. Did that mean that this guy would be coming back later, to hear more dream stories? If so, then Tommy would need to come up with some new ones, and fast. He would include details from Jesse's dreams to keep the grey man engaged, but mix in enough nonsense from gaming scenarios to make it hard for his captors to be sure which parts mattered. The longer they were uncertain, the longer they would need to keep Tommy around to feed them information.

Always keep them wanting more, he thought grimly.

He remembered a story he'd read once, about a princess whose husband wanted to behead her after their wedding night, but she had talked her way out of it. What was it called-1001 Nights? She told him a story that night but left off the ending, so he had to let her live another night to finish it. Then the next night, after she finished that story, she started a new one, which also had the ending missing. And again the next night. And the night after that. Eventually he just gave up on the whole beheading idea and let her live on as his wife. Happily ever after. True, it hadn't sounded like a very healthy marriage to Tommy, but who was he to judge?

He was pretty sure that his captors wouldn't give him a total reprieve like that. But as long as he kept telling stories they wanted to hear, they'd probably keep him around. And meanwhile, maybe Jesse would find him. Or someone else would. Or he'd figure out a way to get out of here by himself.

Lying back on his bed, trembling, he shut his eyes and began to weave suspense-filled fantasies in his head.

h.e.l.l, he thought dryly, at least I'm playing to my strengths.

12.

BLUE RIDGE GATE.

VIRGINIA PRIME.

YOU KNOW HOW YOU FEEL when you jump off a high diving board for the very first time? There you are, suspended in midair with nothing to hold on to, and suddenly it hits you just how far down the water really is, which you never really understood until that minute. You have this long, terrible moment where you're falling-just falling-and the whole world seems to slow down around you, so you have time to a.n.a.lyze every flaw in your diving technique and calculate just how bad the pain is going to be when you hit the water belly-first, because empty air doesn't offer any handholds and gravity doesn't allow do-overs.

Going through the archway was like that.

One minute I was lying like a corpse in my cloth-and-steel coffin, trying to ignore everything that was going on around me, and the next minute I was moving. The cavern floor that had seemed so smooth when I was walking on it turned out to be anything but, and a few times the gurney got jolted so badly I was afraid my backpack would come loose and fall to the floor.

Trust the duct tape, I told myself. Trust the duct tape. A mantra of serenity. Trust the duct tape.

Then strange patterns filled my head again, and this time they were ten times brighter than before. Glowing lines swept around me in seemingly chaotic abandon, but I could sense that there was a greater pattern to them, and that the pattern mattered. I tried not to think about what it could mean, for fear of getting so distracted that I would turn my head to look at some part of it.

We must have entered the archway then, because suddenly the ground was level and everything else was gone. Just gone. I'm not sure how I knew that, from under my sheet, or how I knew that there were a thousand different directions we could go in-a hundred thousand-and only one of them would bring us safely to the other side. a.s.suming there was anything on the other side that a Mana.s.sas gal would call safe. It was a terrifying ride, smooth on the outside but roller-coaster scary on the inside, and I had to fight not to reach out and grab the edges of my gurney, just to have something to hold on to.

And then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over. The gurney jolted as one of its wheels b.u.mped into something solid. The sound of human voices-or maybe non-human voices-filled the air and the bits and pieces of conversation I overheard were so unexpectedly mundane that they served as an anchor, grounding my soul as the strange patterns faded from my mind.

Is this the last group for today?

Paula asked if you could take her shift.

No, I don't know when Sanderson will be finished. Why don't you just ask him yourself?

I was shaking pretty badly by that point, which was dangerous. I tried to hold my body rigid so that its trembling wouldn't be visible, but trembling doesn't work like that. Luckily no one was looking too closely.

There was a sudden jerk as my gurney started moving again. The floor was perfectly smooth, which at least told me that we were no longer in the cavern. Then the table stopped moving, and I heard other gurneys wheeled into position beside me, five in all. Footsteps moved away from us. s.n.a.t.c.hes of conversation fluttered about my head like anxious insects, then moved off into the distance and were gone.

Silence.

For the first time in what seemed like eternity, I dared to draw in a deep breath. My chest ached as clean-smelling air filled my lungs. I had the sudden crazy vision of a Star Trek landing party reporting back to Captain Kirk: "The aliens breathe oxygen, sir."

Then the lights went out.