IF

Clayton Smith

Part III: Gods and Monsters

Chapter 1:

In Which Our Story Becomes a Little Watered Down

The Stranger tumbled across the lintel, huge globs of peanut butter spattering the rocky ground around his boots as he landed smoothly on the bluff. The children toppled after him, somewhat less gracefully, bouncing through the gateway between dreams and collapsing in sticky brown lumps at the Stranger’s boots.

“Ugh,” Cole moaned, hauling himself to his feet and pawing at the thick layer of creamy peanut butter that coated his entire body. “Gross.”

“My dress!” Polly screeched. “My dress is ruined!” That, Cole thought, was really the least of her worries, seeing as how her entire face, including her eyes, was cemented over. Well, maybe not her entire face…her mouth seemed to be working pretty well. “I hate being dirty!” she bawled.

Emma scooped a handful of peanut butter from her cheek and popped it into her mouth. “Mmmm,” she said through a sticky smile. “Ifsh rearry guf!”

“It’s horrible!” Polly insisted. She scraped the peanut butter away from her eyes and saw just how fully her entire being was coated in sticky, sweet peanut butter. She let out an agonizing shriek.

“Don’t be such a weirdo,” Willy said, running his tongue around his lips. Then he shook like a dog, and flecks of peanut butter sprayed out in all directions, splattering his classmates.

“It tastes all-natural,” Etherie observed, sucking the sticky stuff thoughtfully from one finger. “It’s the palm oil in processed peanut butter that’s really worth screaming about.”

“At least it isn’t chunky,” Cole added helpfully.

“Yeah—I hate chunky!” Willy cried.

“I meant if it were chunky, we’d be bruised up,” Cole sighed. “We should count ourselves lucky.”

“Lucky?” Polly fumed. “Does my dress look lucky to you?!”

“Be grateful we made it out alive,” the Stranger said gravely. “If nothing else, that was lucky.” And none of them could disagree. Not even Polly.

The new world where they now stood was stark, and beautiful. They were standing on a plateau of layered brown stone that seemed to be floating in the air, like a flying island. There was a pool of water on the platform, just a few dozen feet from where the group stood. Water bubbled up into it from some hidden spring down below, then swirled lazily in slow, calm eddies…but when the water reached the far end of the pool, it picked up speed and rushed over the edge of the cliff, in a long waterfall that dropped for hundreds of feet before crashing onto another floating platform of stone below.

The whole thing made Cole’s toes tingle.

“Where did we go through?” Cole asked the cowboy, scraping the peanut butter out of his hair. “Did we go the right way?”

The Stranger shook his head. “Not sure. Got pretty turned around in there. We’ll get cleaned up, and I’ll check the map.” He pulled off his peanut buttery hat and reached inside the brim, pulling out a mostly clean handkerchief. He mopped his face with it until he could see clearly, then strode toward the pool of water.

Just watching him get near the water made Cole’s stomach drop. “Be careful!” he cried, almost involuntarily.

“Don’t be such a baby!” Willy shouted, plodding after the Stranger. Etherie followed, also unconcerned, but Polly and Emma both seemed to share his fear, which Cole believed to be thoroughly justified. If the idea of losing his footing in a pond and being swept away down a waterfall to the thundering crash of water on boulders half a mile below wasn’t worth a little healthy fear, Cole didn’t know what was.

“Don’t be afraid,” Etherie said in that serenely confident way that made Cole wonder if she could see into his thoughts. “Something so beautiful cannot be scary, can it?”

Cole was inclined to disagree.

The world behind them on the far side of the black rubber mat flickered through its bizarre offerings: first a courtroom; then a parking lot for clown cars; a submarine freeway; then a stately marbled church. And on this side of the long, open threshold, the plateau of rock butted up snugly against the rubber lintel like a wide, flat fungus growing off some otherworldly, horizontal tree trunk. Where the circular edge of the stone pulled away from the lintel, there was nothing; the air there gave way to blue sky below. If Cole crouched down, he could actually see under the lintel. It ran straight out to the horizon from the rock’s surface like a massive television screen. There was more blue sky behind it, if he looked under the lintel…though that was impossible, because he could see the pulpit of the great church straight ahead of him. Then that, too, flicked away and was replaced by the inside of what must have been the world’s largest clock tower, its heavy gears the size of skyscrapers rolling and grinding lazily away. Yet below the lintel, and behind it, the blue sky remained.

Cole swooned from the dizzying sight and stumbled forward on his peanut buttery soles, and he nearly toppled over the edge. He caught himself just in time and scrabbled back to safer footing.

Their stone saucer was far from the only island of rock in the sky; the space was full of them. They dotted the sky like stars. By studying the others, Cole could understand how their own stone island must appear: not like a saucer at all, but like a stunted cone, the kind used to hold shaved ice at a carnival. But instead of cheap paper, these were made of solid rock. They tapered off to a point maybe 100 feet below the surface, and then they just...stopped. There was nothing beneath them; they just hovered, floating islands of rock suspended in mid-air.

The thought of having no solid grounding made him swoon again, only this time, he gave into his weakened knees and plopped down onto a peanut butter puddle with a loud squish.

“It is disconcerting,” Etherie admitted, nodding slowly off into the distance. “But it’s the water that makes it beautiful, don’t you think? The way it cascades…always pouring from one island to another to another to another. Ooooh!” she breathed. “Look!”

The children followed her pointing finger and gasped, almost in unison. Two of the stone islands were moving! They were arranged one below the other, with the surge of water falling down from the top and crashing onto the island at the bottom, which was, in turn, filling with water and spilling it over its own edge to yet another stone island below that. But the one floating above actually started falling, slowly as a feather, and the one below began climbing. The waterfall between them grew shorter and shorter, its crashing becoming more and more subdued, until finally the two islands were level with each other, and for one moment the water was distributed equally on both plateaus, forming one giant island of water in an endless sea of sky. A second later, the island that had been below rose above, and the one that had been above sank down below. The flow of water reversed.

“They all move!” Emma cried. And indeed, most of the islands were moving, floating lazily through the air—up, down, left, and right. Some of them spun in slow circles; some glided in wide arcs. And always the water moved with them, adjusting its flow accordingly.

“Cool!” Willy yelled. He had hustled over to the edge of their rock and was gaping excitedly at the islands below. “The water goes all the way down to forever!” he cried, pointing down at the seemingly infinite expanse of air beneath them. “You could ride it like a water slide!”

He leapt toward the pool, about to put his theory to work, but the Stranger slipped up behind him, quick as a snake, and pulled him back from the water’s edge. “No,” he said sharply. “Clean yourselves up, and we’ll go back the way we came and wait for a different imagination.” The cowboy dunked his boots into the water, smeared most of the peanut butter away, and tugged them off his feet. Next came his socks, then his vest and his shirt, washing out each piece in turn. The children followed suit, though more modestly, easing themselves into the pool fully clothed and struggling to free their fabrics from the sticky mess.

Well, four of them eased, anyway. Willy did a running cannonball.

When Cole had gotten the creases of his clothes peanut butter-free, he crawled out of the water and joined the Stranger, who sat bare chested on the rock, patiently cleaning his six-shooter with his damp rag. “It’s too bad we have to backtrack,” Cole offered.

The Stranger bared the edges of his teeth. “The sooner we reach the Pinch, the better. But if that junkyard general was right, we’re gonna have a bad time getting there.”

“Because the Royal wants us...” Cole paused. He didn’t know the right word for it. “Gone?”

“Dead,” the cowboy corrected him seriously. “No two ways about it.”

All the moisture evaporated from Cole’s throat. He choked down a hard swallow, then bent and cupped a handful of water from the pool. He lifted it to his lips, but stopped himself just shy of a sip. “Is this safe to drink?” he croaked.

The cowboy shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

Cole hesitated and frowned at the cowboy, then gulped down the water. He shook his hand dry and sat down next to the Stranger. “This Royal, he’s strong, right? Powerful?”

“The most powerful force in the Boundarylands right now.”

“In all of imagination?”

“Right now.”

“Then...why aren’t we already gone—er…dead?” Cole asked uneasily.

“The Pinch is his place of power,” the Stranger frowned, pulling the rag through one of the gun barrel’s cylinders. “The further you get from it, the less powerful he is. Understand?”

Cole nodded glumly. “And since we’re getting closer, it’s only going to get worse.”

The cowboy raised his eyes from his gun and leveled them at the young boy. “It is.”

“Isn’t there any way to do this that doesn’t involve the Pinch?”

The Stranger shook his head. “You cut ties with your IF when you sent him away. The only other way to track someone down is to use the Royal.”

“But the Royal wants us dead.”

The cowboy nodded. “Yep.”

Cole frowned. “Then how are we going to get him to help us?”

“I’m working on that.”

The other children splashed happily near the edge of the pool, oblivious to their conversation. Cole sighed. “Why would he want us gone?” he asked.

The Stranger shrugged. “No tellin’. It’s just dark days.” And he left it at that.

Cole watched the children playing. They looked so happy to be there, to be together, in that place. They looked so joyful. “Well,” he said finally, “I guess we could just...stop. Right? And go back home?”

The Stranger tilted his head and furrowed his sun-leathered brow. “Is that what you want?”

Cole rocked his head from side to side as he considered the question. Of course it wasn’t what he wanted, but he couldn’t exactly plunge toward certain death with four other children in tow, either. He felt horrible about the way he’d treated Broken, and he knew that if it wasn’t resolved, there would always be some part of him that felt a little weaker—a little colder. It would always feel a bit like someone had let a draft into his chest. But still...what good was resolving a problem if you weren’t alive to appreciate it? It would be bad enough— irresponsible enough—if the only life in question were his, but with four other children and an adult in the equation? Of course he couldn’t push on.

Could he?

“I don’t want to quit—” he began truthfully.

“That’s good,” the Stranger interrupted. “Because we ain’t got much choice in the matter.”

Cole’s blinked. “What do you mean?”

“The Wellwhich Way Station is the way in. Imaginaries, we can leave the realm anywhere and anytime, but only if we’re summoned by our Anchors. Elsewise, and for else-creatures, there’s only one way out of the Boundary.”

Cole blenched. “Don’t tell me…”

The cowboy nodded curtly. “Through the Pinch. It’s got the only door out I know of.”

“So we keep going, either way,” he said. Cole groaned as buried his head in his arms. “Be honest,” he said, his voice muffled. “Do we have any chance of making it out of this alive? Any chance at all?”

The cowboy grunted and returned his attention to the revolver. He moved on to the next chamber, dipping the rag in water and rubbing it along the curved edge. “A chance. Maybe not a good one, but still…a chance.”

“How, then?” Cole muttered. “How do we do it?”

“It’ll take some imagination.” Cole looked up and searched the Stranger’s face for a sign that he was teasing. He found nothing but stone. “If we’re gonna have any sort of chance, you’re gonna need to find yours.”

Cole turned back to the other children, hooting and hollering across the water. “I don’t think we can count on that,” he said quietly.

The Stranger snorted. “Ain’t gonna have much choice. You need to find your imagination if you want to stay alive, and find it quick. I’d bet all six barrels that our royal friend’s got more than just the one search party tracking us down.”

Cole picked up a loose piece of shale and skimmed it across the water. It skipped three times, then disappeared over the edge. “I didn’t think this trip would be life or death,” he whispered, biting his bottom lip. Two tears quivered on his eyelids, threatening to spill over, but he scrubbed them away with his sleeve and took a deep breath. “Well,” he said, sniffing back his running nose, “it’s too late to turn back anyway, right? I guess there’s no use crying about it. We’ll have to take our chances with the Royal and the Pinch.”

The Stranger gave him a sideways smirk. “We ain’t done in yet. Long as we’re breathin’, we’ve got hope.” He stood up and slipped the gleaming six-shooter into its holster. “Come on. If we’re gonna move forward, we’d best hurry up and go backward.”

“You don’t think there’s some way we can control the movement of this thing?” Cole asked, bouncing up and down on the rock, seeing if it had any give. “Maybe make it float us over to the next lintel? Wherever that is?”

“It’s there,” the cowboy said, pointing into the distance.

Cole craned his neck and strained his eyes, shading them with the back of one hand. He saw something out there, way down on the horizon—practically beyond the horizon…a slight change of color that was little more than a dark speck in the blue sky.

“Look,” Cole said, nodding downward. “Our waterfall hits that island, that island drops it over to that one, that one drops it onto that one, and when that one moves up higher, it’ll dump it on the other one there...all the way across the sky, all the way to the end. It really is like a water slide.”

“Water slide!” Willy screamed. He broke away from the girls and kick-splashed across the pool, diving straight for the waterfall. The Stranger reached into the water and grabbed him by the collar as he passed. He hauled the frantic boy out and dropped him on his behind on the hard stone. “Aw, come on,” Willy muttered. “They’ve got bigger slides than that at Slick Willy’s Water Park.”

“It’s not a slide,” he said fiercely. “Stay away from the edge.” Then he turned back to Cole. “And no, I don’t think we can control how the island moves. I think we better get before it decides to move itself away from the lintel we do have.”

The children dragged themselves out of the pool and shook off the water, lingering a few minutes to dry in the sun. Then they gathered their things and lined up at the lintel.

The flow was familiar by now, and they watched patiently as the imaginations whirred past. The first scene was a railroad station at night, which Cole thought a decent enough setting, until he saw two figures huddled near the tracks, one lying more or less prostrate on the ground, and one hovering above, knocking the other senseless with a flashlight.

Maybe that wasn’t the right imagination after all.

Next came a pirate ship caught in a full-on battle with a much larger vessel bearing the Union Jack flag. Cannonballs whizzed overhead; one struck the mizzenmast, exploding it in a violent storm of splinters and dust. Then this scene whisked itself away and was replaced by a zoo where the animals were the keepers and men, women, and children clung to the bars inside the cages. Then came a field with an enormous tree propped up in its center, a tree that looked somehow both stunted and colossal at the same time—the way a Bonsai tree might look to an ant. Some sort of hieroglyphics were carved into the trunk, spiraling up and around its great circumference, though from this distance Cole couldn’t make out what they were. The leaves of the tree vibrated like hummingbird wings, moving so quickly that they appeared to be translucent spheres.

“This one,” the Stranger decided. “Hands.” He grabbed Cole’s hand with his left and Etherie’s with his right. Etherie took Polly’s, Polly held Emma’s, and Emma grabbed...empty air.

“Willy?” she asked, swiveling around.

“WATER SLIDE!” the boy hollered. He was already halfway through the pool before the Stranger could untangle his hands from the children’s.

“Willy!” the Stranger roared, plunging into the water, sending a small wave over the sides of the cliff. “Stop!”

But Willy reached the edge of the waterfall and leapt into its current, crying, “Ya-hoooooo!” He slipped over the edge and out of sight.

The Stranger gaped after him in disbelief. He peered over the edge and saw Willy disappear into the spray of water, then reappear for a split second before he plunged into the pool on the platform below. After a few seconds, the boy bobbed to the surface, laughing like a maniac and wheeling his arms wildly in the water. The tide ushered him over the lip of that island, too, and onto the next, which raised itself above a fourth island just in the nick of time as Willy sloshed over and spun down the current.

The cowboy let loose a string of short, harsh words, most of which the children hadn’t heard before, but the meanings of which was pretty easily understood.

He was rather upset.

“What do we do?” Emma gasped, her eyes huge and wet as freshly washed dinner plates. “What do we do?!”

The Stranger gritted his teeth. “We go after him.”

Chapter 2:

In Which a Newcomer Comes Along

Haberdash flapped her wings in frustration and jiggled the top lever of the image replicator, but it was no use. The infernal contraption absolutely refused to engage in replication. What it did not refuse to do was give a sickly click-click-whirrrr, click-click-whirrrr every time she gave the lever a tug. “Blarney!” she pouted, shaking the small metal box like a rattle. “Why don’t you work?” Something inside the replicator went clack-tock. The front casing burst open, and a gleaming metal spring sprang out from inside and bounced around like a demented accordion.

“Oh, perfect,” Haberdash moaned. “Like that’s in the budget.” She scratched back against the itch to hurl the blasted piece of junk to the imagination’s depths. But she stopped herself, for two reasons. First of all, the Home Office would need the broken image replicator for inventory and examination if they were going to send her a replacement. And secondly, it seemed like there actually was no bottom to this particular imagination, and while the thought of the useless piece of machinery falling literally forever was tempting, the exercise wouldn’t be wholly satisfying without the gratifying crashing sound of its shattering demise.

So instead of flinging it into the heavens below, she looped the stupid thing’s leather strap over her neck so she could drag it around like a millstone. Oh, what fun.

“Of course it would pick right now to go on the fritz!” she grumbled to herself. “The Bounti Falls is the rarest, most impossible-to-find imagining in the entire Boundarylands! I’ve been tracking it down for…let’s see.” She squinted her eyes and screwed up her face as she worked out the math. “Carry the two, power of eight, square the root of the ninth cosine…jiminy, I’ve been tracking it for six thousand years!”

Haberdash heaved a weary sigh and looked helplessly down at the gorgeous and awe-inspiring vision beneath her. The Bounti Falls was, in her estimation, the third most beautiful imagining in the Boundarylands (fourth on the days that the slug demons burrowed underground in the Ember Mint Fields, but that was so rare, and ugh, as soon as they wriggled back in plain sight, with their slimy, mucous-covered tentacles and their googly, oogling eyes…on those days, they might as well be the Dismemberment Fields, for all their terrible grossness). The Falls were especially gorgeous from this height, far above the highest zenith of the most upwardly mobile island where the cascading water could be viewed practically in their entirety, if one had eyes sharp enough to see the lower layers. Dangerous as all get out, those Falls were, but beautiful nonetheless. They would have made the perfect shot for the new brochure…they might have even made the cover. She knew it, she wanted it, and, more importantly, the Home Office knew it, and the Home Office wanted it. And now they wouldn’t get it.

The Home Office didn’t handle disappointment particularly well.

Haberdash sighed again. Maybe she could use the shot of the Moonlands instead.

“What a nightmare.”

She hovered glumly, thinking maybe she should continue on through the ever-shifting maze of lintels and hope for the best. Plenty of the Boundary’s imaginings had repairmen. Surely one of them could fix a simple, broken image replicator. But even if she did find someone to fix the cursed thing, the Bounti Falls would be long gone. Even with her key, she might not find the right door again. So why bother?

She fluttered back toward her own door, the dead weight of the replicator around her neck pulling her down toward the islands as she went. She gave the far reaches of the Falls one last, yearning look, and as she did, movement caught her eye from down below. She squinted against the brightness of the day and—good Jupiter, there were creatures down there! Moving, living creatures! Four—no, five of them!—huddled about on an island butted up against the nearest lintel!

She screeched to a stop in midair and changed course, buzzing down toward the moving figures below. “Hello!” she shouted cheerily. But her words must have been lost in the thunder of the falling waters, because they didn’t seem to register the call. But, ah! No matter! She’d be within shouting distance soon enough.

Haberdash couldn’t help it. She beamed. Something about the isolation of this place made the presence of these visitors very exciting. She buzzed down toward the tiny figures, wishing against wish that the stupid replicator hadn’t broken. A tourism photo with actual tourists? That was the kind of shot that won awards.

But as she flew toward the figures on the rock island, something awful happened. The figures began to move, which was not in itself terribly surprising…but it was the direction in which they moved that caused her heart to seize up in her chest. The five little dots were headed directly to the edge of the falls.

“No!” she shouted out at the top of her lungs. “Stop! Get away! Go back!” But she knew it was useless. The bright, blue void between them swallowed her cries. She was still too far away. She put her head down and pushed herself into a free-fall, but it was no use; she was too slow. She watched helplessly as the five figures pitched themselves over the falls, one after the other, and disappeared under the water’s frothy white foam.

“Oh dear,” she frowned. “That would have made an awful picture.”

She saw the group pop back up in the pool of the platform below, and they appeared to be alive enough. They were in for one heck of a ride, though, and that last drop…well, that last one would be a doozy.

Unless she could get to them before they got there.

She turned again and made a beeline for the end of the road, the very last rocky island in the string of waterfalls. She was farther from it than the swimmers below, but their path wasn’t exactly direct, and she figured she might be able to beat them to it, if she flew straight and gave it every ounce of strength she had. She passed over the group as they fell down the fall to the third island and was halfway to the end of the line when she realized what those five figures were doing. They weren’t out seeking thrills in the falls, they were sliding around after a sixth figure, another creature that was four islands ahead of them!

“Oh dear,” she said again, wringing her hands in despair as she flew. “That one will almost surely go over the edge.” Which, of course, was a bad thing, because over the edge of the last island was nothing but blue-sky oblivion.

Whatever that creature was, it would fall for the rest of time.

His inability to breathe notwithstanding, Willy was having the time of his life.

Sure, his mouth, throat, and lungs were full of water. Sure, he kept getting sprayed in the eyes and could hardly see where he was going. And sure, some of the pools were shallow. Like, really shallow. Like, two-inches-of-water-between-him-and-sharp-stone shallow. He was pretty banged up, and his right leg might have been fractured. But man-oh-man, what a ride!

“Wahoooooo!” he choked out in the middle of a free-fall. Water rushed in and flooded his lungs, and he coughed and sputtered in big, wet heaves. He splashed down into another pool, this one mercifully deep, and he spun in the wake of the falls like a leaf in the wind. “Woooooo!”

He splashed his way through a few more falls until one of the islands lowered him into a nearby pool that itself was nearing yet another floating island. This alignment allowed the water to cease its furious, fuming foaming and ease into a lazy twist of spirals as it splashed down the series of steps. Willy laughed and seized the opportunity to flick the water out of his eyes, giving him the ability to really see for the first time since tumbling over that very first island.

What he saw cut the laughter right out of his throat.

Just beyond the next island, the imagining ended. There were no more floating rock platters, no more pools to splash down into. The water that slipped over this final rock formation fell and fell…and fell. Maybe it fell forever. And across the chasm, the empty air beyond the platter stretched far, far out into nothingness until it hit the next lintel, miles and miles away.

Unlike the lintel where he’d entered, this one didn’t start in mid-air. It stretched in all four directions as far as Willy could see, out to the horizons on either side, up to a vanishing point into the sky above, and down, down, down, past the mists and wisps of clouds of whatever space there was below. It was like the IMAX screen at the Prairie Lakes Cineplex three towns over from his house, but bigger. Much bigger.

Currently, it led to a frozen blue ice cave where a small group of tiny people huddled for warmth over the flame of a solitary matchstick. Willy could tell at least two of them were already frozen to death by the aquamarine hue of their skin. The others broke icicles from their beards and noses, eating snow and freezing themselves from the inside out in the process, from the looks of things. In short, it wasn’t a place Willy wanted to be, even if he could make the leap from the final island to the lintel.

He dropped down into the last pool, and he clawed savagely at the water, pulling himself to the edge of the pool and heaving himself up onto the rock before the current could wash him away into the endlessness below.

“Oh, thank the deities of the seven halls!” Haberdash shouted from above.

Willy’s heart nearly leapt out of his chest when he heard the voice booming out of the lumpy creature with the lacy wings flittering above his head. “I didn’t do it!” he screamed, shaking his head vigorously back and forth. He didn’t know what he was denying. It was just a reflex from too many years—seven years, to be exact, seven straight, with no breaks—of getting into trouble.

“And good graces that you didn’t!” Haberdash cried, buzzing down toward the boy. “That next step is a long one.”

“Are you a dragon?” Willy asked, squinting up at the flying creature.

“A dragon?” Haberdash asked, astonished. “Why no, child!” She burst into a laugh. She dropped a little closer to the rock island with each throaty bellow. “Life would be so easy if I were a dragon, wouldn’t it?” She sighed. “No, I’m afraid it’s much, much worse than that. I’m not a dragon. I’m a—”

“Waaaaaaaaah!” Emma hollered as she shot over the edge of the island. She splashed down a few feet from Willy, skidding toward the final edge and screaming over the roar of the water. But the Stranger slid down behind her, splashing on the balls of his feet. He sprang forward like a panther and grabbed her by the arm before she pitched over the edge, pulling her to safety. Cole came next, tumbling clumsily over the edge of the penultimate platter and plopping into the shallow end of the pool. He was followed closely by Etherie, who somersaulted blithely onto the rock and landed like a feather. Haberdash, who had nearly been knocked unconscious by all four of them as they fell, hovered away from the scene a little, gasping her relief.

“Well!” she panted, grasping at her heart with both hands. “Wasn’t that something! An entire corps of you—an entire corps—and not one of you having gone over!” She shook her head in disbelief. “Well, there’s a higher purpose at stake for your group, I should say!”

Cole crawled his way out of the water and looked around. “Where’s Polly?” he asked, wheezing for air.

At just that instant, they heard Polly’s approaching cry. She splashed into the pool behind them, which had slowly risen to just above the Stranger’s eye level.

“Here she comes,” Emma said, lifting her eyes to the floating rock platter.

And then, several things happened in the exact same instant.

The imagining on the other side of the lintel flicked away to a desertscape dotted with gnarling cactuses and raspy, gasping tumbleweeds.

Polly’s feet slid over the edge of the levitating island.

The Stranger opened his arms, tensing to make a diving catch.

And Polly’s rock island, which, like the others, had been slowly inching its way upward until now, suddenly shot into the air like a firecracker.

Half a blink later, a screeching Polly was arcing through space, shot into the air with the velocity of a tennis ball off a tightly-strung racquet. Into the air she flew, higher and higher, until she was little more than a frilly blue speck against the clouds. Her body reached its apex, hung in the air for a moment, and then began to fall. The band of travelers watched in helpless, open-mouthed horror as she tumbled from the sky and crashed into the desert on the other side of the lintel. And then the imagining spun away, the desert was replaced by a bustling theme park, and Polly was whisked off into the hidden and infinite maze of the Boundarylands.

Chapter 3:

On the Dangers of Poor Dental Hygiene

Dr. Mandrill held the vial up to the light and shook it gently. The baby tooth swirled lazily in purple liquid. The sunlight seeped through the thin, underdeveloped edges of the tooth, encircling it in a soft halo.

My own personal savior, he thought.

“Do you know what this is, Squeak?” he asked, giving the vial another shake. “It’s a tooth, of course,” he continued quickly. “Even a simpleton as blind and useless as you can see that, I trust.” He chuckled. “But beyond that, do you know what it is? Do you know what it signifies?”

“Please,” General Squeak murmured, stings of spittle dropping from his lips. “Please.”

Dr. Mandrill continued, seemingly oblivious. “This is the beginning.” He placed the vial carefully into the chest pocket of his white coat, then ran his hands over his smooth, gleaming scalp. “I trust the irony of that is lost on you. I’ll explain it, shall I?”

Squeak whimpered incoherently.

Mandrill nodded and began to pace through the pile of trash, his hands clasped firmly behind his back. “The true beginning, chronologically speaking, occurred some time ago. A dear friend of mine, in the Time Long Before—you weren’t around then, were you? Not even a spark in that first scared child’s imagination. This friend, he was a true believer in the realm. He loved the Boundarylands fiercely. Do you understand what it means to love something with every ounce of yourself?”

Squeak whimpered and nodded, spitting strings of mucous onto the trash below. His spittle was tinged pink from the blood in his mouth.

Dr. Mandrill grunted. “I doubt that. But did you know that there are some who would destroy this world? There were then, and there are now. And this man, he engineered a method of salvation that is so…so exquisite. You see, the one thing the Boundarylands has never had, the one thing the realm has never been organized enough to produce, is an army. A real army. Oh, there are plenty of imaginary soldiers running about, of course, fighting their fictional wars, dying their meaningless deaths. But there’s no trueborn, homegrown army willing to die to defend the Boundary. As imaginary beings, we are all of something else. This man, however, devised a way to grow warriors who are of this land.” Squeak trembled against his bonds, the ropes cutting painfully into his wrists. “Ah!” said Dr. Mandrill. “You’re thinking it’s impossible. Nothing can grow in the Boundarylands, nothing can be made here unless it’s made from out there.” He gestured back over his shoulder, though the real world couldn’t be pinpointed by a cardinal direction. “But this tooth,” he said, patting the vial in his pocket, “this tooth changes everything. Because it is with the tooth of a real world child, and only with the tooth of a real world child, that the army of the realm can be forged. This tooth represents my life’s work, Squeak. It’s why I became a dentist: not for the sake of imaginaries, but in the quest for a real child’s tooth. All I have done, and all I will do, is for this tiny gem, this little treasure of enamel and dentin and cementum and pulp. All else…everything else…is useless to me.

“I tell you all this not because I think for one second that you’ll be able to comprehend what’s actually at play, here,” he said. He slipped a pair of pliers from his back pocket. “I tell you this because I want you to know exactly how unimportant, insignificant, and useless your imaginary teeth are to me.” He grabbed Squeak’s mouth with his free hand and yanked open his jaw. “I want you to know that when I’ve taken every last one that it was strictly about punishment in the name of the Royal, about the discomfort it caused you, and not one single thing more.”

Chapter 4:

In Which We Visit the Department of Tourism

“Oh dear,” Haberdash frowned, wringing her hands as she buzzed about over their heads. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

Cole’s jaw, which had been hanging wide open since Polly got whisked away into another world, finally got back to work. “What do we do?” he asked the Stranger in shocked amazement. But the Stranger was already at work, unfolding the blood map and pinning it down with loose stones from the floating island. The children gathered around and watched miserably as Polly’s dot flashed around the map, appearing first in the northwest, then in the south, then at this end of the map, then at that end over there. Sometimes her dot would disappear altogether, absent from the map for several seconds at a time before reappearing somewhere far away.

“Why’s she moving so fast?” Willy asked, screwing up his face in confusion.

The cowboy sat back on his haunches. “The map shows the land relative to itself. The map stays put. The imaginings all move.”

“And Polly spins around and around,” Cole said. The Stranger nodded.

Etherie placed her hands together at her forehead. She inhaled deeply through her nostrils and exhaled through her mouth. “I’ll do my best to send her my inner calm,” she said. She folded herself down to her knees and set to work projecting her peace into the universe.

“I can find your friend.” Haberdash floated down to the island and plopped down on the rock, accidentally battering Emma’s hair with her wings. “Whoops, sorry, dear. We just need to get this back to my office, I can track the girl from there.”

“Your office?” Cole asked uncertainly, glancing around the imagination.

“Oh, it’s not here, child. No, no, I don’t work in pools of water, ha! Couldn’t get much paperwork done there, could I? No, no, the Autumn Mountains, that’s where I hail from. Gather your things; I’ll take you there.”

She reached for the map, but the Stranger snapped out, faster than lightning, and grabbed her by the wrist. “We don’t know you,” he said, his eyes cold.

“She’s a dragon,” Willy said helpfully.

Haberdash yanked her arm out of the cowboy’s grasp. “I’m not a danger to you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said indignantly. “I’m a perfectly respectable creature.”

“There’re plenty who would do us harm.”

“Well, I’m not one of them.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a badge. She held it in the Stranger’s face. “I’m the Assistant Director of Tourism.”

The Stranger inspected her credentials. “E. Q. Haberdash, Boundarylands Tourism Department, Assistant Director,” he read. The badge appeared genuine enough. Maybe a little too genuine, the Stranger thought as he inspected the Royal’s seal at the bottom. He held up the badge and indicated the stamp. “You’re indebted to the Pinch.”

Haberdash took a deep breath. Words could be dangerous, even in a place as desolate as this, and she wanted to choose hers carefully. “In an official capacity, I am. To the Home Office of Tourism, I should say. Not specifically tied to the Royal.”

“And beyond your official capacity?” the cowboy asked, raising an eyebrow.

Haberdash sighed. “Beyond that, I’m as free as any other member of the realm.”

The cowboy considered this. He didn’t trust people who claimed to have selfless motives, as a general rule, and the creature’s connection with the Royal didn’t set him at ease. Squeak had made it clear that the Royal was after them, just as the Stranger feared. But on the other hand, they didn’t have much choice. The only other way he knew to find Polly was to wait in place and hope her dream world spun itself back to this lintel. But that could take thousands of centuries, if it ever happened at all. And they just didn’t have the time.

“Fine,” he growled. “We go. But if I get a sniff of danger—”

“Oh, visitors!” Haberdash interrupted, clapping her hands excitedly. “Wonderful! I’m pleased to make your general acquaintances. Now, let’s see, where did I put that key...?” she wondered, digging through her pockets. “A-ha!” She triumphantly pulled out a piece of chalk.

“That’s not a key,” Cole observed. “That’s chalk.”

Haberdash tilted her head and gave him a sweet, motherly look. “Anything can be a key, if you use it right.” She buzzed over to a drier patch of rock and put the tip of the chalk to the ground. She began to draw a wide circle, humming to herself as she went.

“What’s she doing?” Willy whispered.

“Hopscotch?” Emma guessed.

“I don’t think so,” said Etherie, shaking her head. “Look.”

As the circle neared completion, the white chalk line began to glow electric blue, and the color of the stone inside the glowing circle drained away to white. When she completed the circle, there was a loud CHOONK sound in the rock, like someone had just unlocked a giant bank safe. The chalk glowed even brighter, and it crackled with energy. The stone in the center was washed over with white light, then replaced entirely by warped wooden slats banded together with two thick metal strips, one at each end. Haberdash stood up, dropped the chalk into her pocket, and blew the dust from her fingers. Then she placed both palms on the wood-slat circle and gave it a good push downward. The door clicked and swung slowly open.

Cole peeked his head over the edge of the hole. Rather than revealing a cave in the floating stone island, as he expected, he saw a tall, crooked tower standing in an open field. Cole was looking straight down, but the grass was on the left, the sky was on the right, and the tower stuck out to the side without toppling over. The stark and confusing juxtaposition between what was in the hole and what should have been in the hole made his head go swimmy. He suddenly had a very real and very important desire to go off to the edge of the island and throw up.

“All right, then,” Haberdash beamed. “Let’s be off!” She fluttered down into the hole and beckoned them from the field on the other side.

“Whoa,” Willy whispered. He got down on his knees, gripped the edge of the hole, and plunged his head through the doorway. His shaggy hair immediately fell to the left, toward the grass. Gravity had gone sideways. “Cool!”

“Is it safe?” Emma asked shyly, edging her way to the hole.

“Nope!” Willy yelled, tumbling down over the edge and plopping sideways into the grass.

“We’ll be safe enough,” the Stranger decided. Cole noticed that he’d nudged the revolver up in its holster. “Careful going through. Down here is sideways there.”

He took Emma by the arms and lowered her gently down into the hole. “Don’t let go,” she warned, kicking her feet. He passed her down gently into the other world, where she twisted and landed on her backside on the grass next to Willy. Etherie passed through on her own, floating lightly through the circle and landing gracefully on her toes on the other side. Cole went next, in a decidedly less graceful manner. He sat down on the edge of the hole and let his legs dangle down first, which turned out to be a mistake, because once they were through to the other side, gravity pulled them to the left, but on the stone island side of the door, his torso was still pushing downward. “Ooooh geez,” he breathed, his stomach turning squeamish again.

“Come on, Coleslaw!” Willy shouted. “Jump!”

“Need a hand?” the cowboy grunted. But Cole shook his head. It was silly. He could do this.

“The pull of gravity changes by 90 degrees,” he whispered to himself. “The pull of gravity changes by 90 degrees. The pull of gravity changes by 90 degrees.” He took a deep breath and pushed himself off the edge of the rock into the hole. He twisted his body mid-fall so his legs would land under him on the far side, but they got tangled up, and he spun too far, and when all was said and done, he had crashed more or less onto his head.

“Creatures without wings are so fascinating,” Haberdash noted from above.

After the Stranger rolled into the new world, Haberdash grabbed the round door and swung it closed. There were no wooden slats on this side of the door at all, just blue sky, as if it had been painted on. The door closed, and there was nothing, not even a seam in the air, to show that there had ever been a door at all.

“That’s my office,” Haberdash said, nodding to the tower. “Part of it, anyway.”

As they crossed the green prairie with its yellow wildflowers, Willy nudged Colemine in the ribs. “Look,” he said, pointing to the horizon. “The mountains are on fire.” And indeed, the mountain range in the distance shimmered red and orange and appeared very much to be consumed in flames.

“That doesn’t seem very safe,” Cole warned. But Haberdash buzzed down to their level and shook her head.

“Those aren’t fire mountains, they’re the Autumn Mountains.”

“Named for their reddish-orange stone, I presume?” Etherie said.

Haberdash burst out laughing. “Stone? Goodness, no! Don’t you wee ones know about the Autumn Mountains? They’re not actual mountains, but autumn leaves, in piles more than 14,000 feet high!”

Willy stopped dead in his tracks. His jaw fell open. “Those are giant leaf piles?!”

“Of course,” said Haberdash.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg!” he screamed as he bolted off toward the mountains, pumping his arms and legs like crazy. The Stranger took three long strides and snatched him up by his collar. Willy’s legs pedaled in furious circles in mid-air.

“We’ve no time for games,” the cowboy said.

“It’s everything I ever dreamed of!” Willy wailed, waving his arms at the massive orange piles.

“I said no.” The Stranger hefted the boy around and marched back toward the group with Willy whining and kicking under his arm.

They crossed toward the tall, crooked stone tower, at the base of which they found a small cottage. “Home sweet home!” Haberdash declared. She buzzed inside, and the travelers followed.

The interior of the cottage could be described as modest at best. It consisted of only one room, a room that contained a rickety bed, a makeshift table, a small kitchenette, and an exposed toilet in the corner. A faded, fraying rug covered a third of the floor.

The structure’s tall tower sprouted straight out of the roof, opening into the room by way of a wide circle and defying absolutely all rules of physics and engineering. And yet it stood, taller than the tallest skyscraper Cole had ever seen. And he had seen his share.

“What’s up there?” Emma asked, pointing up into the tower. The walls were lined with shelves that spiraled up to the very top. They were crammed full of leather-bound books.

“Those are the Books of Popular Record,” Haberdash explained proudly. She fluttered up to the bottom shelf at the base of the tower and pulled a book from the shelf. She heaved it back down and opened it up to a random page. “Ah! See, look here.” She pointed to a photograph of a man with a long, white beard, wearing a flowing blue robe and a peaked cap of the same color. He stood next to a shimmering orange and yellow dragon. Actually, “standing next to” wasn’t quite right; “unabashedly kissing the cheek of” was probably a better description. “This here’s the great Merlin!” Haberdash gushed. She pointed to a handwritten scrawl below the photograph. “This was taken on the day he christened Crisper Firebelly as Lord Protector of the Realm-Wide Dragonian Reputation, way back in the seventeenth era. You can see he’s performing the ritual there.” She waved a hand up at the shelves above. “All those books are full of that sort of pomp and circumstance. The type of historical show-and-tell that really brings in the tourism dollars.”

“How do we find Polly?” the Stranger asked curtly. Cole could tell by the way he kept shifting his weight that he was uneasy. And he guessed that when the Stranger was uneasy, he was an extremely dangerous man.

“Yes, of course, I’m so sorry. We’ll need the current logs. This way, this way.” She flew over to the rug and whisked it away, revealing a trap door in the floor. She grabbed the iron ring that served as a handle and pulled with all her strength. The door creaked open, revealing a winding staircase that spiraled deep into the earth. “Down you go!” she said cheerily.

“You first,” the Stranger grunted. Haberdash frowned at him, clearly upset with the lack of trust between them, but nodded all the same and floated down into the cellar. The children and the cowboy followed.

Two years earlier, when Donald Slawson was doing research for his book Sam Carburetor’s Family Secret, he’d taken Cole out to visit an airplane hangar, a location that served as the setting of the all-important climax in which Sam Carburetor stared down a robotic Nazi fighter pilot named Gustave Elk, who was programmed to destroy every person on Earth who had Carburetor family DNA. Sam defeated him with a “puzzle wrench,” whatever that was. (Cole hadn’t actually read the book too closely. It wasn’t his father’s best.) That airplane hangar had been the most enormous, colossal, gigantic, humongous building he’d ever seen. He remembered thinking that an entire city could fit inside it, and there would still be room to spare.

Haberdash’s cellar made that hangar look like a coat closet.

“Gracious,” Etherie whispered, taking in the expansive sight. The curved metal ceiling stretched as far as any of them could see in every direction, with not a single wall in sight. The space was packed with large, boxy machines spewing out impossibly thick books along a maze of conveyor belts that zigzagged in wide, lazy spirals from one horizon to the other.

Haberdash flew up to the nearest belt and hauled a heavy book from it as it passed. She grunted and struggled under the weight. “This is the Recording Room. Each book here represents one single moment in time.” She dropped the book. It fell to the floor with a heavy thud. “Phew. Some moments are longer than others in the Boundarylands. Believe it or not, this is one of the shorter ones.” She lowered herself down to the floor and flipped open the book. The pages were filled with names, numbers, notes, charts, graphs, photos, drawings, and doodles. “This book will tell you where every feature, creature, and object in the Boundarylands was located during this one moment. You see?” She pointed to a page with a photograph of a film noir-style detective wrestling with a man in a black, hooded robe. A scribbled caption beneath the photo read, Edgar P. McCootie, P.I., Chicago office, 1943. Next to that was a map of Atlantic City with a circle drawn around one of the casinos. The map was labeled “Odin.” A larger map on the opposite page showed a large, vaguely United States of America-shaped country with a circle drawn over the west coast. That map was labeled “Panama.”

“Panama isn’t in California,” Cole pointed out. How were these books supposed to help them locate Polly if the maps inside were so completely off?

“Well, someone thought it was in this moment.” Haberdash closed the book and flew it back to its spot on the conveyor belt. “Come! That machine there is the main recorder.” She flew over to the largest boxy contraption in the room. It stood taller than Cole’s entire house and was at least three times as wide. Hundreds of conveyor belts spouted out from it, carrying book after book after book, speeding them away as quickly as the chugging machine could print them.

“How quickly does it work?” Cole asked, marveling at the machine. “How long does it take to print a whole moment?”

“Oh, it happens instantly,” said Haberdash, fluttering about excitedly. She so rarely got to show off the Recording Room. “The second a moment is over, it’s stamped into existence. Grab the next moment that comes out, will you? We’ll see where your friend is right now.”

The Stranger, who tended to be wary around machines as a general rule, crept up to where the nearest conveyor belt met the metal wall of the machine. He gripped the next book that appeared from within the box’s dark maw. He laid it on the ground and started flipping through the book. “How do we find her page?” he asked, amazed by the immense thickness of the tome.

“Let me,” Haberdash said, nudging him to the side. “I’ve got a talent for it.” She grasped a handful of pages, and she rifled through them quickly. Then she grabbed a second handful, flipped through them, and so on, grabbing pages, flipping them, grabbing new pages, flipping them. She read the entire book in a matter of about seven seconds. When she was done, she closed the book and looked up at the group with a frown of confusion on her face. “She’s not here.”

“What do you mean, she’s not here?” The Stranger’s hand shot toward the gun on his hip. If this was a trap, now was about the time it would spring.

“I mean she’s not here. She’s nowhere in the book.” Haberdash flipped through it again, just to be sure, but there wasn’t much point. Her eyes were especially keen, and she never missed a page. “I’m sorry, but it appears as if your friend is no longer within the realm of imagination,” she said, scratching her head.

“I doubt that’s possible,” Etherie mused, tapping her finger against her lips. “We saw her safely cross the lintel, and the only way out of the Boundarylands is through the center, correct?”

“Yes, as long as you’re not an IF. IFs can be beckoned, but all other exits go through the Pinch or the Way Station. I agree, it’s strange, but I’m telling you, she’s just not here.”

“The girl’s right,” the Stranger growled, easing his hat further back on his forehead. “Polly’s still in the realm. She’s gotta be.”

“And I’m telling you, she isn’t,” Haberdash insisted, crossing her arms. “This system records the precise location of each and every single imaginary creature, feature, and object in the Boundarylands, and if you’re—”

“Wait a second. Did you say imaginary?” Cole asked. “It tracks every imaginary creature?”

“Every last one,” said Haberdash, proudly sticking her nose in the air. “And to suggest that—”

But Cole interrupted her again. “What about non-imaginary creatures?”

Haberdash frowned. “Why would that matter?” she said suspiciously.

“The children are real,” the Stranger said gruffly, sticking a new cheroot into his mouth.

“Real as in…? Wait, they’re real real?” she asked, wringing her hands. “From the real world, real?”

“As real as anything physical can be,” Etherie said.

Haberdash gasped and put a hand to her mouth. “I should have known,” she whispered. “I should have known the moment I saw you. I must be rusty. It’s just that it’s been so long since I–”

“Don’t mean to rush you,” the Stranger said, “but time’s important, and it’s slippin’ by fast. Can you find a real girl in that book or not?”

Haberdash gave an awkward shrug. “I have no idea. I’ve never looked for a real-worlder before. I don’t know if—hmpf.” She set her jaw and gave a good, solid nod. “Well, let’s check, shall we?” She reopened the book and flipped through it until she found her own name. Her face went pale as she read the entry. “‘Assistant Director Haberdash inspects the main recorder with a Stranger.’” She turned the book around so the rest of them could see the illustration. It was a hasty scribble of what looked like a sausage with wings and a tall stick man with a cowboy hat. “Look! Just the two of us! No mention of the children in the record.” She sighed and sat back on her knees. “Goodness me. We’ll never find your friend.”

“Wait. Wait!” Cole said excitedly. “Aren’t there maps in those books?”

“There are some, yes,” Haberdash admitted.

“Then we can! Right? I mean, if we can pair her location on our map with a dream location from an official map at the very same instant—”

But the Stranger was already ahead of him. He unfolded his map and smoothed it on the record room floor. “Does each moment have a full map of the Boundarylands?”

Haberdash sputtered. “Well, I—yes, I—in the back, there is, yes, why?”

The stranger placed a knee on his map to hold it open. “How many instants does it take for this machine to spit out a moment? How many instants exactly?”

“Like I said, it happens the very second—”

“How many instants exactly?” the cowboy repeated, steel creeping into his voice. He was growing impatient.

“I believe—I believe—” Haberdash stammered. “I believe two. Two instants.”

“Right. Cole, get ready to grab.” Cole ran over to the machine and perched against the conveyor belt. “When I say so, grab the next book off the belt. Got it?” Cole nodded. The cowboy rubbed his hands together to bring a little life to his fingers and hunched over the map. Polly’s dot of blood danced around the map, fading here, reappearing there. The cowboy waited with practiced patience. There were only two markers on the map that didn’t shift: the Wellwhich Way Station and the Pinch. The only way to compare the two maps was to wait until Polly was near one of these two markers. And so he waited, and he prayed that she would not get near the Pinch, where the Royal was waiting to sniff her out.

Cole flexed his fingers, ready to grab at the cowboy’s say-so. Haberdash took to the air and flitted nervously back and forth.

Seconds passed.

Minutes passed.

A quarter of an hour passed.

The cowboy waited.

Then, suddenly, Polly’s dot disappeared from its blip in the northwest and re-materialized just at the boundary of the Wellwhich Way Station. “Now!” the shouted. He jabbed his finger against the map, marking the exact spot. Cole pitched forward and threw himself onto the next book to pop out of the recorder. He hauled back against it with all his strength. The book was so heavy, it dragged him along the conveyor for a good three feet before he managed to shuffle it off the belt. It slammed onto the floor, nearly crushing Etherie’s foot.

“Sorry,” Cole said, out of breath.

“No harm,” she smiled.

“Boundary map!” the cowboy snapped. Haberdash buzzed over to the book and flipped the pages until she found it. The map of the Boundarylands was a thick bunch of paper that was rolled into itself and stuffed in between the pages of the book. She pulled it open, found the edge, and unfurled the entire blessed thing. It stretched for eight feet, at least.

“That’s a lot more detailed than our map,” Cole said, impressed.

“We strive for perfection,” Haberdash beamed. “Now. Where are we looking?”

“The Way Station,” said the cowboy.

“Ah! Excellent. Yes, let’s see. That should be...right here!” She hovered above the map and pointed out the Wellwhich. “Where exactly did your friend appear?”

The Stranger slid the blood map over to the book, careful to keep his finger pinned to the paper at Polly’s exact former location. Her dot had already disappeared and reappeared a half a dozen times since. “Right here, just off the main gate.”

“Then let’s see. That puts her in...” Haberdash inspected the larger map. Then she gulped. “Reaper’s Gulch.”

Out of the corner of his eye, almost imperceptibly, Cole saw the Stranger flinch.

“Do you know it?” the boy asked.

The Stranger tugged his hat lower on this brow. “Yeah.” He stood up, folded the map, and slipped it into his pocket. “You can get us there?”

Haberdash nodded. “I can, only...there’s something you should know first.”

“Wait.” An idea struck Cole, an idea so obvious, he laughed out loud for not seeing it earlier. The rest of the crew gave him a queer look. He blushed, but pressed on. “The reason we’re here...the whole reason we’re in the Boundarylands...is to find my imaginary friend. He’ll be in your book. Right?”

The cowboy gave a low whistle. “Not proud to say I let that one slip past me,” he admitted. “You just saved us a heap of trouble.”

Cole smiled proudly.

Haberdash returned to the book. “You journeyed into the imagining for an IF? That’s very lovely, dear. Very lovely indeed.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “There aren’t many who’d do so much as give a hankie to an imaginary friend.” She turned to the cowboy. “No offense,” she said quickly.

The Stranger grunted.

“What’s his name?” Haberdash asked, turning back to Cole.

“Broken.” Cole wasn’t sure if his IF was likely to go by that name here, but it was the only name he had for the malformed creature. So he hoped for the best.

“I have him!” Haberdash cried, having consulted her books. But her voice faltered. Something was wrong.

“What is it?” Cole asked nervously.

Haberdash frowned and tugged nervously at her hands. “Oh dear, it’s just that...just that...”

“Spit it out,” said the Stranger.

Haberdash sighed. “Your IF is in the Pinch.”

“Really?” said Cole. “Well, that’s good, right?” The Pinch was one place that would never move on their map; he’d be easy to find there. And they had to get to the Pinch anyway, to get back home.

But Haberdash shook her head gravely. “I fear it’s very, very bad. There are only two reasons imaginaries end up in the Pinch. Either they’re on official business...and that’s not likely, dear, him being an IF. IFs aren’t given positions of state, you see. It’s not done.”

“Okay,” Cole said slowly, frowning. “What’s the other reason?”

The winged creature sighed heavily, her fingers pulling worriedly at the corners of her mouth. “The only other reason for him to be there is…is…”

“He’s a prisoner,” the Stranger finished.

Cole started. “Broken is a prisoner?”

The Stranger and Haberdash nodded in unison. “Has to be,” the cowboy said, troubled. “No other reason for him to be there.”

“Oh, that’s bad,” Emma observed.

“Why would he be a prisoner?” Cole demanded.

The Stranger gritted his teeth. “Knowing the Royal, there don’t need to be a reason. But the fact that he’s an IF is plenty reason enough.”

“The Royal has harsher views on IFs than most,” Haberdash explained gently.

Cole took a heavy breath. The trip had just gone from bad to much, much worse. But he shook his head and crossed his arms. “Then we have to save him,” he decided.

To his surprise, the cowboy nodded. “Yeah. We do.”

Cole turned to Haberdash. “We’ll go grab Polly, then you can take us to the Pinch.”

“Ha!” Haberdash snorted. She covered her mouth with both hands. “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to laugh, and I’m certainly not laughing at you! But the Pinch is locked by far greater keys than mine. I can send you to Reaper’s Gulch, yes. But the Pinch? You’ll have to get there the old fashioned way.”

“Riding dinosaurs!” Willy cried.

The others turned to look at him. They blinked. Then they turned back to their conversation.

“Take us to the Gulch,” the Stranger said. “We’ve no time to waste.” He folded the map, stuck it back under his hat, turned toward the stairs, and ushered the children along before him.

“Wait, please,” Haberdash pleaded. “I’m trying to tell you—”

“What?” the cowboy snapped, a little too gruffly.

Haberdash looked uneasily at the group. “Being from the real world and all, well…it’s just that…it’s just…”

“Spit it out,” said the cowboy.

She sighed. “You children are in greater danger than you know.”

Chapter 5:

On the Subject of Stranger Danger

Polly lay flat on her back, staring up at the bright, blazing sun. The fall into this new dream had been disorienting, but that’s not what bothered her as she struggled to catch the breath that had been knocked out of her lungs with the impact. No, it was the fact that her subjects had let her fall in the first place.

A princess should always be caught.

She sat up and brushed the desert sand off her arms. “A falling princess should never touch the ground,” she said aloud to any and all who would listen. But as she looked across the barren plain, she realized there was no one around to hear. The desert stretched on and on before her, vast and empty. There were no subjects in this kingdom to catch her. “Well,” she said. “At least they had good reason for letting me fall, then.”

She grabbed her wand, which she had dropped during her descent. She was glad to see it had made the leap across the lintel. She gave it a good shake. It didn’t seem to be broken. “Please work, please work, please work,” she whispered. She squeezed her eyes shut and pictured a great white horse, a brave and noble steed with an excellent sense of direction that could carry her through the desert in the right direction, whichever way that was. She held the picture in her mind and gave the wand a good flick. The star tip blinked.

A horse did not appear.

Polly frowned.

“I guess I have to walk,” she sighed aloud.

“Why should you?”

Polly screeched and bolted to her feet. She whirled around and swung the wand blindly at the voice. Her attack missed the owner of that voice by an easy three feet. She spun with the force of the swing and fell down on her bottom.

“Careful, now, careful,” said the old man, reaching a hand down to help her. “You’ll ruin your pretty dress.” He was tall, and trim, wearing clothes not unlike the Stranger’s: dusty pants, a white shirt, and a leather vest under a brown knee-length coat, with a brown cowboy hat on his head. But he had a white beard and long white hair. He looked sort of like Cowboy Santa Claus on a diet. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just happen to have this horse and carriage yonder, and I thought maybe you’d like a ride.”

Polly squinted against the sunlight. Sure enough, a horse stood a few hundred yards away, tethered to an old cart. “Are you my new servant?” she asked suspiciously, holding her wand at the ready.

The old man smiled. “Well. Not exactly.” He removed his hat and brushed the dust from it. “What’re you doing out here, in this place? All alone?”

“Inspecting my kingdom,” Polly said, her nose held high in the air. This was a lie, of course, and her parents often warned her against lying, but she didn’t want to tell this stranger that she had accidentally fallen into the desert from another dream. It was too embarrassing. “And I don’t need my friends to help,” she added. Inside, she was actually beginning to panic because none of the other children had followed her into this new world, and across the lintel behind the white-haired man, where the floating rock platters used to be, all sorts of strange imaginations were now flashing past. But not one of them contained a familiar face.

Still, she didn’t want to show weakness.

“I’m sure you don’t,” the old man smiled. “Well, if you’re inspecting things, you’ll want to see town.”

Town? There was a town? All she could see was desert. “Yes,” she nodded. “Take me to the town.”

The old man placed one hand over his heart and gestured toward the carriage with the hat in the other. “Right this way.”

“My friends will be coming, too,” she said as they walked, eyeing the imaginations as they zoomed past the lintel. “Pretty soon. You’d better have room for them.”

The man smiled. Sunlight glinted off his gleaming white teeth. “Oh, yes, my dear. There’s plenty of room for all of your friends.”

Polly nodded. “Good.”

“What’s your name, child?” the old man asked, leading her toward the cart.

“You may call me Princess Polly,” she decided. “Or Princess, for short.”

“I’ll do that,” the old man grinned. He pushed his hat back down on his head and helped Polly up into the back of the cart.

“And I’ll call you Servant Number Two,” she said, climbing up into the rickety wooden box. “I already have a Servant Number One.”

“You can call me what you like,” the old man said, his eyes flashing dangerously. He shook out his hands, and blueish-white lightning crackled to life between them. Polly gasped and tumbled back in surprise. The man reached down and brought his crackling fingers to her temples. The electric current shot through her, fizzling across her body. Her eyes rolled up into her head, and the world became black, shot with explosions of red.

Just before she lost consciousness, she heard his raspy voice say, “But most people call me Zeus.”

Chapter 6:

On the Subject of Bonds, Familial and Metal

When Polly came to, the world so dark that she blinked hard three times just to make sure her eyes were open. Gone were the desert sands, the bright sunlight, the horse and buggy, and the electrified old man; she now lay on something that felt like stone, in a world of total darkness, with a steady drip-drip-drip echoing against the walls around her. “Hey!” she cried.

Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! said her echo.

Somehow, she didn’t think this was the old man’s “town.”

She struggled to sit up, and heard a loud scraping of metal as she did. When she tried to scoot forward, something hard bit into both of her wrists, and she realized that there were chains attached to her arms. She cried out and pulled her hands forward, trying to break free, but the chains were fixed tightly to the stone wall behind her.

She was stuck.

She was a prisoner.

“Help!” she screamed into the darkness.

Help! Help! Help! Help! the darkness replied.

Polly’s lip trembled. She knew the rules of being a princess. Princesses were strong. They were regal. They were prepared for any situation.

Which meant that maybe Polly wasn’t a princess, because what she did next was cry.

Then a bolt of lightning burst into the space, washing her prison in pale blue light. The lightning struck a small stack of tinder, which instantly caught fire. The orange and yellow flames rose, throwing warm light on the face of the old man, who sat on the other side of the kindling and set to work stacking full logs on top.

“Sorry about the chains,” he said. “Nothing personal. Just didn’t want you pitching over the side in your sleep.” He nodded off to Polly’s right, and in the glow of the fire, she could now see a deep chasm open up just a few feet from where she sat. Zeus stood up and crossed over to where she sat fettered to the stone wall. He crouched down and pulled a key from his pocket. “If I let you loose, you think you can keep yourself from falling in?” Polly nodded vigorously. Zeus set to work unlocking her shackles. The chains fell away from her wrists, and Polly scurried back to the corner of the cave. “No need to be scared,” he said, slipping the key back into his pocket. “You’re safe enough here. I’ve no wish to harm a child. I have children of my own, you know. Several dozen.” He sat down and crossed his knees. With the fire behind him, Polly could only see him in silhouette, and his outline looked strangely childlike. “Caused me no small amount of trouble, most of them. But a father’s usually helpless, isn’t he?” Zeus gave her a wry grin. “I bet your father’s helpless against you, child.”

Polly sniffled. She didn’t know who this person was, or how he could make lightning with his hands, or why he was being nice to her even though keeping her prisoner was a mean thing to do. “I want to go home, please,” she said, her voice small.

“You actually remind me of one of them. My daughter Aphrodite.” He laughed. “Headstrong, and the queen of everything.”

“I’m a princess,” Polly corrected him, rubbing the snot away from her nose.

“There’s little difference, except time.” Zeus rocked back on his haunches for a few moments, lost in thought. Then he shrugged, stood up, and brushed the dust off of the seat of his pants. “Mind the drop, there. And sit tight. I’ll have food brought up to you. And I advise you not to try to leave the cave.”

“Why?” asked Polly, her bottom lip quivering.

Zeus flashed her another smile, and young as she was, she still recognized the danger in it. “Because,” he said, turning to leave, “the seven-headed monster guarding the door wouldn’t like it.”

Chapter 7:

“The Tooth, the Whole Tooth, and Nothing But the Tooth”

Haberdash closed the trapdoor to the Recording Room and frowned as she considered her guests. “Does anyone else know that you brought real children into the Boundarylands?”

The cowboy squinted warily. “Some do.”

Haberdash sighed. She flew over to her table and fell into a chair. “Then it’s probably already too late.”

“Too late for what?” Cole asked. Emma, sensing what her parents called “grown-up talk,” scooted closer to Cole and snuck her hand into his. He squeezed it reassuringly.

“I’d rather not say in front of the children,” she said to the cowboy.

“Speak freely,” the man said.

The little winged creature sighed again. “There’s a man who’ll be looking for you. A very dangerous man indeed.”

The Stranger grunted. “I’ve dealt with dangerous men before.”

But Haberdash shook her head emphatically. “Not like this. Not like him.”

“Who is he?” Etherie asked.

“A dentist,” she said. Cole shuddered, completely involuntarily. He’d never had a cavity, thank goodness, but just the sound of the drills going to work in the rooms down the hall and the grunts of pain from the mouths they tore into were enough for him to know with complete certainty that a dentist was dangerous, all right. “Dr. Mandrill, his name is. Straight from the Nightmaring.”

“I’m not worried about any dentist,” the Stranger replied.

“You should be!” Haberdash cried. “Just listen to me! Before I was the Director of Tourism for the Boundary, I had another role. An important role. For over seventeen eons, I was the Tooth Fairy.”

Willy perked up from the other side of the room. “I lost my tooth when I got here—gimme a dollar!” he shouted. He raced over and pulled open his lips, showing her the empty space where the baby tooth had been. “Money!” He held his hand out and made grabby motions.

Haberdash placed a tender hand to her heart and smiled sadly. “So precious.” She wiped tears from her eyes and pinched Willy on the cheek. “There’s a dulcet in the jar under my bed.”

Willy turned and sprinted across the room. He had no idea what a dulcet was, but he was pretty excited about having one. He dove under the bed and resurfaced with an old clay jar. He pulled the cork out of the top and plunged a hand into the pot. It came out holding what looked like a little globe of smoke. “You’re wonderful,” the smoke said in a gentle, pleasing voice. Then it broke free of its spherical shape, formed itself into a pair of smoky lips, kissed Willy on the forehead, then evaporated into the air. Willy stared blankly at the now-empty air.

“What the heck was that?” he demanded.

“A dulcet. It’s a high form of currency around here.”

Willy tossed the clay jar and grumbled to his feet. “That’s not a dollar,” he muttered. “That’s awful.”

“I think it’s wonderful,” Etherie gushed. “A genuine affirmation is worth more than anything all the world’s money can buy.”

“Such sweet children,” Haberdash cooed, smiling at Etherie. “I do miss being the Tooth Fairy. I loved that job.” She began to cry again.

“Why’d you leave it?” asked Cole, the boy who didn’t believe in Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny, or leprechauns, speaking to a spritely, pot-bellied creature with wings about why she had stopped being the Tooth Fairy. If his dad were here, his brain would have hemorrhaged with delight.

“I didn’t want to quit. I was made to quit.”

“By this dentist,” the Stranger said. Haberdash nodded.

“Yes, by the dentist. He came to me one night, just as I was returning from the real world. I’d never met him before, never even heard of him at that point. But there he was, sitting in my office, sitting at my desk, in my chair, like he owned the place. ‘Hand over the teeth, please,’ he said. Just like that. No introduction, no nothing. Just, ‘Hand over the teeth.’”

“What did he want a bunch of old teeth for?” Emma asked shyly. She hadn’t let go of Cole’s hand, despite the fact that it was beginning to sweat from the warmth.

“For dark deeds,” Haberdash whispered. “But I told him I didn’t have any teeth. How could I? You can’t carry things into the Boundarylands from the real world, everyone knows that.”

That caught Cole’s attention. “Of course you can” he said. “We’re here.”

“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” the fairy admitted. “I can’t imagine how you made it across the border without dissolving into a trillion pieces of static. That’s what happens when you try to bring something over.”

“It’s ’cause of their IFs,” the Stranger said, lighting his cheroot and leaning back against the wall. “They stayed back in the real world. They tether the children.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Haberdash said suspiciously.

The cowboy shrugged. “Wasn’t really sure it’d work myself. But here we are.” He removed his hat and ran his fingers through his greasy, dirty blond hair. “What dark deeds has this dentist got in mind?”

“Well…an army, I suppose you’d call it. He brought the idea with him from the Nightmaring. From what I gather, it works like this; he has a…a…I don’t know, some sort of magic potion, this purple liquid; he carries it with him in a vial. He sprinkles a little on the dirt, lets it sit for a bit, then he plants a tooth in that soil —a human tooth, mind you, a real human tooth. An imaginary tooth won’t work, he made that quite clear. And once it’s planted…” Haberdash hesitated.

“Go on,” said the cowboy.

“But the children,” she whispered.

“They need to know what they’re up against. Keep going.”

Haberdash frowned. “The tooth grows.”

“Grows?” Willy asked. He trotted back over to the group and sat down at Haberdash’s feet. “Grows into what?”

The fairy shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “This is only speculation, now, mind you, it’s never actually been done. But supposedly—supposedly—the teeth grow into gallows trees. Tall, ghastly trees made of bone that grow branches, like regular trees do, but these branches bear odd fruit They sprout huge eggs, each one the size of a house, and made of bone. You crack them open, and a…a creature emerges. A creature that—well, the description isn’t very pleasant,” she finished hurriedly.

The Stranger drew deeply from his cigarillo, lost in thought. “What’s so special about human teeth? Why not regular imaginary teeth?”

Haberdash shook her head. “I don’t know. But I know it only works with real teeth. Or at least, the dentist is convinced that it does. When I told him I couldn’t carry teeth across the threshold, he—” She paused as she considered the children. Then she said quietly, “He did some awful things to me.”

“He fired you?” Emma guessed.

The fairy couldn’t help but laugh. “Yes, dear, he did that, too. And I was reassigned here. This was before the current Royal held the throne, of course. Now, when someone loses a state position, well, it doesn’t go so easily for them.”

“Waaaaait a minute,” Willy said, crossing his arms. “You’re saying there’s no Tooth Fairy now?”

Emma gasped. She stared at Haberdash with wide eyes. “No Tooth Fairy?” she whispered, horrified.

“No, no, there is a Tooth Fairy. A new one. Only…he’s not from around here.”

The Nightmaring, Cole thought. The new Tooth Fairy is a nightmare. An icy hand closed over his spine, and a chill shivered through his bones.

“Dr. Mandrill is sure to learn that there are real children here,” Haberdash said. “He has spies everywhere. He probably already knows. And believe me when I say he’ll stop at nothing for a chance to pull their teeth right out of their heads. He’s clever; he’s dangerous.” She lowered her voice, leaned across the table, and whispered, “And he has the support of the Pinch.”

The Stranger nodded slowly. A dangerous man was one thing; a dangerous man backed by the Pinch was another thing altogether, especially since the Royal was out for their blood. The fact remained that, Broken or no Broken, their only way out of the Boundarylands led them straight into that particular lion’s den.

“Anything else you can tell us?” the Stranger asked, setting his hat back on his head.

Haberdash shook her head sadly. “Just watch out for him. And for the Tooth Fairy, if you come across his path. Neither of them is any good.”

“Fair enough.” He made a twirling gesture with his finger. “Let’s go. First we get Polly. Then we deal with the Pinch.”

Haberdash grabbed the chalk out of her pocket and followed the group outside. The wind was picking up; it blew hard enough now to whip Etherie’s long hair into a beehive around her face. “Good time to be leaving,” Haberdash observed. “I don’t know where exactly in Reaper’s Gulch this will drop you, but it’ll get you into that imagining, at least.”

“We’re obliged,” said the Stranger.

Cole cocked his head. “Aren’t you coming?”

Haberdash bit her bottom lip nervously. “Ah...I don’t think I’d better. I have a replicator to replace, and brochures to print and…and…well, I’d just better not.”

She’s scared, Cole realized. Scared at the thought of running into this dentist again. He swatted at a leaf that had gotten caught in his hair. The wind was really howling now.

“This place generally susceptible to quick changes in weather?” the cowboy asked with a frown.

“No. Never, actually,” Haberdash frowned. The entire group was being pelted with dead leaves now, blown far across the plain from the Autumn Mountains on the horizon. “I don’t know what could be—”

She was interrupted by a loud crack of lightning, followed by a roaring rumble of thunder. Cole craned his neck forward and strained his ears to hear over the locomotive squeal of the wind. The thunder wasn’t just thundering. It was saying something. It sounded like…like…

“Math,” he whispered aloud.

If a is equal to one, then a times b equals b, the storm whispered on the wind. If a triangle is a right triangle, then a-squared plus b-squared equals c-squared. If p and q are bi-conditional, then p cannot exist as separate from q. If f is the direct result of d, then d exists in conjunction with f. The truth-value of p in conjunction with q is false except if both p and q are true. If n has a value of greater than two, then for no three positive integers does a to the power of n plus b to the power of n equal c to the power of n.

“Does anyone else hear that?” Cole asked nervously. The storm was near raging now, the wind whipping so hard that Etherie, thin as she was, was forced backward by the powerful gusts. There was no rain, but plenty of thunder and lightning, and the sky over the Autumn Mountains had turned a blackish-purple color. Whatever the wind was carrying, it was bearing down fast.

“It’s a logical storm!” the Stranger yelled over the sound of the wind. “Fairy! Draw the gate, now!”

Haberdash fell to the ground and began tracing a line on the ground. With the wind barreling through the prairie, it was difficult to connect a finished line in the blades of grass, but Haberdash sketched roughly over the ground until she made a full and complete line. Even so, the chalk didn’t crackle with its electric blue light as she drew. The line simply lay there, flat, white, and dead. “It’s not working!” she cried.

If a person is dreaming, then the person is asleep. The sum of two plus two will always be four. If the sun is shining, it is not night. Wet roads and rainy weather have a positive correlation. Winter does not exist concurrently with summer in the same geographic coordinates. If the cup is empty, there is nothing in the cup.

“The logic’s too close!” the Stranger hollered into the wind. “We have to get out of the storm’s path!”

There was a mighty rustling under the howl of the wind. The children turned to the horizon and watched in fascinated horror as a swirling purple vortex slammed into the Autumn Mountains from the far side, exploding the massive leaf piles outward. The leaves rushed toward them, a red, yellow, and orange tsunami carried on the wind. The Stranger grabbed Emma’s and Etherie’s hands and ran, pulling them along. “Move!” he shouted.

Haberdash followed closely behind, ushering Willy along and pleading for Cole to follow. But Cole stood transfixed as the storm bore down on him, watching the wall of leaves speed toward him with the power of a locomotive.

“Cole! Move!” the Stranger yelled.

But he didn’t move. He couldn’t move.

He barely even flinched when the wall of leaves slammed into him, surrounding him in a swirling curtain of dry, crackling fall leaves.

Imagination, by its own definition, is not reality. Filmstrips are made of plastic, gelatin, and silver halide crystals. Lemonade stands do not represent a feasible business model. Dentists take the Hippocratic Oath. Once someone is known to you, he is no longer a stranger.

The whispers of the purple vortex were true. They were logical. They made sense. Cole stood there, in an imaginary place, with imaginary people, facing imaginary threats, in search of an imaginary friend. But imagination wasn’t real. And no one really existed in a filmstrip.

The Stranger pulled Etherie and Emma out to a safe distance, out of the logical storm’s path. Emma was crying, so Etherie slid one bony arm around her shoulders and held her close. Haberdash huffed and puffed to meet them, still pushing Willy ahead of her. “This should be far enough out,” the Stranger shouted over the rumble of thunder. “Draw your door.”

“What about the boy?” the fairy cried.

The Stranger gritted his teeth. “You draw. I’ll get him.”

For once, there was real doubt in his voice.

The purple twister was weaving its way across the plain, following behind the frantic storm of leaves. In its wake, the Stranger could now see, there was nothing but the Void, a long, exposed white ribbon trailing back to the horizon. The storm of logic was erasing every imaginary thing that it touched.

“Cole!” the Stranger yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth. But the boy either didn’t hear him, or else didn’t want to hear him. He stood his ground and faced the purple tornado, his hands balled tightly into fists at his side.

The logical storm had found easy prey.

The Stranger pushed his hat tighter onto his head to keep it from blowing away. He crouched down and crept closer to the boy. One brush from the vortex would send whatever piece of the imaginary cowboy it touched into the Void. That piece would be lost forever.

But Cole knew the logical storm could not harm him. Or at least, he calculated that it could not. He was not imaginary. He was not illogical.

He was not pretend.

A voice deep inside of him wondered aloud if the tornado would carry him home. Would reason carry the reasonable to the real? Dorothy and Toto in reverse? It could happen. Or the storm could simply wipe away everything that was false and leave Cole and his classmates whole, uninjured, to awaken once again in the life that made sense. If that were true, it would be their ticket out, and they wouldn’t have to face the Royal to exit through the Pinch. And if the storm continued to rage, it would erase all the imaginary creatures, release them to the Void…it would erase Broken, and there would be nothing left there for Cole to apologize to, and nothing to apologize for.

Nothing at all.

The logic of the storm was so comforting…so simple, and so calculated, and so familiar. Logic brought with it extraordinary relief. It meant the end of confusion. The end of the exhaustion Cole was feeling from the mental gymnastics of trying to wrap his mind around floating islands and Tooth Fairies.

He wondered if he should just let the storm take him. Let it ease his struggle and carry him back to reality.

The Boundarylands cannot be located by Global Positioning Satellite. A sea’s waves break toward the shore. Even bully children grow up to be adults. The nature of imagination precludes reality.

Cole held out his arms. He closed his eyes. He let the purple tornado of logic spin toward him. The whispers were louder now, louder than the roar of the wind. The truth filled his ears, flooded his brain, restored his soul. The storm gave him the answers he sought. The storm was the conveyor of truth.

As it crept closer, spinning its reason and cleansing the Boundary, Cole heard his name being screamed at him across the wind. He opened one eye and peered off to the right. There sat the Stranger, crouching low to the ground, holding his hat down on his head, willing to go no farther for fear—yes, genuine fear—of the storm that could erase him into the Void.

Leaves and debris whirled around Cole as the twister slid closer and closer, spinning with intense ferocity as it loomed high above him with its dark purple force, the top lost in the thundering clouds. The wind screamed in Cole’s ears, but he could still hear the reasonable whisper below…

This is the world of imagination. This place is not real.

A huge leaf slapped into his face just then, covering his eyes. He reached up and pulled it down, and he was about to toss it aside when he realized that it wasn’t a leaf at all. It was a piece of paper. And there were words printed on it.

Words that were familiar to him.

Words that he’d read before.

Because somehow, impossibly, irrationally, illogically, a page from his father’s book had found him in the Boundarylands.

Prince Colemine stood before the dragon called Machloya, armed only with the Alchemist’s Broom, which was worse than useless now that the evil Grindel had drained it of its power, Cole read, his lips forming the words silently. But Machloya did not know the once-great tool had lost its magic. To the fiery, seething dragon, who had run up against its otherworldly force before, the broom was a thing of great awe. His belief made it real, to him, and that was the prince’s advantage.

Cole looked up from the page. The purple tornado was close now, almost close enough to touch, still advancing as it whispered its truths.

But suddenly, Cole realized, he understood something new about imagination.

“My father made this real,” he called into the swirling vortex, holding the page of the book aloft. It was battered by the wind, but Cole held it tightly in his fist. “This was formed in his imagination, but now it’s a real, tangible thing. The book is real. The movie is real. People love this story, and that’s real. My father pulled this out of his imagination and made it real by sheer force of will.” The tornado continued to advance, though more slowly now. Cole took the paper, folded it neatly, and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans. “Something doesn’t have to be logical to be real,” he realized aloud. “It just has to be real to someone.”

Belief in imagination is illogical, the logical storm hissed angrily. A creature who believes in imagination is an illogical being. It lunged forward, desperate and angry. Cole dove to the side, but he was too slow, and the tornado bowled into him, trapping him into its center—the Center of Reason, Eraser of All Illogical Things.

“COLE!” the Stranger screamed over the thunder and wind.

It was quiet inside the storm’s center. The air was calm; the winds were gentle. Cole raised his eyes at the twister and saw the purple swells of logic spinning around him. The quiet of the storm’s eye gave him a moment to think. In fact, it was made specifically for thinking. The logical storm encouraged rational contemplation above all other things, and it danced around the thoughtful boy with glee as its highest purpose was achieved. And in the center, amidst all his thinking, Colemine Slawson thought something rather astonishing. He laughed aloud and said with great surprise, “I actually do believe this imaginary world is real!”

Something in the storm went PING!

The cyclone snapped in half. The top of the funnel flew straight up into the air, losing itself in the clouds, and the bottom half tottered madly for a moment, then tipped over and spun out of control, skipping and skidding across the prairie on its side. Cole watched in astonishment as the tornado rolled to a stop far across the plain, then exploded into a massive puff of purple smoke.

And in the end, the only thing the logical storm left behind was the wide, white trail of the Void.

The cowboy stared at the boy, wide-eyed and astonished. “You took out the storm,” he said, surprised.

Cole nodded. “I…I think I understand,” he said slowly. “I think I see the Boundarylands for what they are now. They’re real to you. They’re real to Haberdash. They’re real to me right now, while I’m here. And if they’re real to someone, then they’re really real.”

The Stranger grinned. He gripped Cole’s shoulder and gave it a gentle shake. “Figured you’d come around sooner or later.”

Cole smiled bashfully. He patted his hand absently over the paper in his rear pocket. “If Prince Colemine can exist, so can anything else.”

“So can everything else,” said the cowboy.

Cole nodded. “Yeah. So can everything else.”

They rejoined the rest of the group, where Haberdash was finishing her rectangle. The chalk lines crackled with imaginary blue light, and the former Tooth Fairy pushed open the door. “Reaper’s Gulch,” she said proudly, gesturing down into the dark opening below. “Just one last thing before you go. If you make it to the castle in the Pinch—er, when you make it to the castle in the Pinch,” she corrected herself, “the prison cells are directly beneath the throne room. That’s where you’ll find your Broken.” Haberdash wrung her hands. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

The Stranger tipped the bill of his hat. “Much obliged,” he said. “And we don’t aim to fail.” He helped the children down into the opening, passing them gently into the world below. Then he gave Haberdash a salute and said, “We’d have been lost without you. We’re in your debt.”

The fairy blushed as she waved him away. “Get out of here, you’ll make me fall apart.”

The Stranger smiled a dangerous grin. “Rest assured, fairy, if we can avenge you against your dentist, we will.” Then he turned and dropped through the hole, after the children.

Haberdash smiled sadly as she pulled the door closed. “I believe you will,” she said to the still air of the prairie. “Truly.”

Something struck the top of her foot as she turned to go. She stooped and inspected the offending object. It was half of the piece of chalk. It had broken in her hand and tumbled out of her palm without her noticing. The other half had remained firmly in her grasp.

“Oh dear,” she muttered, plucking the broken half from the ground. Had the chalk been cracked when she was drawing the doorway? Surely not. It would have snapped in half while she worked…wouldn’t it have?

Still, if there had been even a hairline crack in the chalk as she drew the door, it might have caused her lines to be somehow...off.

Haberdash took a deep breath and tried to not to panic. “Nothing is for certain,” she breathed aloud.

But the more she thought about it, the more certain she was that she’d sent the children and their cowboy through a fractured gate.

And if that were the case, then there was no telling what was waiting for them on the other side.

Chapter 8:

“Let’s Make Like the Ozone Layer and Disappear”

Miss Twist sighed. “Gaia. Please come down from there.”

“This is where I belong!” Gaia screeched from her perch in the tree high overhead. “This is where we all belong!”

“Yes, and I would love to have a conversation about that, inside,” Miss Twist said, rubbing her forehead with her palm. “I hate humidity,” she added, mostly to herself.

“You would cage Mother Nature?!” Gaia demanded, crouching low on her branch and eyeing Miss Twist suspiciously.

“No, I would not cage Mother Nature,” Miss Twist protested. “But I would ask Mother Nature to step inside, where we can have a calm, quiet, cool, and secretive discussion about the fact that if you don’t come back inside near the portal, your tie with Etherie might deteriorate, and she could be lost in the Boundarylands forever.”

But Gaia clicked her tongue and leapt to another branch higher up in the tree. “I am bonded to Etherie the same way I am bonded to all creatures of Earth!” she said. “Would you have me abandon all for the sake of one? When that one is in the good company of children who are likewise bonded and tethered to their own imaginary Anchors?”

“It’s too hot out here for me to try to unravel that question,” Miss Twist admitted. She wiped a drip of sweat from her cheek. She took another step deeper into the woods, and the mud on the ground sucked at her shoe. Her foot came right out of that shoe. “Oh, great,” she muttered.

“I’m sorry, I cannot be held within man’s walls,” Gaia explained, sounding genuinely apologetic. “Etherie will be safe, I know she will, for she is a good and kind spirit, and in strong harmony with the vibrations of the universe.”

Miss Twist sighed. She wriggled her foot back into her shoe and pulled her feet backward, out of the mud. “I know you think that—”

Gaia shattered Miss Twist’s words with a scream. “My hand! My hand!” she shrieked. She held out her left hand, inspecting it with wild, fearful eyes. “Look at my hand!”

Miss Twist squinted up into the tree, and she realized that she couldn’t look at Gaia’s hand. She couldn’t see it because it was evaporating into thin air.

“Oh dear,” she said, deeply troubled.

“What is happening to my hand?!” Gaia wailed. She stuck out her right hand and tried to touch the disappearing left hand, but it was so far gone that her right fingers pushed straight through the fading ghost of her left palm.

“Out of the tree! Now!” Miss Twist commanded. “We have to get back to the others!”

“What is happening to me?” Gaia asked again, sniffling in shock. She gazed down at Miss Twist, her face pale as a sheet and her eyes brimming over with terror.

“It’s exactly what it looks like,” Miss Twist said, turning and heading back toward the school. “Something has happened to the children. You’re disappearing because they’re about to cease to exist.”

Chapter 9:

In Which We Discover What’s Behind Door Number Three

The Stranger gritted his teeth so hard, Cole could hear them squeaking from several yards away. He must have bitten his tongue, too, because when he spat, the saliva was pink and frothy with blood. The cowboy wiped his lips with his sleeve and muttered, “She sent us through the wrong door.”

Cole looked around. The sky was dark, a strange purplish blue, and filled with looming black clouds. They stood in wet, spongy grass that threatened to suck them under with every step. Thin, hazy mists billowed through the air, smoky tendrils that wrapped their long fingers around the travelers and seemed to pass right through them. Scraggly trees broke through the landscape, their long, black limbs scratching outward, casting shifting shadows in the watery moonlight.

It definitely looked like a place that could be called Reaper’s Gulch.

“Are you sure?” Cole whispered. Somewhere in the distance, an owl hooted.

The Stranger gave a curt nod. “I’m sure. This place ain’t right.”

“This place is awesome!” Willy corrected him. He sprinted off into the night, hooting and hollering and karate kicking at the air.

Emma sidled up to Cole’s side, picking her feet up gingerly from the spongy ground, and whispered, “Why is the ground rotten here?”

“The trees have auras,” Etherie observed, fascinated. “Yellow, with tinges of orange.”

“Is that…good?” Cole asked nervously. He had a feeling he knew the answer to that question already.

Ether shrugged. “It’s not so much the color that’s the problem. It’s the fact that an aura exists at all. Trees shouldn’t have emotional spirits.” Cole felt an all-too-familiar shiver run down his spine. He’d been feeling that cold chill way too frequently since they came to the Boundarylands. It wasn’t lessened any when Etherie followed up with, “But yes, those colors are dangerous. Especially, I imagine, in trees.”

“What do we do?” Cole asked.

The cowboy’s face was red with anger, or maybe just frustration. Probably both. “We walk.” He pulled out the map and examined their position. The nearest lintel was off to their right. He turned and squinted into the darkness, but even his sharp eyes couldn’t see the boundary between their imagining and the next. “Come on,” he grunted, stuffing the map back in his pocket. “Let’s go.” He stalked off toward the horizon, and the children followed.

“What sort of dream do you think this is?” Cole asked no one in particular, glancing uneasily at the shifting mists and creaking trees. He was immediately sorry he’d asked the question, because he was positive he didn’t want to hear the answer.

“It feels like a nightmare,” Etherie confirmed. Cole winced.

“I want a hot chocolate,” Emma whined.

“Hot chocolate?” Cole asked.

Emma nodded. “When I have bad dreams, my mommy makes hot chocolate. She says the marshmallows are good dreams, so she puts lots on top. Then, I have good dreams instead of bad dreams. I want hot chocolate now.” She glanced around at the ground near her feet. “Everything here is just rotten.”

Etherie tapped her cheek thoughtfully. “I should say that the setting is appropriate for a nightmare, but I don’t sense any danger here. In fact, my being is permeated with a spirit of ahimsa.”

“Ahimsa?” Cole asked, raising an eyebrow. His lexicon was substantial; it wasn’t every day he was introduced to a new word. “What’s ahimsa?”

“A state of non-violence. I think we’re safe here.”

“I hope so,” said Cole, but he couldn’t shake a bad feeling about the place. “Not everything that’s dangerous is violent.”

Willy came running up the hill behind them and spread his arms out like an airplane as he ran down the slope toward his companions. “Rrrrrnnnnnnnnnnn,” he said, tilting his arms and zooming in little loops down the hill. Willy the Fighter Plane was coming in for a landing. Except instead of piloting into the runway, he slammed into the center of a heavy wooden door that suddenly thrust itself out of the wet, soggy ground without warning. The door shook with the impact but remained standing, despite not being secured to anything but air on top and on all sides. The same could not be said for Willy, who fell backward onto the grass like a piece of timber.

“Willy!” Cole shouted. He ran over to the fallen child, dodging around the door that had sprung up out of nowhere. “Are you okay?”

“My face feels tingly,” Willy said weakly, staring blankly up at the dark sky overhead. “Am I a train?”

“Great.” Cole waved the others over. “I think he hit his head,” he said helplessly, which was sort of a stupid thing to say, because of course he’d hit his head, they’d all seen it. But it was something his mother said when other people said nonsensical things. It seemed appropriate.

Emma hustled over to the fallen boy. She prodded his forehead with her thumb. “Willy’s broken!”

“Stand back, give him some air,” the Stranger instructed, nudging Emma gently aside. “He just got his bell rung.” He knelt down next to the prostrate child and frowned. “You okay?”

Willy took a deep breath, then pulled himself up. “That’s a dumb place for a door,” he declared.

The Stranger couldn’t have agreed more. He instructed Willy to stay put on his backside, then he turned and inspected the mysterious door. It was thick and heavy. It looked to be made of maple wood. Someone had painted it with white stain, but that was a long time ago. The color had faded to a sickly gray, and the stain was peeling away in huge flakes, revealing the battered, weathered wood beneath. There was no doorjamb, just the heavy wood of the door itself sticking out of the ground like a massive tombstone. It leaned a bit to the left, but otherwise, it seemed sturdy. The knob was tarnished brass, and it jiggled loosely in the door when the Stranger touched it.

“Are you going to open it?” Cole asked, eyes wide. He didn’t know how it was possible to open a door that didn’t attach to a jamb, but he didn’t know how a door just sprang out of the ground, either. So he figured it was possible.

The cowboy squinted at the knob, deep in thought. “Some doors are best left closed,” he said. He considered the door as he rubbed his stubbly jaw. “Then again, they all lead somewhere, and we’re in need of being led.” He pulled his revolver from its holster and motioned for the children to step back. “Let’s see what we got.”

The Stranger gripped the loose knob and pushed it firmly back into its slot in the door. It turned easily, with a dull squeak. He pulled back the hammer of the gun and tugged on the knob.

Something slammed into the door from the other side, knocking the Stranger back to the ground. Out from the darkness on the other side of the doorway leapt a tall man—no, a tall creature—made of burlap rags, laughing hysterically and swinging an ax like a baton twirler at the head of a parade.

Cole screamed and fell away from the monster, stumbling over a short bump in the earth and tumbling backward to the ground. As he fell, the madman’s ax swung downward and missed his chin by mere inches. If he hadn’t fallen, his head would have been sliced clean off.

“Run!” he screamed with the little breath he had. But the children were too terrified to move, let alone run. They stood like statues as the ax-wielding rag man whirled crazily out of control.

Cole rolled out of its path and leapt to his feet. From a bit of a distance, he was able to get a decent look at the monster. It was well over six feet tall and seemed to be made entirely of musty, rotting burlap sacks. Sections of the material were stained dark red. A thick noose hung from his neck, the tail of the rope frayed and trailing his crazed movements by a good three feet.

Whoever had tried to hang him had clearly and irreparably failed.

The monster’s eyes and mouth were no more than sockets sawed into the burlap. Strings of the coarse material hung out of his mouth and eye holes, swaying horribly in the cold mist. He sliced the ax through the air, hacking wildly at pockets of fog, laughing so hard that his whole body shook. He turned and beamed at Emma, his mouth curling into a smile. He crept toward her, taking gigantic, exaggerated Mickey Mouse steps, holding the ax high above his head.

“Emma!” Cole screamed. But his cries didn’t matter much. Emma already saw the nightmare approaching; she just couldn’t do anything about it. Her legs had frozen, locking her in place. All she could do was gasp in fear as the creature stood over her and swung the ax down at her neck.

A shot rang through the air, cracking like a stone whip through the mist. A bullet ripped through the canvas just above the noose around the creature’s neck, puncturing the throat. He dropped the ax and grasped at his neck, covering the bullet’s entry and exit wounds with floppy, burlap claws. Then the creature whirled around, ragged eyes growing wide in surprise, and found the Stranger crouching on one knee, the gun in his hand exhaling smoke from the barrel. His eyes were calm, his hand steady, his entire being assured and confident. He cocked the gun again and said in a careful, even tone, “Back away from the girl.”

The burlap creature opened its stringy black maw and screamed. The cowboy fired again and again and again. The bullets tore through the burlap as easily as butter—one through his chest, one through his gut, and one through the space directly between his eyes. The creature hissed angrily and crumpled to the earth, deflating like a balloon. The canvas withered and fell in a heap onto the wet grass, little more than a rough blanket tossed on the ground.

“You okay?” the Stranger asked. He spun the revolver into its holster and leapt to his feet. Emma nodded dumbly. She was scared to death, but physically unharmed. The cowboy sized up the rest of the group. “Everyone else good?” The other children nodded. The cowboy turned to Cole and shrugged. “Guess we shouldn’t have opened that one,” he said.

“How’d it get here?” Willy said from the outer edge of the group. The rest of the children turned toward him. Cole realized that the boy was as white as soap. His fists were clenched tightly at his sides, and he was shaking. Willy raised his crazed eyes to the cowboy, demanding answers. “Why’d you bring it here?!”

The Stranger frowned. “Have you seen that creature before?”

“Why?” Willy demanded again, on the verge of tears.

Etherie placed a gentle hand on Willy’s arm. He twitched and shook her off, but she approached him again, gently taking his hand. “Willy…was that a monster from your nightmares?”

Willy’s eyes bulged. They looked ready to pop straight out of his head. He opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again. He yanked his hand out of Etherie’s careful grip and stalked away, back up the hill. Cole jogged after him. “Willy! Wait!” he called. He reached out and grabbed Willy’s arm. Willy shook him off, hard, and Cole went tumbling across the wet grass. As he skidded across the ground, a second door shot out of the earth, this one made of thick, gray steel with what looked like a metal ship’s wheel for a handle. Cole slammed up against it, and the wind whooshed out of his lungs.

“Cole!” Emma cried. She hustled up the hill after him, but the Stranger reached out a hand and held her back.

“Wait,” he said. “Nobody move.”

The children froze in place. Even Willy took a break from stomping up the hill. They watched the Stranger carefully as he closed his eyes and listened. The owl in the distance had stopped sounding its lonely call; there wasn’t a single noise carrying in the air. No wind, no crickets—nothing.

Nothing…except for a low rumbling from deep within the earth.

The Stranger crouched down low in the grass and motioned for the children to do the same. “Hold fast,” he warned. “Try to stay out of the way.”

“Stay out of the way?” Cole whispered. “Out of the way of what?”

Suddenly, the ground began to shake, and doors exploded out of the earth. Lots of doors. Wooden doors and metal doors. Painted doors and carved doors. Doors with handles, doors with knobs. Front doors, French doors, back doors, barn doors. Basement doors. Office doors. Screen doors. Church doors. Cellar doors. Bedroom doors. Garage doors. Closet doors. Doors with knobs, doors with handles, doors that slid from side to side. Old doors. New doors. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them, bursting out of the ground, ripping through the grass and thrusting themselves toward the sky. A blue door painted with golden stars popped out two feet from Emma and made her scream. An old copper door with bright green verdigris actually came up beneath Willy’s feet, launching him up into the air as it shot up out of the ground.

One by one the doors appeared with a great SHOONK! SHOONK! SHOONK! SHOONK! Soon the field in which they stood looked like a cemetery for giants, the doors serving as mismatched grave stones, until the last door appeared, a high, art-deco thing made of pewter. It surged up toward the sky, then came to a rest, propped up by nothing but the ground below it, just like all the others.

The world fell silent once again.

Cole realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out now and heard the other children do the same. The forest of doors was so thick, he couldn’t see any of the other members of his party. “Is everyone okay?” he called. His voice bounced around the heavy, looming planks.

“Follow my voice!” the Stranger called brusquely. “Everyone come together! Now!”

Cole didn’t wait for an explanation. He pulled himself to his feet and hustled through the maze of doors and joined the cowboy next to a wrought-iron gate with two small gargoyles perched on either side, leering down at the group gathered below. It was just a gate, with wide openings between the vertical bars, but for some reason, Cole couldn’t see through to the misty air behind them. The space between the bars…or maybe behind them…was black. Blacker than the darkest night.

“What’s happening?” Etherie asked.

“We landed in a bad place,” the Stranger scowled. “The Place of Doors.”

“Are there any more nightmares?” Emma asked, pulling her shirt up over her nose and peeking out over the collar.

The other children turned to the Stranger, who hesitated. Finally, he just said, “Stay close to me,” and motioned the children inward. “Don’t stray. We need to find the center.” He didn’t wait long enough for the children to ask why; he grabbed the hands of the two nearest to him, Emma and Cole, and pulled them off to the right. Willy and Etherie followed close behind.

They wove their way through the doors, the Stranger stopping every few seconds to get his bearings and alter their path, pushing them on toward the center of the maze. Willy ran his hand along the doors that he passed, flaking paint off the older ones, clanging his fingernails against the metal ones. At one point, his hand closed on the wrought iron handle of a large rosewood door and began to twist with his momentum as he walked past.

The Stranger caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and in one fluid motion, he whirled around, picked up a rock from the ground, and flicked it through the air. It caught Willy’s hand right on the middle knuckle.

“Ow!” Willy cried, letting go of the door handle and shaking out the sting. “What was that for?”

“Don’t touch the doors,” the Stranger said.

He continued leading the children through the maze, first to the left, then to the right, then back to the left. Finally, he motioned for them to stop. He looked around the space and nodded once, satisfied. “This is the center. Now we wait.”

“For what?” Willy grumbled, still pouting over his injured hand.

The ground began to rumble again. The earth trembled under their feet. The children instinctively grabbed onto each other, forming a ring around the Stranger’s knees. The cowboy grimaced. “For that.”

The doors flew into action. They seemed to leap outward from where the children stood, though they remained anchored to the ground. They moved out and away like the fins of scattering sharks. Then they spun around each other, gliding into formation, and settled in a huge, open ring around the group.

Cole stared open-mouthed at the new formation of doors as they loomed on the perimeter. The mists swirled wildly in the wake of the sudden movement. “How did they do that?”

Etherie tucked her long, black hair back over her ears and said thoughtfully, “Maybe the better question is, why did they do it?”

They all looked to the Stranger for an answer. He tugged his hat down tighter on his head, stuck his cheroot between his teeth, and muttered, “’Cause that’s what they do.” He put his hands on his hips, considering the doors. Finally, he said, “Guess we might as well try it.”

“It” apparently meant walking through the ring of doors. It looked easy enough; there was a good three feet of open space between each door, more than enough for a grown man and four small children to slip through. But as they approached the opening between a red church door and a rusty gate, the doors shifted themselves again, spinning as a unit to block their path. The red door and the gate came together with a loud CLACK, and the other doors filled in closely on either side. The travelers moved to the left; the doors moved with them. They moved to right; the doors moved, too. The Stranger even tried flicking one of his lightning-fast hands through an opening a few doors down, and he nearly lost it at the wrist.

He chomped on the cheroot and took a few steps back from the doors, shaking his head. “No way around it,” he said miserably.

“What does that mean?” Etherie asked. “What do we do?”

Cole already knew the answer. The reality fell on him like an iron coat. “If we can’t go around them,” he said, his heart growing cold, “we’ll have to go through them.”

The Stranger sighed. He pushed his hat back on his head and mopped the sweat from his brow. “Go on, then,” he said, gesturing at the circle of doors. “Choose your nightmare.”

Chapter 10:

“You’re All Greek to Me”

Zeus pushed his way through the batwing doors and hopped onto a stool near the end of the bar. “Dionysus,” he said, beckoning the bartender, “a round for the house.”

Dionysus gave a short guffaw. “You’re the only person in the bar.”

“In that case, make it a double,” Zeus smiled.

“Yes, sir.” The bartender reached for the other god’s usual on the bottom shelf, but Zeus cleared his throat and ticked his finger up a few notches.

“The good stuff today.”

Dionysus turned around and eyed Zeus suspiciously. “Good day?”

“It is that,” the old man said with a grin. Then he added, “For all of us.”

Dionysus pulled down a bottle of pure Olympian ambrosia from the top shelf. Then he grabbed a glass from under the bar, blew the dust out of it, and set it down in front of the older man.

“Aw, come on, don’t use that.” Zeus pushed the glass away. “You don’t put true nectar in a dusty cup.”

“We don’t have anything but dusty cups. This place isn’t exactly hygienic.”

“At least rinse it or something. That’s a 40,000-year-old bottle of ambrosia, for Titans’ sake.”

Dionysus shrugged. “Whatever you say. But I don’t think it’ll help.” He dunked the glass into the barrel of water he kept behind the bar. Then he shook the glass dry and set it back down in front of Zeus. “Better?”

“Better enough.”

Dionysus poured two fingers of ambrosia into the glass, and when he tried to pull away, Zeus grabbed his elbow and tipped the bottle back down. “Little more…little more…there we go.”

“Better take that easy,” Dionysus warned, plugging the bottle. “Hera was down here not too long ago, and she said—”

“Hang what Hera said!” Zeus snapped. He shook his head. “Me almighty, you’re worse than one of my kids.” He brought the cup to his nose and inhaled deeply, filling his nostrils with the sweet, heady aromas of honey, citrus, and jasmine. The difference between genuine ambrosia and the schlock they usually served up was as far apart as mountain and desert. The smell flooded the old god with memories from a time long, long past, a time when he was king over most of the civilized world. A time of silver robes and power, oh, such power, infinitely more potent than the glass of god-wine in his hand. The old days. The brutal ones.

The good ones.

Zeus raised the glass in a toast to the old ways, then he sipped decorously from the somewhat-clean cup.

“Ahh. There you are, Olympus,” he smiled.

“I think I’ll join you,” Dionysus said, pulling his own glass from under the bar. “For old times’ sake.”

“Just make sure you pay up,” Zeus warned, leveling a finger at the bartender, who saluted his acknowledgement. “You growing your beard back again?”

Dionysus often oscillated between a clean-shaven jaw and one weighed down by a thick curtain of salt-and-pepper hair. His face had been smooth ever since the descent to the desert, though. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, feeling the bristles that were beginning to push through the skin. “I think maybe I will,” he said. “The weather may be turning soon.”

Zeus took another sip of ambrosia. “No,” he said, feeling the sweet wine warm his limbs from the inside out. “It won’t be. That’s the whole point.”

“Call it an old comfort, then. A link to the past.”

Zeus raised his glass again. “I’ll drink to that.”

Dionysus filled his own glass and clinked it against his better’s. “To the past,” the bartender agreed.

“And to the future,” Zeus grinned.

Both gods sipped deeply from their cups. They drank on in silence, and when both glasses were empty, Dionysus reached for the bottle, but Zeus snatched it first. “I’ll keep an eye on this,” he said, pouring himself another glass. “You go assemble the pantheon.”

It had been some time since the Twelve Gods of Olympus had been seated together in one room, and it took none of them long to remember why.

Hermes was the first to arrive, windblown and haggard. “You’re not looking so well,” Dionysus observed, setting up the table. “The old man running you ragged?”

“I haven’t slept in eighty days,” Hermes admitted, rubbing a hand over his increasingly gaunt jaw. His eyes were rimmed red with lack of sleep, and deep, black pools filled the hollows under his eyes. “He’s got me flying all over the blessed Boundary.”

“Could be worse. At least you’ve got the Pinch’s pass, yeah? Must cut eons off your trips.”

Hermes shook his head miserably. “The Royal took it away. I’m traveling cross-country.”

Dionysus winced. “Oof. In that case, I’ll make yours a double.” He set out the bottles and mixed Hermes a drink. The tired god took it gratefully.

“Don’t know what Zeus did to anger the Royal, but whatever it was, he did it good. And I’m paying for it.”

Apollo arrived next, his golden blond hair curling out from under his cowboy hat. He shook the dust from the day’s ride off his trousers before stepping into the meeting hall.

“Punctual as always,” Dionysus said, reaching across the table and shaking hands with his old friend.

“Couldn’t be late for this,” Apollo said, smiling his easy, boyish grin. “Dad hasn’t called us all together since Olympus. Something big’s a-brewin’.” He hung his hat on the stand in the corner and winked up at the electric light overhead. The filaments glowed brighter, washing the room in a clean, white glow. Apollo nodded and smiled. “Better.”

Then came Hephaestus, his hands still blackened with soot from the day’s work. “You could have left the leather apron at home,” Apollo said cheerily to his half-brother. “No bellows to blow here, Vulcan.”

Hephaestus turned his scarred face to the sun god and scowled. “Call me Vulcan again, I’ll rip your tongue from your throat with a pair of ruby tongs.”

Apollo raised his hands innocently. “Okay, okay, got it. You’re not in the mood for Italian.”

“Stop teasing my poor husband,” Aphrodite purred, sauntering into the room. She wore a red and black corset with matching bustle paired with black lace gloves that rose to her elbows and sheer thigh-high stockings clipped to a black satin garter belt. “You know he has such a temperamental disposition.”

“Ex-husband,” Hephaestus growled, slipping the black leather apron over his head, crumbling it into a ball, and throwing it into the corner. His massive chest and arms rippled tensely under his tight, sooty shirt. “The title of Aphrodite’s husband is a sin I won’t keep paying for.”

“Temperamental, indeed,” Hestia smirked, entering the room.

Hera followed quickly on her heels, her face more soured and pinched than usual. “Can’t say he wasn’t warned,” she muttered, glaring at Aphrodite.

“Now, now, surely we can have just one family reunion without leaving behind a smoldering pile of rubble, yes?” said Apollo jovially, handing a glass each to Hestia and Hera.

“I always liked this one,” Hestia said, patting Apollo’s smooth, tan cheek. “Where are you keeping yourself these days?”

“Oh, here and there,” the sun god beamed.

Artemis and Athena came next, looking like two very different sides of one rather confused coin. They stood the same height, and had similar features, but whereas Athena wore a modest blue dress, buttoned to the throat, with full skirts and buttoned shoes, Artemis was clad in little more than a thin cotton shift, streaked with grime and stained with the blood of several animals. She wore men’s boots, heavy, blocky chunks of leather scuffed with use and wear. Athena’s hair was pulled back into a perfect bun; Artemis’s fell wild and tangled around her shoulders.

“A hunting permit?” Artemis was saying as the two women stormed into the room. “Are you mental?”

“‘Mental’? Where do you pick up this jargon?” Athena sighed. “A hunting permit. Yes. The law is in effect, so like it or not, you’ll need one if you’re going to continue trapping within the limits of the township.”

“How long will it take to get one?”

“I don’t know, Artemis. It depends on the backlog. It could be a day, it could be a week.”

“A week! You are mental!”

“You’re not helping your case any,” Athena said, annoyed. “Hello, Hermes, dear, how are you?” she said, kissing him on the cheek.

“Ready to drop.”

“Father still has you running all over the whole of creation?”

“And then some,” the haggard god replied.

“I’ll talk to him, see if I can get you a reprieve. He’ll listen to reason.”

“Ha!” sneered Hera. “That man’s never listened to reason in his life, I don’t expect he’ll start now. He’s a walking pile of idiocy and waste.”

“No argument from me,” said Demeter, sauntering into the room. “I assume we’re talking about Zeus?”

“Who else?” grumbled Hestia.

“Is he not here yet?”

“At the saloon, no doubt,” Hera said, signaling for another drink.

“Sun god!” Demeter cried, pointing an accusatory finger at Apollo. “We get it. It’s the desert. It’s hot. Now turn off the sun. My crops are more useless than dust.”

“Sorry, Demeter, you’re barking up the wrong deity. The sun is just as present here as it is anywhere else, no more, no less. You want relief, speak to the water gods about clouds.”

“Why did Zeus bring us to this miserable dustbowl?” she pouted, plopping down in a chair next to Aphrodite.

“Oh, like you had such luck on Olympus. You wailed about altitude then, you wail about heat here, you’d wail about the winds if we lived on the plains. Give it a rest,” Hera muttered.

Athena pulled a thin, silver pocket watch from within the folds of her dress and frowned at the time. “If father’s going to call a meeting, he should have the decency to be on time.”

“Decency,” Demeter snorted. “That’s rich.”

The deities fell into their places around the table, the older generation huddling near the far end, glowering over their cocktails at the younger gods, who bickered and fawned over each other with equal ferocity. Only three seats remained open at the meeting table. “Two solid ounces says Poseidon doesn’t show,” Hestia said.

But he did show, just a few minutes later, slipping quietly into the hall and slinking over to an empty seat at the table. Poseidon had lost much of himself since the move to the desert. His strength had left him, and his dry, flaking skin now hung in bunches from his frail, hunching bones. His cheeks were deep hollows, his eyes yellowed and sickly. His hair had been drained of its color, and now only white wisps clung to the scalp under his dusty cowhide hat.

“So you’re still alive after all,” Hera said, genuinely surprised. “I thought you’d be sucking in your last gasps on some dry bed of death by now.”

Poseidon opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a rattling gasp. He signaled to Dionysus, who approached with a tall pitcher of cold water, its sides dripping with condensation. Poseidon lifted the pitcher to his lips and poured it into the dry cavern of his throat, gulping down as much as he could, spilling the rest down his chin. When the pitcher was empty, he handed it back to Dionysus and cleared his throat. “The river does me well enough,” he said quietly. He caught the drips of water trickling down his neck and rubbed them into his chest. He closed his eyes and sighed.

“He never should have brought us here,” Hestia said, shaking her head sadly. “Look what he’s done to us all.”

“He’s given us freedom,” the voice of Ares boomed from the entrance. The other gods turned to behold him, the blunt, mountainous god of war. His frame filled the double door completely, his broad, muscular shoulders scraping the sills on either side. He ducked his head to enter the room and stepped into the light, his legion of scars gleaming like a shower of meteors against his sun-darkened skin.

“Freedom!” snorted Hestia. “What freedom is that, nephew?”

“The freedom from our fate,” the warrior boomed. “It was man who confined us to Olympus; it was Zeus who led us away.”

“So it’s freedom that Poseidon’s enjoying? Look at the poor dope…he’s drier than toasted paper!”

“The god of the sea has lashed himself to his title like a captain to the mast of his sinking ship,” Ares said, taking his seat at the table. “Poseidon on land is a fish out of water because he refuses to evolve.” Here, the god of war turned a scarred eye on his parched uncle. “You’ve been given the freedom of the world, and you don’t know how to live outside of your prison cell.”

“Easy for you to say, warmonger,” Apollo said cheerily, leaning back in his chair and propping his feet up on the table. “There’s no shortage of fighting in this new realm. The natives fight the newcomers, the newcomers fight themselves, both sides try to fight us, and we all fought against the reapers themselves when we decided to pitch camp in the Gulch. Your thirst for blood is being constantly quenched.”

“I won’t—” Poseidon began, but his words were choked out by his throat, which was as dry as the desert sand beyond the meeting hall walls. Dionysus appeared with a newly filled pitcher of water, and Poseidon upended it into his mouth. When he was adequately moistened, he tried again. “I won’t leave my brother, or the rest of my family.” He stubbed one gnarled, bony finger against the tabletop. “I stay here.”

“You won’t have to.” The gathered gods turned toward the door in unison as the twelfth and final Olympian pushed his way into the room. “Not for much longer.”

“Nice of you to join us,” Hera frowned.

“Relax,” Zeus said with a smile. “And here. Have some ambrosia. On the house.” He produced two of the top-shelf bottles from behind his back and passed them around the table. Everyone seemed temporarily sated by the surprising gift of liqueur from home. Everyone, that is, except Dionysus.

“I hope you left me the right payment for those,” he said miserably. Then he added, “In the proper currency this time.”

Zeus flashed him a wink. “Not to worry. We’ll have Hermes fly up to the mountain and snag us a few more reserves.” The poor, frazzled god of travelers swooned and fell out of his chair. “Someone pick him up,” said Zeus. “He’ll want to hear this, too.” Ares reached down with one hand, grabbed Hermes by the scruff of his neck, and hauled him back into his chair. Zeus nodded, satisfied. “All right, then. Let’s begin.

“I know the last several eons have been difficult on some of you. Some of you have taken pretty well to our transition to life in the Old West. But others of you haven’t found it so easy. Poseidon, I know you in particular have been troubled by the climate. It’s been a time of great change for all of us, and I want you all to know that your patience is acknowledged.”

“Acknowledged,” Demeter laughed. “How gracious.”

But Zeus stayed his course. His mood was so fine, not even sarcasm from the goddess of the harvest could flare his temper. “You all know why we came down here. When the Romans came to power, our influence began to wane. We withered on our proverbial vine. And then, of course, came the Christian god. No sense rehashing it. What’s done is done. Mortals stopped believing in us, the people lost their faith, and our power evaporated like that.” He emphasized this with a snap of his fingers. The other gods begrudgingly nodded their agreement. They remembered all of this only too well. “So, with our potency reduced to ash, we were abandoned in the halls of Olympus, little more than husks of the mighty gods and goddesses we once were. And so I brokered us a deal with the then-lord of the Boundarylands and moved us to a place that would never threaten to remind us of our old mountain home and what we’d lost there.”

“We’ve heard this speech already, many times,” Artemis said uneasily. Historically speaking, long speeches from Zeus almost always resulted in extreme upheaval. And she was just beginning to like her new life. “What did you really bring us here to say?”

Zeus smiled a mischievous grin and pressed his palms together in front of his chest. “Just this; all of our long suffering is about to be redressed.”

Another murmur arose from the table. Poseidon sat up straight in his chair, desperate to hear news of a return to more humid climes, and even Hermes perked up a little at Zeus’s proclamation.

“And how, exactly, is that going to happen?” Hestia asked.

“With the help of our new weapon,” Zeus grinned. “One powerful enough to wipe that sniveling Royal off the plane of imagination for once and for all.”

The gods eyed each other uneasily. Zeus’s words were treason.

“What is this weapon?” Ares asked. “I would hear more of it.”

“It’s not an ‘it,’ it’s a ‘her.’ She’s a child—a real child, from the real world.”

More gasps went up from the gods around the table. Some of them even laughed out loud.

“A real child? That’s not possible,” Hestia said.

“Humans can’t cross over,” Demeter agreed. “At least not this far into the Boundarylands. It’s never been done.”

Zeus grinned, pleased to be back in control of the conversation. His eyes crackled blue lightning with excitement. “It has now. There is a child in the Boundarylands, and the Royal wants her. He wants her something fierce.”

Apollo raised a finger from the other end of the table. “Even if there is a child in the Boundarylands, what does that have to do with us?”

Zeus beamed and raised his own cup to the ceiling in salute. “I have her in Reaper’s Cave.”

Now the entire table began to buzz.

“A real girl! In our cave?”

“That’s one serious bargaining chip.”

“What would the Royal give to have her?”

“What wouldn’t he give to have her?”

“Zeus did something right for once in his useless life.”

“Don’t give him the credit yet. There’s still plenty of time for him to blow it.”

Among all the gods of Olympus, only Athena was hesitant to cheer. “How old is the girl?” she asked.

Zeus shrugged. “By real world years? Maybe seven or eight.”

“We’re holding an eight-year-old girl prisoner? In a cave? Just so we can hand her over to the cruelest royal the realm has ever seen?”

“We’ve done worse things,” Apollo pointed out.

“I don’t like it,” Athena insisted. “It reflects poorly on our town.”

Zeus shook his head, struggling mightily to retain his patience. “In the first place,” he began, “it’s not like she’s chained to the wall. Not anymore, at least. She’s free to move about the cavern.”

“Unless she gets too close to the entrance, I imagine,” Hestia said, her motherly instincts subduing her initial excitement. “What do you have guarding her? A gorgon?”

“The Hydra. Which won’t harm her,” he added quickly, “because she’ll keep to the recesses of the cave since her alternative is to face the Hydra. And secondly, we’re not handing her over to the Royal.”

“We’re not?” Hermes said drowsily from the corner of the table. “Sorry, did I miss something?”

Zeus heaved a mighty sigh and rubbed at his temples. His children could be so shortsighted. “The girl is our leverage. If we give her up, we lose our hold on the Royal.”

“Besides that,” Aphrodite chimed in with a wicked grin, “Zeus, Hercules, and I paid a visit to the Pinch a few days ago. We weren’t extended the warmest of welcomes. I wouldn’t give the Royal anything he couldn’t take by force. And I’m guessing he couldn’t take much.”

“You visited the Pinch? Without an official envoy?” Athena asked, alarmed.

“Relax. It was unofficial business. We went to plead a case for trade.”

“Jewels from our mine for fresh stores of water,” Aphrodite explained, examining her long, red fingernails.

“Enough to keep us in drinking supply for another age or so, and to keep Poseidon from cracking into pieces.”

“What did he say?” Poseidon croaked, his voice taking on just the slightest tinge of hope. Zeus turned to his brother and hesitated uneasily.

“He said no.”

“But he took the jewels,” Aphrodite added.

“And he’ll send for more. When he does, we’ll reveal the girl.”

“And when his cronies take her?” asked Demeter.

“They won’t. The Hydra will see to that.”

“So, I’m sorry,” muttered Hephaestus, straightening up in his chair, “but what’s the point in all this? We have the girl; we tease him with the girl; he asks for the girl, and we say no. What’s the point?”

“The point is, we agree to hand her over only to the Royal himself. We’ll find a passable excuse, she’s too valuable to be left with lackeys, we want his personal assurances we’ll be well compensated, something. And when he comes—”

Hestia interrupted with a snort. “He’ll never come out here,” she said, crossing her arms. “Not so far from his throne.”

“He’ll come,” Zeus insisted. “The girl is that important.”

“What then?” asked Ares.

Zeus could practically see the lust for war welling up in his son’s eyes. “Then we dispatch of him. Once we have word that the Royal himself is on his way, Hermes and Apollo will take a small platoon of creatures, gorgons, harpies, minotaurs, maybe, enough to take the Pinch but not so many that we’ll raise a red flag by crossing the border. Ares, you’ll work out the details. The rest of us will wait here for the royal envoy. The Hydra will do its work; what it doesn’t finish, the rest of us will clean up.” Zeus’ fingertips sparked with lightning. “Though I think I’ll save the Royal for myself.”

“Not bad, Father…not bad,” Apollo mused, nodding his head slowly. “Snuff the Royal, take the Pinch, and just like that, we’re back to our ruling ways.”

“This is going to set inter-imaginary relations back eons,” Athena warned.

“So be it,” Zeus growled.

“He’ll send armies, you know,” said Ares. “Before he comes himself. He’ll send armies. Maybe legions. He’ll exhaust his power of range before he takes the journey himself.”

“I expect he will. That’s why we have you.” Indeed, the god of war’s mind was already hard at work striking out strategies and formations, plotting plans and secondary assaults and categorizing each member of the Greek royal family by expendability for positioning on the lines.

“We will win,” Ares calculated with a sly smile.

“I expect we will,” agreed Zeus.

“What do we do now?” asked Apollo.

Zeus shrugged. “We wait. We wait for the Pinch to come to us.”

They drank off the rest of the ambrosia, and the meeting of the gods was adjourned.

An Interlude

The Royal hasn’t visited the dungeon in some time. A smile creeps into his lips as his hands pass along the familiar stones set into the wall. Even in the dark, he knows every nook and cranny of this dank, cold vault. In an earlier time, this was his solace, the chamber where he came to think, to rediscover his calm. The moans of the prisoners, the screams from the torture chambers, they had soothed him more completely than Brahms or Mozart ever could.

But, like all things, the dungeon became stale with time. What was once comforting and playful grew dull and colorless. He used to feel such pleasure, watching political prisoners of the realm succumb to the breaking wheel. It used to be a delight to keep the pins of the iron maiden sharp. But before long, there was not a single torture device in the collective universes of imagination that could excite him, and the details of managing an ever-expanding kingdom became great and consuming of his time, so gradually, his visits to the prison subsided. It has been perhaps two whole ages since he last made these rounds.

But there is a new prisoner who interests him. So he has made a glad return.

This new prisoner is in a cell near the door, the quarters nearest the torture chambers. The Royal wishes him to be constantly reminded of the pain and terror that await him if the monarch so much as tips the painsman a look. He has not harmed the prisoner, not yet. He will savor this one. He will draw it out.

“How are you enjoying your visit to the Pinch?” the Royal asks, approaching the bars. The creature raises his eyes, expecting the jailer, and seeing the king instead. He scrabbles back to the far corner of the cell.

The prisoner is a singular being. He is wrong in shape, somehow, though in a way that escapes exact definition. Perhaps it is something in his height; perhaps not.

The Royal grips the bars with both hands and leans his head against the cool metal. “I understand you had a short and disappointing stint with humans,” he says.

“I don’t know what you heard,” the prisoner cries, his voice strained with fear. “I’m not in league with the real worlders.”

“I didn’t say that,” the Royal says. He savors a short pause before adding, “Guilty conscience?” The prisoner bursts into tears. He is a grown man, as self-possessed as any other man, and yet he sobs like a child. This is not unusual, in the Royal’s experience. He has worked diligently to make sure the subjects of the land fear him. “It is not merely your involvement with the humans that has resulted in your incarceration, but your inability to keep them from penetrating the realm. How much of the blame lies with you…well, that’s what we intend to learn.” The monarch lifts a short, metal hook from its nail on the wall, a small but effective torture device. He is about to explain the mechanics of the tool when he senses an urgency in the castle above. “I’m needed upstairs,” he says curtly, put off by the interruption. “Think on how you might present yourself when next we meet.” He turns and exits the dungeon as the wailing prisoner cries and cries and cries.

The Royal is ill-surprised to find Roark rushing toward him when he returns to the throne room, a piece of paper flapping in his hand. “A message from the dentist,” the servant says.

The Royal snatches the paper from Roark’s hands and reads the careful script: I need carte blanche.

His mouth presses into a firm line. He beckons to Roark for the writing plume, which the servant provides without hesitation. The Royal writes his reply on the same paper, and the dentist’s words disappear before the tip of his pen, replaced with the Royal’s hasty scrawl: No one gets a blank check.

He waits impatiently for a reply, but he doesn’t need to wait long. In just moments, his words are replaced with the dentist’s script: I do.

The royal smolders at this impudence, but he will let the hand play out. The dentist is his greatest weapon against the threat of the real world children. For now.

Explain, he writes.

Your tactics are useless here, the dentist replies. Fine in other situations, I imagine. Effective for stopping any number of typical threats. But these children are unlike anything you’ve faced before. They don’t hold to our rules. And they’ve got one cunning son of a gun showing them the way.

The Royal considers this carefully. He gives away nothing by letting the dentist think he has a measure of control. Nothing but pride. Pride is important, but it can be regained. And so he responds:

You believe you can stop them?

The Royal can practically hear the sharp scratch of the dentist’s pen:

I know I can.

A few seconds pass, and the script disappears and is replaced with a new message from the doctor. These children are the key to my life’s work. And I am not a young man.

The Royal closes his eyes to think. The dentist has great intelligence and drive, it is true. Perhaps too much of both. But these real world children should be put down as soon as possible, and it would not do for the Royal to venture to the outer Boundary, where he is weak. Absolute sovereignty hangs by a thread, and he cannot chance defeat at the hands of children. The realm would be lost to him.

You have my permission to do what needs to be done, within reason, he writes. Then he adds, My reason. Not yours.

Thank you, sire.

The Royal closes his eyes and sends his thoughts out over the Boundarylands. He feels for the children. They are still far away, and at first, he cannot detect them. But then, he feels the familiar prickle on the back of his neck, and he has discovered them. They are in a place that surprises him: the Place of Doors. He cannot discern their features; they are too far away for that. But they are opening a door and walking through, and he can just make out the door itself. It is a large door, a steel door, with a pull handle instead of a knob. The Royal knows it well. He knows all the doors that lead to the Nightmaring.

He created many of them.

The children are going into a nightmare, he writes. I’ll send you the coordinates. I doubt they’ll escape, but you can be waiting for them if they do.

The Royal holds the scroll of paper out to Roark, but pulls back when the servant reaches for it. He uncurls the document and writes a final note:

If you find them, incapacitate them, but bring them here alive.

The dentist’s reply is absolutely dripping with glee:

All I want is their teeth.

-

The IF series will continue in Part IV: Bad Dreams

-

A Note From the Author

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About the Author

Clayton Smith is a Midwestern writer who once erroneously referred to himself as a national treasure. He has been described as “too tall to live,” which hardly seems fair.

His work includes the novels Apocalypticon, Post-Apocalypticon, Anomaly Flats, Na Akua, and Mabel Gray and the Wizard Who Swallowed the Sun; the plays Death and McCootie and The Depths; and the short story collections It Came from Anomaly Flats and Pants on Fire: A Collection of Lies. Some of his short stories have appeared in such publications as Canyon Voices, Write City Magazine, and Dumb White Husband.

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