Chapter 2

Keith stared at the bathroom mirror. His eye was definitely sporting a shiner. He could see a bruise on his side as well, and he winced every time he needed to bend or twist, but as long as he kept his shirt on and didn't visibly wince, he thought he could keep that one to himself. The black eye, though, needed some kind of alibi...

"Your doorknob?" his mother asked him a few minutes later.

"Yeah, mom. It was weird. I was kinda half-asleep, and I saw something on my floor as I was coming back from the bathroom, and I bent down to pick it up and wham! I'm surprised that you guys didn't hear me yell."

She stared at him for a second while Keith held his breath. She started to say something, and then shook her head a bit. "The men in my life," she finally said ruefully. "It's probably too late, but put an ice pack on it and the swelling will go down. If it still hurts, take an aspirin."

Breathing a sigh of relief at the success of his too-obvious-to-be-a-cover-story cover story, Keith retired to his room with an ice pack, closed the door, and sat down on his bed to think.

He hadn't let himself really think about what had happened last night, but he was a logical and inquisitive kid, and he couldn't keep his mind away from the stuff he liked to call the solid facts when he was solving a puzzle in the D&D world. OK, he told himself, just as he would before figuring out how to abscond with gold pieces, what are the solid facts?

He didn't dream what happened. Oh, he was sure that the beginning, with Grampy on the porch, was a dream. No question there. But even if he had somehow developed a talent for sleepwalking, and even if there he had some psycho stigmata-type deal that made his body get real bruises when he dreamed of a realistic kick to his ribs, that still didn't explain the pine needles. He looked at the little brown needles that he'd gathered into a pile when he woke up this morning, and he knew there was no way he could explain those away as a dream. He was in Southern California. There were no pine trees on his block. There were no pine tree forests for miles around. Certainly not enough pine trees anywhere to leave enough cast-off needles on the ground that he would have picked so many up just by rolling in them. No, he had really woken up, he had really gone to get a glass of water, had really seen something in the back yard, and had really...

Keith sighed, looking over at his bookshelf, one side of which was dominated by his collection of Sherlock Holmes books. "'When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, '" he quoted. He glared at The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet, one of his favorites and the one in which Holmes had said those words, as if to punish the book for forcing him to face the facts. The solid facts.

OK, weird and crazy as it is, I went somewhere last night.

So now what?

Keith spent the rest of the day gathering up supplies for his backpack, and digging out his Marlin .22 single-shot rifle from the back of his closet. He hadn't touched it in years, and the realization that it was Grampy who had given him the gun made him pause for a moment. He hadn't thought about Grampy for a while, and to have that dream about him just before needing the rifle Grampy gave him was ... weird. Weirder, he corrected himself silently. All of this was weird.

He had already decided that if he tried to tell anyone what happened, he'd be in a loony bin in nothing flat. What he needed, he thought, was something to prove what he was saying. Something he could bring back that would absolutely prove it.

His thoughts also kept wandering back to the girl. I was so convinced it was a dream that I didn't do anything right. I wonder what happened to her? He kept imagining the scene again, this time with him ready. Get away from her, you bastard, or I'll put one between your eyes! And then he'd work the bolt of his Marlin and aim it confidently at that jerk's head. Let him see what happened then!

It would be better if I don't run into him again at all. I know that. Of course.

But as he imagined returning to wherever it was that he had visited, avoiding the danger was by far the least satisfying of the scenarios. Don't worry about him again, he'd tell the girl after he'd scared her attacker and sent him scrambling away into the woods. He won't dare show his face again. What's that? A hero? Me? Well, I guess he was pretty big, but I was just doing what anyone...

His latest reverie was interrupted by a call from his mother that dinner was ready. He rushed through the meal, and voluntarily did both his own and Melanie's chores, just to have something to pass the time. Melanie, after a split-second of surprise, elected not to look that gift horse in the mouth or anywhere at all, and announced her plans to go see a movie with some of her friends. Keith had, as usual, no real social plans that didn't involve TV or reading, and so it didn't draw comment from his folks when he headed up to his room after dinner.

It was only after closing the door and retrieving his backpack and rifle from under his bed that it occurred to him that he didn't really know anything about how to ... make anything actually happen. He couldn't just go out in the back yard and wait. He decided to watch the back yard from his window, and hope for the flashes of light to come again. If they didn't by, say, 2:30, then he'd try actually going outside.

Keith awoke with a start and sheepishly wiped drool from his chin. He had obviously dozed off leaning his head on the windowsill, and now, cramped and stiff, he looked over at the clock. 1:45 AM.

"Great start to being a hero," he whispered to himself. Where were you for the Great Battle? Oh, asleep on my windowsill, why?. Did Gandalf fall asleep before Saruman's attack on Helm's Deep? Did Spiderman fall asleep waiting for the Green Goblin to attack? Sorry, kid, we can't add your name to the hero's list.

He peered outside. Nothing but night stared back at him. No light, no forests, no damsels in distress. But there did seem to be a portion of the back yard that looked ... darker, somehow, than it should. That seemed worth investigating.

A moment later he was on the back porch, backpack and rifle slung over his shoulders and his flashlight again in hand. He swept the light over the back yard, pausing at the spot where he thought he had seen ... something ... from his window. From here, though, everything looked manifestly ordinary, and although he was completely alone, Keith began to feel a little foolish. He blushed, as though he had been caught doing something stupid, and started back into the house. He paused again, debating with himself, and then turned back and stepped into the yard.

When the flash of light came this time, he was oddly unsurprised. He was back in his pine forest, the scene of last night's combat. As far as he could tell, he was standing almost precisely where he had appeared last time. He realized he was holding his breath and deliberately let it out, then took a deep lungful of air. The air was sweet and fresh, and oddly invigorating. A few birds chirping were the only sound he heard, and it took him a moment to realize that he was used to always hearing some undercurrent of sound. His house was a couple of miles from the freeway, and you couldn't actually say that you could hear freeway traffic, but it created an undercurrent of sound; somewhere there were always motors running, TVs and radios playing, dishwashers running. As he stood in the clearing and listened, he realized that what he was hearing didn't include any of that white noise that was such a part of his life that he never noticed it until it was gone.