like the core of a live volcano.
   'Are you all right?' Reblax asked Oromas I.
   'Bruised, I guess, but otherwise okay.'
   Reblax stood up on the wall, keeping one hand pressed against the muddy street to give 
him support. He hoped that the wall would hold their weight. 'I saw the shadow-creature 
go thataway,' he said, pointing directly upward.
   'So, how are we going to get after him?' Oromas I wanted to know. 'We can't possibly 
catch him if we have to climb every inch of the way. It's going to be like pushing 
peanuts up Mount Rushmore with our noses.'
   But even as they spoke, the world around them began to change. The sun sank slowly 
below the horizon, and for a moment they were bathed in shafts of golden light - light 
that streamed upward through the branches of the trees. Then, as the sky darkened and the 
stars prickled the sky, they felt the world begin to tilt beneath their feet.
   Oromas I looked up at the stars. They were wheeling in the sky like the stars in a 
planetarium. 'We're righting ourselves,' he told Reblax. This is a different dream.'
   Within a few minutes, Reblax and Oromas I found themselves standing in a small room - 
a room without windows or furniture. The only light came from the cracks around the door 
- which, to Reblax's relief, was set in the wall the right way up. He touched the 
depression on his helmet, and the room was lit up. It was white and completely 
featureless, except for the door.
   The door was black, six-paneled, with a decorative brass handle. The same door that 
had appeared in Lenny's scripture book.
   The garden!' said Reblax urgently. 'It's gone to the garden!'
   He tugged open the door, and there it lay - the darkened garden with its crisscross 
paths and its broken statues. He and Oromas I stepped out onto the patio and down the 
steps, anxiously looking around for any sign of the shadow-creature. God, thought Reblax, 
if it's entered the real world already ...
   They hurried along the central pathway between stalks of bone-white bracken and 
dried-up heathers. Reblax was sure that the statues changed their positions - that they 
turned on their pedestals as he and Oromas I went hurrying by. Whichever way he and 
Oromas I went, they could never see the faces of any of the statues. They were always 
confronted by broken stone backs.
   At last they reached the marble sepulcher. Their feet crunched on the weedy white 
gravel. 'Any sign of it?' Oromas I panted.
   Reblax shook his head. 'God, Ashapola, whatever you are - I'm counting on you now. 
Keep Dianne safe.'
   Oromas I said, 'It's still dark here. Like, there's still a feeling of fear. Can you 
sense it? Maybe the shadow-creature's still lurking around.'
   'Well, let's keep checking,' said Reblax. 'You go round that side of the sepulcher, 
I'll go round this side. Then we'll meet up again, and try those tombs over there.'
   'You got it,' Oromas I agreed.
   Oromas I moved off to the left, while Reblax circled the sepulcher to the right. He 
trod as softly as he could, feeling the sharp gravel beneath his skin-thin shoes. He 
glanced up one or twice, to make sure that the sky was still inky-black. The first sign 
of the sun, would mean that the shadow-creature had materialized in the waking world - 
and Dianne was only two or three feet away from Lenny's bed.
   'Where are you, you bastard?' he whispered. 'Where the hell are you?'
   Suddenly Oromas I screeched out loud - a screech so agonized that Reblax didn't 
understand at first that it was him. But the reflexes of Reblax the runner were 
instantaneous, and even before he fully realized who it was, he was sprinting around the 
sepulchre to the other side. When he saw what had happened, he stopped in a slither of 
gravel. High above him, nearly twenty feet tall, reared the thunderous black shape of the 
shadow-creature, like the heaped-up black coats of a thousand dead men. Out of the 
darkness of its body its claws protruded, curving and shiny, and Oromas I was clutched in 
these claws, his dark-blue armor crushed. His head, already half-severed from his body, 
dangled down his back like a hood. The shadow-creature was shaking him violently, so that 
his arms and legs swung in a hideous parody of dancing.
   Reblax shrieked, 'Bastard! Let him go!'
   The shadow-creature tossed Oromas I's body away, and breathed a thin, sour stream of 
freezing breath at Reblax and clashed its claws. Reblax stepped back, and then back 
again. He didn't even have his wire to protect himself. The shadow-creature shuffled 
forward once more, hissing, but then Reblax stood his ground.
   He had suddenly realized something. The shadow-creature didn't frighten him. He wasn't 
afraid to die.
   When he thought of death, all he thought about was relief from his paralysis, relief 
from pain, and the chance to rejoin Virginia and Jennifer. He would miss Lenny, but Lenny 
was young, Lenny would be able to make a life for himself. And he would always have his 
father's spirit watching over him.
   The sensation was extraordinary. Reblax felt totally invincible. But he wasn't going 
to sacrifice his life for nothing at all. He had a duty to stay alive - to protect Dianne 
and to protect Lenny, and to destroy this shadow-creature forever.
   He stood in front of it, waiting, ready to make a run for safety if he had to. He was, 
after all, the fastest runner imaginable - or even unimaginable.
   The shadow-creature remained where it was, the ground trembling beneath it. Perhaps it 
could sense that Reblax was no longer afraid of it. Perhaps it knew that, if he were to 
run, not even the wind could catch up with him.
   Whatever the reason, the shadow-creature remained where it was, its claws slowly 
scraping against the marble of Lenny's schoolbook sepulcher, waiting, thinking.
   Then, without any warning at all, it seemed to fold up like a huge black umbrella, and 
vanished.
   Reblax almost panicked. If the shadow-creature had vanished, that meant that it had 
materialized in the waking world. That meant that now, at this instant, Dianne was facing 
the most vicious and soulless beast that had ever stalked the earth.
   He stumbled across to Oromas I, hoping that Oromas I might still be alive - alive 
enough to project him back to reality. But Oromas I's neck was a tangle of slashed 
gristle, and the shadow-creature's claws had cut through his armor like a chain saw 
through a tin can.
   Reblax tried some of the switches on Oromas I's power-grille. Oromas's psychic energy 
was fully charged up, but Reblax had no idea how to convert it to his own use. He knelt 
back on his heels. His only chance of saving Dianne now was to see if he could find the 
other Night Warriors and get Oromas II to take him back. But by now it was probably too 
late for that. Too late for anything.
   As he knelt by Oromas I's body, the sun began to break through the clouds, and a small 
brown phoebe settled on the sepulcher and began to sing.
   At that moment, a shadow fell across the cracked marble, then another, and a 
hauntingly familiar voice said, 'John?'
   Reblax turned around. Standing a few feet away on the weedy path was Virginia, in a 
flower pink summer dress. Beside her stood a tall figure in slabby crimson armor, a 
figure who was unquestionably a Night Warrior - although not a Night Warrior Reblax 
recognized.