In his excitement the next morning, it was all Nick could do not to wake Lene before sunrise and show off his work from the night before.  He had slept little, dozing for half-hour stretches whenever his body grew tired from the exertions of practicing magic, and his broken collection of dreams had been linked by one shared motif, basketball: one-on-one games against another guy who, though several inches shorter than Nick, had managed to thrash him soundly every single time.  “You got no game, Frack,” the other man had teased.  “I thought you said you were gonna practice.”

Scrubbing at his face over the bathroom sink, Nick wracked his brains trying to connect the guy with previous dreams.  That merry face, those bright eyes, the brotherly affection…  Were they related?  Perhaps.  Nick toweled off and put all thought of the mystery man aside as he remembered what had caused him to rise so eagerly in the first place—his impatience to share his new-found powers with Lene.  He’d forced himself to go back to sleep each time he woke during the night, reminding himself that it was too early to wake his young companion, but Nick’s impatience had finally gotten the best of him and he hurried over to her bedside.

Kneeling over the little girl, he touched her shoulder and watched as she stirred from her slumber.  Lene yawned and made a grouchy face, pulling the quilt over head when she saw him.  “Whaddaya want?” she whined.  “S’too bright in here.”

“That’s because it’s morning.  Now, now… don’t be grumpy, kiddo,” Nick teased, climbing up onto the bed and tugging the blankets away from her.  “I want to show you something cool.”

She insolently buried her face in the pillow.  “Can’t it wait… ‘til after, y’know, breakfast?” came her muffled response.

Nick gently gripped her by the shoulders and encouraged the reluctant child to turn over and sit up, shaking his head at her.  “Nope, this is too cool to wait any longer, you grouch.  You’ve gotta check this out and then we’ll have breakfast.”  He turned to face the open door and held his palm out.  The hint of a smile touched his lips as Lene rubbed her bleary eyes with a tiny, balled-up fist and grudgingly did as he asked.

“What do you wanna show me?”

“Shhhh, just watch,” he said, narrowing his eyes.  Nick focused… focused…  The door began to quiver.  He heard a tiny gasp of surprise from the child as she sat up straight and looked at the door with greater interest.  Then all of a sudden it slammed shut with a loud bang that shook the door’s frame and made its brass knob rattle.  Lene jumped, nearly falling out of bed in astonishment, and grabbed on to Nick for support.

“Holy cow!” the nine-year-old exclaimed.

“Yeah, I know.  Cool, ain’t it?”  Nick had discovered quite by accident the night before that it was easier to hurl objects a short distance with great force than to guide them slowly through the air as Lene had done.  As a result, there was now a garbage bag full of broken dishware in the kitchen to prove it, which he explained to his young friend in full detail.

“That’s so good, Nick!” Lene said enthusiastically.  “Now we can practice together!”  She made a face then as her stomach growled audibly and clutched her hands to her belly, adding, “After breakfast.”

The two headed to the kitchen where, unfortunately, Nick’s efforts had left very few dishes to eat from, so they ended up scooping cereal into a couple of chipped mugs and downing it quickly before milk could seep through the cracks.  “We should probably move on to a different house, huh?” he suggested, finishing the last of his Fruity Pebbles.  He reached for the box and poured himself another serving.  “I’ve kind of trashed this place, sorry.”

“S’alright,” Lene replied through a mouthful of Cap’n Crunch, “prolly no one’s coming back here anyway and there’s plenty of other houses for us to go and see.  I got a funny feeling, though.  I think we should go through the back yard this time, Nick."

“Yeah?  You think so?  Well, once we’re finished eating I’ll grab my backpack and we can go.”

They raced through breakfast, excited by what new things they would do today.  In his hurry, Nick slopped milk onto the countertop and had to grab a towel to wipe it down.  Finishing first, Lene pushed away from the counter, "I'm done, I win!"  With a wave of her hand, she effortlessly sent her chipped dishware soaring across the room into the sink and skipped out of the kitchen.

Nick stared.  Though last night she had practically turned red straining to move dishes across the room, now after a night of sleep—without any further practice—she could do it without trying, without even the hint of a wobble in her technique.  And she didn’t even seem to notice the difference.  How had her abilities improved so much just overnight?  It made his own shaky attempts to move things look pitiful.  Finishing his breakfast, Nick decided to give his own powers another try and waved his hand the way Lene had, focusing on moving his dishes to the sink.  Instead of guiding smoothly like Lene’s hand, they flew across the room and shattered loudly against the wall above the sink, sending bits of china everywhere.  Nick flinched.  /How does Lene do it?/  This girl’s powers were unreal.

“Ready to go?” she was back and clutching his backpack and sneakers.  “What was that loud noise?”

“Uh… nothing.”  Nick turned and grabbed his things from her.  “Let’s go.”  Out the back door they went.  It opened onto a quaint yard landscaped with small trees and a winding gravel path that was dotted with larger stones along its edges.  Nick picked up one of these smooth flat stones, weighing it in his hand before tossing it to Lene.  “Here.  I want you to show me that again.”

“Huh?”

“In the kitchen, you made the dishes fly into the sink so easily even though last night it seemed really hard for you.  Can you do that again?”

“You mean like this?” she held out her hand and the stone sailed into a bed of rocks across the yard, too slowly and smoothly for her to have just tossed it.  “Why?”

“Whenever I try to move things, they kind of just go /boom/ instead of flying around smoothly like that.  Watch,” he held his hand out to another rock sitting at the roots of tree, this one larger than the last.  It shot up suddenly into the air, scattering leaves from the tree branches as it went, and flew high into the sky.  “Oops.”  His eyes followed the rock and he snatched Lene out of the way as it fell to the ground and fragmented into several pieces, sending chips of rock in their direction.

She laughed at him.  “I bet that wasn’t on purpose!” the girl giggled.  She stopped when she saw the expression on his face.  “Aww, don’t look so sad.  You just need practice is all.”  She made him do it again.  Then again, and again; they spent the better part of the next hour sending stones flying across the yard.  Nick found the rocks hard to control, and a smooth glide was much more difficult to maintain then just letting the rocks go flying randomly.  Sweat trickled down his scalp, across his temple and along the front of his ear.  Nick wiped it away with his sleeve and tried not to let himself get frustrated that what was like second nature to the little girl at his side was so challenging to him.  Lene was in an entirely different league.  Her abilities seemed to have magically increased ten times, and now objects soared around more quickly and steadily than they had the night before.  It was as if her previous unsteadiness and exhaustion had never even happened.  He, on the other hand, could barely keep his rocks from exploding against the fence and one particularly poor attempt sent a huge rock crashing through the wooden fence, smashing one of its planks.

“You broke it!”  Lene exclaimed and ran over to the gap in the fence to peer through.  “Hey, neat!  Check this out,” her small lithe body slipped easily through the hole left by the missing plank.

“Lene, don’t go off anywhere alone,” Nick called after her loudly but it was too late.  The gap in the fence, though perfect for Lene, was much too small for him to pass through so he tugged at the planks around it until they broke off.  He slipped through the fence to join her and found the girl standing beneath a great big wizened apple tree, gazing up into its gnarled branches.

“How old do you think it is?  Looks like a million years old!” she exclaimed.

“Nah, I don’t think it’s that old,” Nick remarked.  Still, the tree was rather aged.  Its leaves were dead and brown, scattered at its roots, leaving bare twisted boughs bent beneath the weight of shriveled gray apples.  Its trunk was warped and scarred so that the deformities looked like a snarling old face.  This, along with the spindly branches that sagged in their direction, lent the impression that the giant withered tree was standing over them like a predator about to pounce upon its prey.

“Ooooh, scary,” Lene said in a spooky voice then giggled.  She reached her hand up toward one of the tree boughs and an apple came sailing down into her palm.  Wrinkling her nose at it, she held it up at Nick.  “This doesn’t look very yummy… Prolly has worms inside it!”

“What do you mean?  It looks delicious,” he joked, snatching it from her hand and pretending to take a bite.

“Ewwwww, gross!” Lene exclaimed.  She reached her hand toward the branch above Nick’s head and mischievously sent a shower of gray apples down on him.

“You scamp!” he exclaimed, ducking and trying to dodge the hail of leathery old fruit.  He reached for the little girl with a playful swipe of his arm but missed, and she yelped then danced out of reach giggling and kicking up dirt.  Nick gave chase, but the apple tree was so wide around that Lene was able to stay just out of reach, keeping the broad tree trunk between them.  They ran around and around laughing and wearing a footpath into the earth around the tree.  In their distraction they did not see the great old apple tree begin to quiver, or the strange twisted face in the bark frown at them, or the mouth of its evil face begin to open wide revealing a huge gaping hole so dark that the bottom could not be seen.  With a creak of its roots the tree leaned over just as Lene skittered by and in a flash swallowed her whole.  She screamed as she fell into the cavern of its maw, but her cries were cut off as the mouth tightly shut and the old tree settled back into place.

A few wrinkled apples quivered and fell from their boughs, and then all was silent.  Nick stared dumbfounded at the place where Lene had been playing just a moment before; there were dainty footprints left where she had been standing.

“Lene!” Nick yelled, shocked.  “Lene, can you hear me?  Are you in there?”  There was no answer.  Nick stared closely at the twisted face, which had returned to its original snarl.  “Give her back,” he demanded loudly, aware that under any other circumstance he would have felt idiotic talking to a tree.  But Other World was a weird place and he had encountered no end of strange and abnormal things since he’d first woken up on that endless street of tract homes some weeks ago.  “I said give her back!”  Still no response.  “Lene, can you hear me?!” he tried one last time before turning away to think.

/There has got to be some way to make it open its mouth again,/ Nick thought, worriedly running his hands through his hair.  /What made the tree swallow Lene in the first place?/  He decided that the crabby old apple tree must have gotten annoyed at them somehow.  The only solution then was to make it so angry that it would open its mouth once more.

Nick tried all the things he and Lene had been doing before she was swallowed.  He ran around the trunk waving his arms and making lots of noise, but there was no response.  Then he tried to make showers of apples fall from the branches in case that was what had annoyed the tree before.  His movements, however, lacked the precision of Lene’s abilities and instead he made the withered fruit explode.  Leathery bits of tough apple skin and rotted pulp splattered Nick’s clothing and the floor.  Still, the disgruntled old face in the bark did not respond.  Frustrated, he kicked at the battered tree trunk, sending chips of dried bark flying everywhere.  “Let me in, damn you!” Nick screamed, kicking so hard his toes hurt. “You stupid tree!  I said, LET ME IN!”  He kicked again with all his might… and got nothing but air as the tree angrily opened its mouth wide and swallowed him whole.

Losing his balance, Nick went tumbling in head first and found himself rolling down a damp, earthy slope that led far below the apple tree.  The incline was so steep that he couldn’t check his momentum and ended up crashing and tumbling for a very long time until he landed with a thud at the bottom.  The impact knocked the wind from him, and Nick lied there clutching his chest and wheezing in pain.

When finally he regained his breath, Nick realized that the hole he’d fallen into was pitch black.  For a second he was uncertain whether his eyes were open or closed and, putting his hands to his face to check, nearly poked himself in the eye.  “Ow!”

“…Nick?”  A distant whisper.  “Is that you?”

“Lene?”  She sounded very far away.  “I can’t see you.”  Nick groped around in the dark, wishing his eyes would adjust, but because the cavern he’d fallen into lacked any light whatsoever, it remained a deep inky black.  “Lene?”  He thought he heard her somewhere in the distance, but it sounded like she was moving farther away.  Nick clambered to his feet to go after her and, with his hands out leading the way blindly, wandered in the direction from which he thought he’d heard her voice.  To his surprise the cavern was tall enough for him to stand in.  Nick wondered how far he had fallen and just how big the cave was.

“If only I had a flashlight to see with...  I really gotta remember to ask Lene to find one for me in one of these houses,” he murmured.  If it weren’t so dark, he could have gone much faster without worrying about walking into anything.  Not to mention that without a flashlight he was beginning to imagine all sorts of boogeymen and creepy crawlies lurking in the darkness, and Other World had already proven that there was no such thing as an overactive imagination.  All of a sudden, Nick’s foot struck a heavy object and he tripped, barely catching himself.  

“What was /that/?”  He reached for the space by his ankles and discovered a thick root protruding from the earth.  “Oh, just a root.  That’s perfectly normal,” Nick told himself.  After all, he was underground beneath an apple tree—albeit an evil apple tree that had swallowed him and his friend whole—so encountering a root was normal.  “Perfectly normal…” he repeated.  However, at that moment the root twitched and twined itself around his wrist.  “Gaaah!”  Nick jerked his hand away.  “Okay, not normal!”

He heard the sound of crunching soil as the root slid away from his hand and burrowed back into the ground.  Listening closely, Nick began to imagine that he could hear roots moving all around him.  Was he going crazy?  Nick freaked out and turned and fled, wondering what to do if he ran straight into a wall full of writhing roots.  Would they grab Nick, never to let him go?  And what about Lene?  She was so small, she’d never be able to fight them off.  He had to find her and get them out of that cave as soon as possible.

“Lene!” Nick called as loudly as he could.  “Lene, where are you?!  Can you hear me?”

“Nick…”  There it was again, that faint cry.

He thought that he saw a shimmer of light somewhere to his left and turned that way.  Was that her?  Had she managed to find a flashlight?  Something crept against his elbow and he yanked his arm away.  “Lene?!” Nick yelled.

“Nick!”  Her voice was much louder this time.  They called back and forth until the faint shimmer he’d spotted before appeared again and brightened before him, illuminating the entire chamber.  Nick was blinded momentarily.  As he stood there rubbing his eyes, a small figured hurled itself at him and threw its arms around his body.  “Nick!”  It was Lene.  “Did you see that big tree?  He ate me!  Oh, he must’ve eaten you too, huh, since you’re here…  But I’m so happy I found you!”

“Happy to see you too, kid, but could you point that flashlight somewhere else?  It’s freakin’ bright,” he added, squinting against the dazzling light in her hands.

“Oh, it’s not a flashlight,” the little girl told him and, dimming it until it was tolerable, showed him a round ball of light glowing in her hands.  “See?”

“Whoa, how’d you do tha—” Nick began, but now that he was no longer blinded anymore he was able to see the cave around them.  Its high, dark earthy walls were teeming with long, twisted roots that reached hungrily toward the two of them like the tentacles of some fierce starving creature.  They were practically surrounded.  Nick could tell from the look on Lene’s face that she had noticed, as well, and had been trying to find an escape from the apple tree’s dungeon.  “You know, on second thought, tell me later.  Do you know how to get out of here?”

“Maybe.  I think I found a tunnel that goes outside.”

“Okay, well do you remember how to get back there?  Why don’t we check it out together?”

The little girl took Nick’s hand, and he wondered whether it was for her sake or for his own.  Now that he could view his surroundings, he almost wished that he couldn’t.  The sight of those creepy pulsing roots gave him terrible chills and his disgust showed plainly on his face.  It was far more revolting than any monsters Nick might have imagined to be lurking in the dark.  The roots waved back and forth in a disorderly roiling heap, and Nick wondered just how he had avoided walking into them so far when it seemed that at any second he or Lene might be snatched up.

After a bit of wandering and backtracking, not to mention a few dead-ends, the pair finally arrived at the mouth of a low narrow tunnel that gleamed faintly with a distant light.  Lene confirmed that this was the way out.

“This?” Nick asked.  Peering down the hole, he could see thick tangles of short roots extending far into the passage.  “Is that even possible?”

“Yeah.  I think if we crawl, we can do it,” the little girl told him.  “I’ll go first ‘cause I have the light.  Are you ready?”

“I think so,” Nick said hesitantly.  He got down on his hands and knees and let her go first then followed closely behind.  It was an even tighter space than he had feared it would be.  Roots stretched at them from both sides and down from overhead, forcing them to crawl very slowly.  Although Lene was small enough that she could pass through just fine, Nick was much too large of a person to be crawling through tunnels the size of molehills, and it made him feel claustrophobic and tense.  The space was so narrow, in fact, that at times Nick swore he could feel the rough tip of a gnarled root brushing against the back of his neck or tugging at his backpack.  But whenever his nerves failed, he reminded himself that soon this would all be over, and he tried to think of all the nice things that awaited him outside.

“You know, when we get out of here, I want a nice hot shower—maybe two of them.  And then I’m gonna stretch out in bed and go to sleep with all the lights on,” Nick declared.  “I hate the dark.”

“Yeah, me too,” Lene agreed, “and I wanna dance!”

“Dance?”

“Yeah!  Will you dance with me, Nick?”

He chuckled, “Sure, I will, kid.  Anything’s better than crawling.”

The light of the tunnel grew slowly brighter, and Nick breathed a sigh of relief as he caught sight of the exit up ahead.  A burst of energy ran through his body, releasing his tension and fatigue.  Eagerly, he moved faster to keep up with Lene, who seemed to have gained her second wind, as well.

“We’re almost there!” she exclaimed.

At long last, the two of them rolled from the narrow mouth of the cave and into the open air, flopping themselves down onto a grassy knoll.  They shut their eyes, still sensitive from the darkness of the cave, tightly against the sun that shone high overhead and just lied there soaking in the warm luscious rays of light and heat and enjoying the cool, fresh breeze.

“We made it…” Nick breathed.  “We’re finally out of there…”  He sat up and stretched, blinking at the sunlight.  “Now let’s go and—” he stopped.  “Wait, where are we?”