"So from now on, you won't run off by yourself again," Nick said, carrying Lene on his hip.

She nodded fervently, her curls bouncing. "Never, never," the five-year-old promised then yawned.

Lene nuzzled her head into his shoulder, rubbing against the knit material of the sweater Nick had put on to cover his torn shirt, and before long she dozed off. While she slept, Nick reflected back on their encounter with the graveyard and shivered at the memory. Lawn gnomes coming to life was one thing, but skeletons and graveyards were in a completely different league of scary and a lot more difficult to take on. It was obvious that Nick couldn't trust appearances in This Place, but how would he know for sure what was safe and what was an illusion?

After a while, Lene woke up from her nap and was restless, so Nick set her down to let her walk in front of him. She ran back and forth with a child's abundant energy like she hadn't just been passed out on his shoulder, but she remembered not to stray too far from Nick's side. As they walked, Lene babbled endlessly with follow-up stories to the ones she'd told earlier about her dog, and Nick wondered again when she'd had a chance to have all these adventures and how she could recount them as if they'd just happened yesterday.

The pair traveled for the rest of the day, taking only a few minutes for dinner because they still hadn't reached the other side of the forest and Nick worried about walking unprotected at night. Who knew what was lurking in the dark, just waiting for the two of them to walk into its grasp? The woods ended up being a lot deeper than Nick had originally imagined, and it wasn't long before he'd lost his bearings on the winding trail. The trees grew so thickly that he was unable to use the castle as a beacon, and he had no idea whether they were even going in the right direction anymore. Nick's worries increased as dusk settled in, and he strained his eyes against the graying light, searching for the way out and really wishing he had a flashlight.

He lifted Lene into his arms and carried her so that she wouldn't trip over anything in the dim light then asked, "Hey, kid, think you can use that magic of yours and pull up a flashlight for me?"

She shook her head in response. "Sorry, but I don't see a flashlight nowhere, Nick. It's gonna be nighttime soon, huh?"

"Yeah," he agreed, but he didn't want her to worry so he changed the subject. "Hey, tell me some more about Bruno. He seems like a pretty cool pup."

"Oh yeah, he is! You shoulda seen it this one time when me and my valp went –"

"Valp?"

"Oops sorry, puppy. A valp is a puppy. I forget sometimes, but Mamma and pappa say I hafta speak English all the time now ‘cause we camed here."

"Here? You mean, you came here to This Place?" Nick tried to sort out what she was saying.

"No, this is the woods, silly. We camed to our house! Anyway, like I was saying, me and Bruno went out to the park and…"

While she prattled on, Nick focused on searching for a way out or at least a safe place to spend the night before he could no longer see his own hands before him. He prompted Lene for more and more stories until she finally told him, "I think that's everything me and Bruno did together. He's only a val – I mean, puppy, so I can't do too much with him. But when he gets bigger, Nick, we're gonna go fishing and out on walks far away from home all by ourselves; then I can take him to the zoo and we'll look at the–" And off she was again on another tangent.

/Well, at least I know how to keep her calm in a scary situation,/ Nick decided.

In the end, he couldn't find the edge of the woods, but what he did find was a small stone cottage. Though Nick didn't feel safe trusting anything about This Place or these woods, he decided that he would rather take his chances inside.

"We're gonna stay here for the night, kiddo," he told Lene and tried the door.

It rattled as Nick both pushed and pulled but didn't yield, so he set her down and examined it closely, squinting to see in the last of the light. The door's brass knob had no keyhole, but it appeared to fasten shut with a hook on the inside.

"It's latched," his five-year-old companion stated the obvious.

"Hmm…" Nick ruffled through his backpack and pulled out the knife he had brought along then slipped it through the crack between the door and its frame. Carefully sliding the knife upwards, he felt the latch pop up, too, and the door unlocked. Nick looked into the small, one-roomed cottage – which was really more of a hut – from the doorway and found that it was almost bare. There was a small, stone fireplace with a stack of split logs beside it, a thin cot tucked into the corner, a washbowl on a stand with a bucket nearby, a pantry cupboard, and a table with a couple of chairs. The floor was cold, packed dirt that had been swept clean. A still air filled the cottage, as if no one had been here for a very long time. Nick hadn't noticed the sensation before, perhaps because the other houses had been so much bigger and this was just one small stone hut.

He returned the knife to his backpack and set it in the entryway then closed the door behind them, flipping down the latch. However, Nick didn't feel too secure with just a little hook locking the door, so he fumbled in the dark for one of the chairs that was nearby and stuck it under the doorknob. Now they were indoors and it seemed safe enough, but still he felt worried about being in the woods at night. Who knew what was out there and how easy it might be for them to get inside? The windows were tiny slits that kept Nick from seeing outside, and they barely let in any light. He had to feel his way across the pitch black cabin to get to the fireplace and put some kindle inside. Lene didn't seem to feel any of his apprehension, though, because she ran back and forth across the dark room.

"Hey, cut it out," Nick told her. "What if you run into something and hurt yourself?"

"Boy, this is a small house!" she exclaimed. "It's like the size of my room at home. I have a big room with lots of places to put my toys because I'm a big girl. Do you have your own room, too, Nick?"

"Yeah, I have a big room, too," he said. He rummaged in his pockets for the book of matches that he had found earlier. "Though when I was a kid, I had to share it with B.J. because we didn't have a lot of space."

"B.J.?" Lene asked. "Who's that, Nick?"

"I'm not sure…" The statement about sharing a room had just come out of his mouth for no reason. "I think… I think that's my sister's name?" As he said it, Nick felt more sure. "Yeah, my sister, Bobbie Jean. We call her B.J. She can be a real pain sometimes but not so bad as Leslie." /Wait, Leslie?/

"Is Leslie your sister, too?"

"Yeah," Nick nodded his head slowly as he thought about it. "Leslie's my sister, too. She's younger than BJ." The matches were hard to strike in the dark, and Nick ended up ruining two or three of them as he replied to Lene's questions before he successfully lit one. He held it to the edge of the dry log but wasn't quite fast enough because the match burned down too far and singed his fingers. "Ow," he said, shaking his stinging hand. Bite scars and scorch marks, what else would his hand have to bear?

"I don't have any sisters," Lene told him. "That's why Mamma and Pappa got me Bruno, so I would have someone to play with when I got lonely."

"Oh?" Nick said. He realized then that in all the stories the five-year-old had told him about her adventures with her puppy, she hadn't once mentioned other people. "What about your friends?" he asked. Nick struck another match and moved quicker this time, holding it up to the edge of the kindle.

"I don't have a lot of friends. I used to have a friend named Samantha, but we had to move far away – like lots of miles! And then I made another friend named Carlie, but we moved again. I haven't seen them for a long time, maybe a hundred days!"

"I used to move around a lot, too, when I was little," Nick remembered. "We used to live in… New York, I think, when I was really, really little. But then my parents relocated us somewhere else… Maybe Florida?"

"Florida? Where's that? What's it like in Florida?"

"I'm not sure. I can't remember much about it yet besides the name, but I think it's far from here." /How did I get to Kansas from Florida?/ Nick wondered. /Did my family move again?/ The flame finally caught one of the logs and he watched the fire spread slowly. It glowed with only a faint light, but at last he could see a little bit. He was getting pretty tired of the darkness.

Behind him, Lene screamed. Nick spun around quickly to find a tall man standing in the cottage, holding her horizontally under one arm, the five-year-old's body kicking and flailing in his grasp. /Was he here when we walked in?/ Nick wondered. /He couldn't have been./ The man would have been impossible to miss. It took him a moment to get over the shock of seeing another human being, this time one as old as he was. But unlike Lene, this person didn't seem to be friendly.

"Put her down," Nick ordered.

"Or you'll do what?" the man asked, his thin lips twisting in a smirk. "You don't want to fight me, Nick. I'll do much worse things than just bite you."

/Bite./ Somehow the stranger knew about the lawn gnome. "Have you been watching me? Who are you?"

"I think the question, Nick, is who are /you/? I bet you don't know," the man taunted. Lene continued to struggle in his grasp and, as if singling in on the word "bite," she did just that, sinking her teeth into his hand. "Auugh," the stranger growled, dropping her. Lene scampered away from him, but not before he delivered a strong kick to her backside. "Such a troublemaker lately, Lene. Too think that you used to be so good, so obedient." She cried and ran into Nick's arms.

"You bastard!" Nick glared at him.

The logs cracked in the fireplace, sending up sparks, and the blaze became stronger, filling the room with orange light. Nick could see the stranger more clearly now: he wore a long, dark trench coat and had silver white hair, though he didn't at all appear to be old. The look in the man's strangely colorless eyes was not friendly and his long, thin face was twisted in anger.
"She's only five years old, man," Nick said angrily. "Do you get off on hurting little kids or something?"

"I, as you call it, ‘get off' on causing pain in general," the man smirked. "But you're right, she's not my target, you are." He raised a hand at Nick and stepped forward.

"Get behind me, Lene." Nick didn't have any sort of weapon handy. The knife was inside his backpack by the door, and he didn't think a book of matches would be very effective. Looking around frantically, he found that the only thing left to do – and a pretty stupid thing at that – was to plunge his hand into the fireplace. Ignoring the heat, Nick grasped hold of the unlit edge of a piece of kindle and turned to face the strange man, clutching the flaming log between his hands. The stranger did not have any sort of weapon in his hands, and yet he exuded a power that made Nick wary. "You stay away from us," Nick called loudly.

"Or you'll do what?" The man asked. He took another step forward, his eyes narrowing in concentration, and Nick felt an odd sensation in his body, like he was going numb all over. The firewood fell from his hand and rolled across the floor and then somehow he was flying through the air and was thrown against the wall above the fireplace. Nick heard Lene scream.

"You bastard…" he repeated. With a groan he collected the log he'd dropped, which fortunately had not gone out yet, and struggled to his feet.

"Nick! Nick, are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Lene, just stand back…" He stepped forward and narrowed his eyes at Günter, who hadn't moved an inch that whole time. /How did he do that?/ Nick wondered.

"Wasn't that fun?" The man took another step towards him. "Shall I do it again, then?"

"You stay away from us!" Nick shouted, holding the burning log up between them. He didn't know what he was going to do. This guy had strange powers, and all Nick had was a big stick.

Then suddenly, from outside the cottage, a howl sounded far in the distance. Another howl, coming from somewhere on the other side of them, howled in return, and then another answered and another. With a pained look on his face the strange man turned to look back at the door, as though wondering if it was secure, and Nick used that moment of distraction to charge forward, brandishing the blazing firewood. His hands felt strangely warm as he swung hard and aimed high, catching the stranger on the back of his head. Another strange feeling went through his body at the contact, and the man staggered and roared. With grim satisfaction, Nick smelled the singed scent of burning hair.

The howling sound outside drew nearer. Raising the log high above his head, Nick concentrated on striking as hard as possible and brought it down once more across the stranger's back, knocking him to the floor. He pulled back for the final blow when abruptly the man vanished.

Nick let out a deep, tired breath and dropped the burning firewood, which rolled a short distance across the ground to extinguish on the dirt floor. /Where did he go?/ Nick turned around to find Lene huddled into a ball, her head down and her arms around her knees. He kneeled on the floor beside her. "Lene… Hey… It's allright. We're okay now." She raised her head from the circle of her arms, eyes shining. Placing his finger under her chin, Nick lifted her face a little higher. "Did he hurt you?" he asked seriously as howls rang almost right outside the door.

She shook her head and sniffled. "My butt hurts," the five-year-old said frankly, "but mostly I was just ascared."

/So she does get scared,/ Nick noted. But who wouldn't be afraid in that situation? Even he was scared witless; his hands were still shaking.

At that moment the door cracked and splintered as it was smashed from the outside, sending fragments of wood flying into the room. The chair bracing it under the doorknob shattered and gave way, and several dark figures bounded into the cottage, filling the small space. In spite of the fire roaring behind him, all Nick could see of the invaders was massive black shapes. He wrapped his arms protectively around Lene, but there were too many of them to fight off.

"Do what you want to me," he shouted over the strange roar that filled the room, "but please don't hurt the kid. She's only five years old."