The things returned.

This time she was careful, as careful as she could be, reaching out to them slowly, gently, feeling them in their terrible fragility. After a while they came to her without coaxing. She handled them with almost infinite caution, enfolded each one as gently as she could, a century between thoughts, a millennium between excruciatingly restrained movements. Even so, some proved too vulnerable, and with tiny cries they were no more, bursting in her grasp like bubbles as they gave up their essences. It tore at her heart.

The others flitted away, alarmed, and she was terrified, certain they would leave her forever. She called to them. Some came back. Oh, but they were delicate. Oh, but they were beautiful.

She wept, and the universe slowly convulsed.

The dream had been so deep and powerful and strange that for a long time she did not realize she had returned to consciousness. Her mind still seemed lost in lonely darkness: for almost a minute after she remembered her name, Renie did not open her eyes. At last some returning sensation in her skin and muscles pricked her and she unlidded, stared, then cried out.

Gray, swirling silver-gray. Flickers of light, the smearing of broken spectra, a fine dust of luminance . . . but nothing else. The shimmery cloudstuff that had girdled the mountain seemed to be all around her now, an ocean of silver emptiness, although she could sense something hard and horizontal beneath her. She was not bodiless—it was not a dream this time. Her hands crawled over her own flesh and to the ground on either side, a ground she could not even see. She was lost in a heavy, shining fog, everything and everyone else gone.

"!Xabbu? Sam?" She crawled a little way over the hard but curiously smooth invisibility beneath her, then remembered the edge of the crevice and stopped, fighting against complete panic. "!Xabbu! Where are you?"

An echo had been one of the few lifelike features that the degenerating black mountainside had retained, but there was no echo now.

Renie moved forward again, exploring with nervously twitching fingers, but even after she had crawled what must have been a dozen meters she had encountered neither the stone of the cliff face nor the open space at the crevice's rim. It was as though the mountain had just melted away around her, leaving her on some inexplicable tabletop in the glimmering fog.

She crawled another dozen meters. The ground she could not see was as smooth as something glazed in a kiln, but real enough to hurt her knees. She called her companions' names over and over into absolute silence. At last, desperate, she climbed to her feet.

"!Xabbu!" she shrieked until her throat was sore. "!Xabbu! Can you hear me?"

Nothing.

She walked a half-dozen careful paces, testing each footstep before setting it down. The ground was absolutely flat. There was nothing else—no precipice, no vertical stone slab of mountain, no sound, no light except the ubiquitous pearly gleam of the mist. Even the fog had no substance: it shimmered wetly but was not wet. There was nothing. There was Renie and nothing. Everything gone.

She sat down and clutched at her head. I'm dead, she thought, but outside the dream, the idea of death was not a soothing one. And this is all there is. Everyone lied. She laughed, but it sounded like something wasn't working properly inside her. Even the atheists lied. "Oh, damn," she said out loud.

A flicker of shadow caught her eye—something moving in the fog.

"!Xabbu?" Even as she spoke, she felt she shouldn't have. Hunted—they were all hunted now. Still, she could not smother the reflex entirely. "Sam?" she whispered.

The shape eased forward, resolving out of nothing like a magical apparition. She was prepared for something as bizarre as the setting; it took her a moment to recognize what it was that shared the silver void with her.

"I am . . . Ricardo," said the blank-eyed man. "Klement," he added a moment later.

NETFEED/NEWS: Church Refuses Exorcism for "Bogeyman"

(visual: child on bed in La Palotna Hospital)

VO: The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has refused the request of a group of close to three dozen Mexican-American parents to perform an exorcism on their children, who claim to have had identical nightmares about a dark spirit they call "El Cucuy"—the bogeyman. Three of the affected children have committed suicide, and several of the others are being treated for clinical depression. Social help agents say the villain is not a demon, but the medical result of too much time spent on the net.

(visual: Cassie Montgomery, LA County Human Services)

MONTGOMERY: "We can't trace the source yet, but I don't think it's a coincidence that most of these young people are latchkey kids and heavy net users. It seems pretty clear that something they've seen or experienced online is provoking these bad dreams. The rest I chalk up to garden-variety hysteria."

What's even more important," the guide said, smiling her professional smile from behind thick goggle-style sunglasses, "is that we now have healthy breeding populations of many threatened birds—the gallinule, or marsh hen, the roseate spoonbill, the Lousiana heron, and the beautiful snowy egret, just to name a few. Now Charleroi will take us into the deep swamp. Maybe we'll see some deer, or even a bobcat!" She was good at her job: it was clear she could manifest the same energy for that line every trip, day in and day out.

Not counting the guide and the young man nominally steering the boat, whose suntanned arms bore the serpentine traces of unignited subdermals and whose facial expression also suggested that some necessary light beneath the flesh had not been switched on, there were only six passengers on this slow weekday afternoon, a red-faced British couple and their small noisy son who was cutting at the duckweed with a souvenir lightstick, a pair of young married professionals from somewhere the the middle of the country, and Olga Pirofsky.

"Please keep your hands out of the water." The guide retained her smile even as her voice hardened to something less cheerful. "This isn't an amusement park, remember—our alligators are not mechanical."

Everyone except Olga laughed dutifully, but the boy still did not stop swiping at the water until his father said, "Lay off, Gareth," and smacked him on the back of the head.

Strange, so strange, Olga thought. So strange, all the years and miles of my life, to wind up here. A bank of cypress loomed ahead in the fast-dissolving morning mist, a gathering of phantoms. Here at the end.

Three days now since she had reached the end of the journey, or perhaps since the journey itself had deserted her. Everything was stasis, pointless as the quiet little guideboat moving along its preprogrammed route across the resurrected swamp. Sleepless through the silent nights, only able to slip into unconsciousness when dawn touched the window blinds of her motel room, Olga could scarcely find the energy to eat and drink, let alone do anything more strenuous. She didn't even know what impulse had led her to buy a ticket for the tour, and nothing so far had made it worth missing the few hours of sleep she might have had in its place. She could see the object of her quest from almost anywhere in the area, after all—the black tower dominated the vicinity as thoroughly as a medieval cathedral its village and fields.

Three days without the voices, without the children. She had not felt so bereft since those distant and terrible days when Aleksandr and the baby had died.

And I can't even remember now what that felt like, she realized. A big emptiness, that's all that's left. Like a hole, and my life since then has just been little things I throw into that hole, trying to fill it up. But I can't feel it.