There were a couple of elves, tall and proud and haughty. They live somewhere else now, and only ever turn up in our world when there’s a good chance to screw us over or kick us when we’re down. It’s all they’ve got left, these days. There were aliens; grays and lizardoids and a few things whose shapes made no sense at all. They really do walk among us. Tourists, mostly. If they look like getting out of hand, the family usually just spanks them and sends them home. Ghosts drifted here and there, trapped in repeating loops of time. And there were things walking through walls, or scrambling up them, or hovering in the skies overhead. Far too many of them for it all to be just a coincidence. Word does get around fast in the unnatural community.

I shut down my Sight. You can’t See the world as it really is for too long; the human mind just isn’t equipped to cope. Luckily, none of them could See me, as long as I wore the torc. They had to wait for me to reveal myself . . . I grinned. It was time to use one of the Bentley’s really special features.

“Eddie, what are you planning?” said Molly.

I smiled at her beatifically. “Brace yourself, sweetie. I’m taking this car up to eleven!”

I pushed the pedal to the floor, let go the clutch, and the Bentley surged forward, its engine howling like a wolf on the hunt. We shot past the hundred mark in a few seconds as I slammed through the gears, and then I hit the hidden switch and threw her into Overdrive. Molly and I were forced back into our seats by the terrible acceleration, and the world blurred around us as we left it behind. The Bentley punched through the walls of the world, and just like that we were somewhere else.

Freed from the everyday restrictions of time and space, the Bentley tore through the dimensions, day and night flickering on and off like a stroboscope. Stars blazed in somewhere else’s night skies, in constellations never seen from Earth. There were strange sounds and incandescent lights, and a city singing in a million inhuman voices. Visions and vistas flickered on and off as we shot through them like a bullet, intangible and unsubstantial, though whether they were the ghosts or we were is probably just a matter of opinion. Molly shrieked and howled with delight, and only the need to concentrate on the steering kept me from joining in. Drunk on speed, crazed on velocity, we hammered through the dimensions until I saw the sign I was looking for and took a sharp right turn back into our reality.