Dead leaves blew across the wooden floor, carrying with them the scent of fall. Christian stared into the gloaming on the other side for the time it took to draw a single breath and then crawled through. The gay, bright-as-brass tinkle of his laughter echoed strangely from the far side. Stockton tipped back his thermos and had another swallow.

Peter Yearns for Action

Peter followed Christian through, across the dusty attic floorboards, onto cold, bare earth and then out from under a low ledge of rock.

He rose and found himself in a clearing on the side of a hill, a natural amphitheater overgrown with pale grass. He turned in a complete circle, looking around. Boulders capped in moss had been scattered helter-skelter around the glade. It took a moment of study to recognize they had been deliberately positioned, creating a semicircle, like teeth in the lower jaw of some enormous antediluvian brute. A single dead-looking tree, deformed and hunched, cast wild branches out over the ruin. Ruin of what? Some place of cruel worship, perhaps. Or maybe just the equivalent of a scenic turnoff. Who could say? Not Peter Stockton.

His father’s hand fell onto his shoulder. The wind hissed through the blades of grass.

“Listen,” his father said, and Peter inclined his head. After a moment his eyes widened.

The grass whispered, “poison, poison, poison, poison.”

“It’s murder-weed,” his dad told him. “It says that whenever the wind blows and men are about.”

The sky above them was the dull color of a bloodstained bedsheet.

Peter looked back at the door as Mr. Fallows pulled his way out of one world and into the other. On this side the doorframe was made of rough stone and the door itself was built into the slope of the hill, which rose steeply away above that rock ledge. Charn crawled through last and closed the door behind him.

“Regard your watches,” Charn said. “I make it 5:40 A.M. By 5:40 P.M. we must be on our way back. If you open that door one minute after midnight, you will find naught but a slab of rock. Oh, and then you are in for it. In our world the door opens every three months. But three months there is nine months here. You must wait the term of a woman’s pregnancy before it will open again, on the summer solstice, June twenty-first. And in case you can’t do the math . . . yes. It has been thirty-seven years since I first opened the door in our world. But it has been one hundred and eleven years here.”

“A century of twilight,” Christian said, with a prickle of delight.

“A century of shadows,” Peter replied, in a tone of hushed awe.