“… Help me. For the sake of whatever God you believe in, help me…”

Baba Yaga pressed the STOP button on the tape recorder. In the awful silence that followed, Barbara could hear her own breathing, ragged and too rapid. Her heart hammered against the cage of her ribs. Klaus, what do I do now? I want you here, my love, because I’m terrified.

“I did what I could for him,” Baba Yaga was saying, and Barbara jerked her gaze to the woman on the bed. “That was recorded decades ago, not long after our botched mission. I tried to help him hold in that thing. I spent years nursing him as he became more and more twisted and awful to be near. I managed to keep him at least somewhat sane and docile…” She nodded toward Franny against the wall. “Until Black ruined it for all of us,” she finished.

Her thin fingertips caressed the black buttons of the recorder, and Barbara thought that she would play more of the tape. Instead, Baba Yaga closed her eyes hard, as if Tolenka’s voice amid the hissing of the ancient cassette had conjured up something terrifying in front of her and she wanted to shut out the vision. “Horrorshow is a monster from another place, another dimension. A terrible, awful god. It wants … it wants death and terror and horror. That’s what makes it strong.” Her eyes opened again. Yellowed pupils sought Barbara. “Now, there’s little hope at all. It’s growing stronger every day, and soon there will be no way to stop it. The whole world will become like Talas is now, and it will be the world’s master.”

“Then we need to find a way to get to Tolenka and kill him, if he’s the one through whom this thing is going to come.”

“No!” The word was a shriek, a scream. Baba Yaga lurched up in her bed, her hand clenched like a claw about to strike. “Didn’t you hear what Tolenka was saying? That’s what you can’t do, you fool! Tolenka is the only thing holding back the monster now. He is trying desperately to keep shut the door the creature has opened. If he dies, if you or your aces kill him, then the monster will step through fully, in all its awful power. It will rip open the walls between its world and ours, and everything there, all the horror and all the filth, will spill over. There will be no place for anyone to hide or escape. Everything and everyone in our world will die. Everyone.”

She stopped. The truth of everything the woman had said was written in the lines of her face. Barbara felt sick. She imagined Klaus, caught up in the madness, or worse, already dead. I did this. I sent Klaus and the others there. I let Klaus go without taking me along. I could have at least been there with him when …