Another hand grabbed my wrist, adding its strength to the first. Thrashing, twisting, fighting every inch of the way, I was drawn over the edge of the bed. I hit the floor with a thump. The hands continued to pull. Soon my arm was under the bed up to my elbow. With nothing on the floor to hold on to, nothing to give me traction, the rest of my body would soon follow.

“No!” I screamed, pushing my free hand against the side of the bed. “No! No! Let me go!”

I heard my father throw himself against the door again.

The cold hands kept pulling and pulling. I swung myself around, jamming my shoulder against the side of the bed, deciding I would rather let them pull my arm out of its socket than let them pull me under the bed.

A third time my father slammed against the door. It splintered and burst open. Too late. My bed slid across the floor to reveal the swirling gray nothingness that lay waiting beneath it. A horrible crackling filled the air as the nothingness sucked me in.

Somewhere above me, I heard my parents shouting my name.

“Now do you believe me?” I cried.

I was sinking into something like a thick, foul-smelling pudding. It was colder than anything I had ever experienced—a cold that worked its way into the deepest parts of me, penetrating to the center of my bones.

Then, suddenly, I was through the coldness and falling into dark.

The fall lasted only an instant. I landed with a dull thump against something that felt like a mattress but turned out to be a huge fungus. Above me swirled a cool gray circle with a spot of blue in the center—the place through which I had fallen.

I could still hear my parents shouting my name.

Four torches, mounted on poles, formed a square around me. I heard an evil chuckle to my right. I turned toward it, and the flickering light provided my first sight of the creature who had dragged me here. He was foul looking, with long hair that hung around his shoulders in greasy strings. When he beckoned to me, I saw that he had long yellowed fingernails; when he smiled, he showed sharp, rotting teeth. His eyes glittered with malice from their deep sockets. Yet for all that, I could tell that he had once been human, which may have been the scariest thing of all.

That, and the fact that he looked oddly familiar. With a shudder, I realized I had seen him in my dreams—or, to be more accurate, in my nightmares.

“Got you at lasssst,” he said in a hissing voice that was filled with deep satisfaction. “Got you at lasssst.”