“You!” The man of metal thrust the medallion at me. “Take this! Now!”

“But they’re coming—”

“Happens every morning,” he snapped. “Put it on!”

Sunlight stabbed through dozens of cracks then, turning the cavern into a quilt of light and dark through which threaded the scattering forms of a thousand unbelievable ogres. A large blade of sun shot down just ten feet away. I couldn’t help it—I took a step toward it and the warmth it offered.

ARRRGH!!! and Blinky recoiled from the beam.

Hadn’t the metal man said I would go home at dawn? I tore my eyes from the advancing surge of monsters and looked at him. He was strangling the medallion chain, unafraid of the sun that had his two companions edging away. Droves of trolls began teeming past us, dancing around the light with multifarious legs and screeching at such volume that the cave sounded like a steel tower being crushed in a giant fist. Larger trolls dove into tunnels while smaller ones scrambled up vertical walls like lizards.

I took another step toward the sunlight.

“If you don’t take it now,” raved the metal man, “we’ll come back for you tomorrow night. And the night after that. And the night after that. And that will be your life, Jim Sturges, until you do what we say.”

It was an excellent threat. I teetered between the options. There was no more stone or concrete or mud that I could see, just a writhing mass of grotesque bodies that devoured the world like a plague.

The man of metal ran out of patience. He withdrew both swords in a way that communicated some sort of signal. ARRRGH!!! charged, a great paw falling at me like a bulldozer shovel, and Blinky sailed in as well, tentacles reaching, eye stems tightening into a single, tortured braid. I felt stiff fur and the powerful suckers of an octopus, but I was already diving for the sunlight, watching my hands turn white as they entered its beam, and then going blind when the ray hit me dead on. My skin hurt, my sinuses filled with the smell of cinder, the back of my throat clotted with the taste of my own fear, and then I was on my back with all of my bones aching as if they had been bent to the breaking point. My head was on a soft, sweaty pillow.

Dad paused by the crack in my bedroom door. He was wearing his weekend mowing gear and was fussing with the button on his left sleeve.

“Morning, son,” he said.

He moved along down the hallway.

Something dropped to the mattress beside me. I held in a scream.

It was the medallion.

I spent less than twenty minutes at home before I left, and every one of them was upsetting. I stashed the medallion beneath my pillow to get it out of my sight, and a few seconds later, the sweat on my body began to cool as I convinced myself that it had all been a nightmare brought on by a monumentally crappy day. Relieved, I threw aside my covers only to find legs crusted with dry sewage and feet blackened with mud.