The moon went behind another cloud, and Jake thought it best to stay where he was until it came back out. When it did, what he saw filled him with the same sort of dismay he’d felt in his dream, following Mia through that deserted castle. For a moment he clutched at the possibility that this was a dream, that he’d simply gone from one to another, but the feel of the pebbles biting into his feet and the sound of Oy panting in his ear were completely undreamlike. This was happening, all right.

Mr. Slightman wasn’t coming up toward where the boys had pitched their tent, and he wasn’t heading back toward the Rocking B, either (although Andy was, in long strides along the bank). No, Benny’s father was wading across the river. He was heading dead east.

He could have a reason for going over there. He could have a perfectly good reason.

Really? What might that perfectly good reason be? It wasn’t the Calla anymore over there, Jake knew that much. Over there was nothing but waste ground and desert, a buffer between the borderlands and the kingdom of the dead that was Thunderclap.

First something wrong with Susannah—his friend Susannah. Now, it seemed, something wrong with the father of his new friend. Jake realized he had begun to gnaw at his nails, a habit he’d picked up in his final weeks at Piper School, and made himself stop.

“This isn’t fair, you know,” he said to Oy. “This isn’t fair at all.”

Oy licked his ear. Jake turned, put his arms around the bumbler, and pressed his face against his friend’s lush coat. The bumbler stood patiently, allowing this. After a little while, Jake pulled himself back up to the more level ground where Oy stood. He felt a little better, a little comforted.

The moon went behind another cloud and the world darkened. Jake stood where he was. Oy whined softly. “Just a minute,” Jake murmured.

The moon came out again. Jake looked hard at the place where Andy and Ben Slightman had palavered, marking it in his memory. There was a large round rock with a shiny surface. A dead log had washed up against it. Jake was pretty sure he could find this spot again, even if Benny’s tent was gone.

Are you going to tell Roland?

“I don’t know,” he muttered.

“Know,” Oy said from beside his ankle, making Jake jump a little. Or was it no ? Was that what the bumbler had actually said?

Are you crazy?

He wasn’t. There was a time when he’d thought he was crazy—crazy or going there in one hell of a hurry—but he didn’t think that anymore. And sometimes Oy did read his mind, he knew it.