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breath, he was after all silent.
    Peter came whipping back in a shower of brightness that lit up the fog around him like diamonds. “Cravens! The house is deserted!”
    “Excellent.” Holmes picked up his carpetbag. “Krähnacht is presumably still back in Yorkshire, in whatever place he breached through to the Nightmare Castle when he ambushed our young Viscount upon his emergence from the Neverlands. Whatever that entrance is — almost certainly close by the stone-circle — the Fairies’ Dance — where you first met Bobbie Lewensham, Peter — it will be heavily guarded. But Krähnacht has been in and out of the Neverlands before.”
    “The Wizard Nightcrow!” I cried excitedly. And when Peter looked blank, I said, “Krähnacht is German for…”
    “I knew that,” said Peter loftily. “I’d just forgot.”
    Holmes gave me the lantern to carry (of course Peter sees like a cat in the dark), and, when we drew near the house, the carpetbag as well. “It’s very heavy,” he warned, uncoiling from it a good twenty-five feet of insulated wire, at the end of which was rigged what I recognized as a crude electromagnetic coil. “But whoever doesn’t carry it has to get near them, and I’d rather that were me.”
    “Get near who?” I asked, hoisting the unwieldy burden and staggering under its weight.
    “The Black Knights,” Holmes said, “of course.”
    Ten Stars — who was tremendously helpful and obliging (unlike some other fairies I could name) — lit on the corner of the bag like a butterfly, and smeared it with fairy-dust, which made carrying it much easier, although it did develop a tendency to want to travel in its own direction and had to be pulled fairly firmly. Still, that was better than carrying fifteen or twenty pounds of electrical batteries all by myself.
    Jakob Krähnacht had his laboratories on the ground floor, strange rooms filled with crystals and mirrors, and a workshop with a small forge. There was a conservatory creeping with foul-smelling plants, and all the carpets and wallpaper stank of smoke and worse things. Much worse things. Ten Stars refused to go in, when Holmes picked the lock on the side door, but Peter walked just ahead of Holmes in the darkness, calling out softly, “Bobbie? Bobbie, it’s Peter…”
    The darkness thickened, and thickened, until the rays of the lamp couldn’t pierce it, as if a hand of invisibility were slowly closing around the light-source, crushing the glow back in. Peter’s voice ahead of us suddenly sounded a vast distance away, dimming down a long corridor. “Bobbie? We’re here to save you—”
    Holmes stopped. What little light remained showed me a wall ahead of us, dark and seemingly soot-stained. Holmes put out his hand to touch it, yet I could hear Peter on the far side of it, his voice fading, “Bobbie—”
    I said, “We can go through. We only think it’s there.” I’d encountered such walls in the Neverlands. Evil Wizards use them all the time. “Close your eyes—”
    I set the carpetbag down — and it settled with a metallic rattle to the floor — and closing my eyes, walked forward, hands outstretched.
    After perhaps a dozen steps, I could hear the sound of the breakers, far off on Neverland’s shores.
    I turned around, and Holmes was gone.
    I was in the blackness of a dungeon, cold rock under my feet. By the taste of the air, the smell of horror and damp, I knew I was in the Nightmare Realm somewhere, and I knew there was evil close-by. Peter darted up beside me, his face grim in the tiny glow shed by Ten Stars — goodness knows where she’d come from — and his knife in his hand. “Did they get him?” he whispered. “The Black Knights. They’re everywhere…”
    I shook my head, grieving and very frightened, at least in part because I suspected that Peter did not hold the power here in these realms that he had in the kindlier skerries of dreams. “He can’t come through,” I whispered. “He doesn’t