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At a minimum, I had an hour before the Dobies woke, remembered what had happened to them, sniffed one another’s butts to confireance, and caone with the seventeen children If I were still here an hour fros would be the least of my concerns, because I’d be either imprisoned or dead

Twenty-five

I NO LONGER HELD THE RHINESTONE COWBOY’S IMAGE in ht hi hi drawn to him, as when I had been in the Ford Explorer and he had run ht of the Payton kids--Jessie, Jasmine, Jordan--and hoped that I would be drawn to them sooner than later Wherever the Paytons were, the other kids would likely be there, too Right now, I couldn’t feel thee talent is reliable but not 100 percent so, any ic Johnson, at his peak, could lay the ball in the basket every time he tried More often than not, yes, and soly close But no iven, we can never apply theiven to error

The stable door was held shut by a hinged steel strap and a swivel bolt I turned the bolt and, loath to e

I doubted that the children were kept in this building If they were here, a guard would be stationed outside But I had to check

The door creaked slightly as it opened, and I slipped inside, leaving it ajar behind me The darkness s of the s on the stretchy tube that secured it to my utility belt It came out as easily as a sword from a sheath, and the on-off button, recessed in the handle, brought forth a blade of soft white light, around which I cupped ht not fall directly on the s and be too visible outside

Although this was a stable, with stalls to either side of the central aisle, no animals had been housed here in years The only evidence that the place had ever accommodated horses were the few horseshoe prints embedded like fossils in the once impressional but now hard dry floor of co wads of pale straw, like spiny sea creatures from a distant era when these , and the only livestock were the spiders that hung in still expectancy or crawled their silken architectures

I walked the length of the aisle Although there see for me here, intuition told me that the appearance of the place was not the entire reality of it

At the end of the building were two rooht have been a tack room The other contained e of interest

I had never been here before, but so about the stable see, convinced that if I cockedessential tothe cupped light directed down, I returned along the aisle As I was about to push open the painted plank door by which I had entered, I realized that the dirt floor had undergone a metamorphosis It appeared to be concrete now

Overhead, chain-hung laht, and I saw that the board walls were also concretelike now, that same too-pristine s in Elsewhere When I put a hand to the wall, it felt sht about the rustic walls that had been here a h texture of the lumber and the uneven joints between boards, as if ed and somehow accessible just below the surface of this stable in Elsewhere

Turning, switching off the flashlight, I found that the stalls and the two roo now just one long, wide space A series of breakfronts froh stored here by an antiques dealer No bristling wads of straw, no dust, no spiders or their webs At the here they weren’t blocked by the display cabinets, the night beyond see black in which I had struggled with the Other Odd on the roof of that industrial building

They used Elsewhere to hide things where the best detectives and the ent searchers could never find them, and to meet others of their kind to discuss their dark business where no one in this world could hear them

Because of my paranormal abilities, when I entered these way stations, I perceived the other world that, at these specific points only, was connected to mine But if I had entered with a friend, he would have seen only the dust--unused stable, and when I moved into Elsewhere, I would have become invisible and inaudible to him

Shower 5 and the base near Los Angeles, and this place did not phase randoht ht be the case I could neither be kept out of Elsewhere nor be trapped in it These places existed in both worlds at all times Unconsciously I had opened this other real

And ere they hiding here other than antique furniture?

The laht pooling on the gray floor between swaths of shadow Against the long walls, the polishedbreakfronts gli, the cabinets contained behind their wood-fra was on display in them, yet even as dread seemed to shrink my heart within my chest, I felt compelled to take a closer look

I chose the array of cabinets on the left The first tere eht revealed that the shelves and back walls were upholstered in dark-blue velvet, the better to present select pieces of the finest china--Lies, Dresden, Minton, Royal Doulton, Pickard--as if they orks of art