Molly was too focused on her own problems. Realizing that I wasn’t going to help her, she spun around on one shoe in a ballerina point—up on the toe and everything—and then lurched out of the foyer and into the living room.

  Wait!

  Maybe I could outrun the light! I had never tried that before. I followed Molly into the living room. Purple light was streaming from the TV screen and from the open mouth of the mounted bull. It was looking at us with those black, beady eyes but it was no longer just a mount.

  The bull started waving its head around and bellowing. Purple light shimmered out from its nostrils. The sound echoed through the room like thunder. I was so dizzy that I couldn’t keep on my feet. The wrinkled red carpet that had been thrown out to welcome me in tripped me.

  I hit the ground, hard. My limbs were too heavy. I couldn’t get them to push me back up.

  “Molly,” I sobbed. “Molly, I don’t want to go yet! I don’t want to leave! Please, Molly! Help!”

  But she was nowhere to be seen, and there was nothing that could help stop me from being ripped from the story before my time, and yanked awake in the middle of the night.

  I was in my room.

  Like, my real room back at my grandparents’ house. I threw the blanket off of my legs and tried to throw myself out of the bed, only for my legs to give out on me. For the second time that night, I found myself on the ground.

  There was no mouse. No Molly. No concerned old person coming to check on me. The door to my closet was sitting wide open, and the dolls were all inside. The new ones, the three that I had killed before finding Dream Trevor, they were all sitting in a neat little row at the very front.

  One of them had his mouth open.

  Another, a fake can of beer in his hand.

  I took a moment to catch my breath, wide-eyed. That was way before I was supposed to leave the dream world. The moon wasn’t even full. I didn’t get done with half of what I wanted to do. My mind was reeling.

  Nothing like that had ever happened before, and I couldn’t understand why it had happened at all.

  Carefully, I got up off of the floor, testing out the weight of each step. I found myself hesitantly moving across the floor. First, I closed the door to the closet—though not without kicking over the dolls that were lined up at the front.

  Again, no one came to check on the noise. My grandparents were seriously peeved at me over that suspension, and I guess probably over a lot of other things too. It wasn’t my fault, though. And it kind of felt like they should be coming out here to check on me even though they were angry.

  My mood just kept getting more and more sour.

  Alright, fine. If they weren’t going to check on me, and since there weren’t any answers up here, in the bedroom, then I should go check on Molly… So out of the bedroom I went, and into the hallway. It really was just the same night; no time had passed.

  It never did, not really.

  I would spend a month in the other world, and then come back here and only a few hours would have passed. So, I wasn’t surprised that only a few minutes had passed this time around and the moon was still high in the sky, visible through all the downstairs windows.

  I gave a heavy sigh. This sucked. Going into the other world was the only thing worth sticking around for. The rest of my life was just work, and upsets, and school, and jerks being, well, jerks. At least in the other world, I got to get some of my frustrations out in a way that didn’t hurt anyone.

  Plus, it felt better than getting into fights here. I didn’t want my knuckles all bruised up, and I didn’t want to spend another week here, stuck in this stuffy house with just my grandparents for company.

  There was no purple light coming out of the basement. I stepped into it, pulled the cord, and made my way carefully down the creaky stairs. At the bottom of them, I was met with… A whole lot of dust, dolls, and nothing else.

  It was just the basement. There was no magic purple light. Nothing even seemed out of place. And when I went over to the crib, Molly looked just the same as she always did. Her hair, perfect. Her eyes, stuck somewhere between green and blue and gray, and her ballerina tutu covered in glitter.

  I reached out, pressing the tip of my finger to her painted-on lips. “What happened to you, Molly?”

  The doll didn’t answer.

  “You looked so scared. But you’re fine here.” I picked up the doll, though didn’t bother being that gentle with her. My hands settled under her arms, and I held her close to my face. Our noses almost bumped against each other.

  She said nothing. Her eyes were painted on. They weren’t bright, the way that they got in the other world.

  I frowned. “You know, you aren’t actually all that helpful. You keep telling me that you know a bunch of stuff, but then you never actually get around to sharing it with me. And you were too scared to even come outside with me! What’s so scary about going out there, huh? Harry went out there! I bet Tabitha did, too.”

  Well, okay. I didn’t know about Tabitha. She had just… Vanished after my first trip into the world of the dolls. But there were new pictures up in the foyer, so she must have still been hanging around somewhere!

  Still, nothing.

  “The other dolls move around,” I told her. “Why don’t you?”

  Again, nothing.

  I made a frustrated sound and dropped her into the crib. She landed on her side, hair strewn out. I turned and made it all the way to the stairs before I remembered the ‘talk’ that Gramps had given me about the dolls.

  And they hadn’t even been Grandma’s dolls!

  This one was special to her. I would probably be in a load of trouble if they realized I had been down here tossing Molly about. With a roll of my eyes, I turned around and made my way back to the crib. Still no light.

  She was frowning.

  “Yeah, well this isn’t fun for me either,” I told her, setting Molly back up into the position she had originally been in. “You can’t even tell me what’s going on. How am I supposed to figure this out on my own, huh?”

  No answer.

  “You know, you’re just about useless.” I finished sitting her up and stamped back through the basement, up the stairs, and into the dining room. My stomach growled. A quick trip into the kitchen later and I had a peanut butter and honey sandwich in hand—and yes, I did check to make sure that it really was honey and not the weird bleach gloop from the other world.

  Then I headed back toward my bedroom… But before I got there, I spotted a door that was sitting slightly ajar.

  It was the library.

  I had only been in here once, during the first week of my stay. It just hadn’t interested me much. I liked looking at things that were a visual medium. Reading just wasn’t my favorite thing. But with the door open, and no way to get back into the dream world… I mean, what else did I have going on?

  I flicked on the light for the library. It flooded the room with a dusty glow. There were two comfortable-looking reading chairs pushed into one corner of the room, each one sporting, surprise surprise, a big raggedy-looking plush doll. The chair between them had a lace doily that was yellowing with age, a big pillar lamp, and several small glass pigs sitting on it.

  The walls were lined with shelves. Each one had been crammed with books. Thick ones, thin ones, red and brown and even blue bindings. Some were clearly leather, some didn’t have anything written on their spines, and some of them were part of long, shelf-wide sets.

  Most of them were covered in dust, too.

  At the far side of the room, there was a big reading desk. It had a chair at it too, but no doll sitting there. Instead, two porcelain dolls sat on either side of a large stack of books, as though the dolls were guarding them.

  One doll was dressed up like a little boy pirate. The other doll, a princess in a pink dress. There was a lamp, but it was old and brass, and I kind of felt like it would be an electrical hazard to turn on. There was also a small white pillar candle and a matchbook, both of which were clearly used often.

  I struck the match, taking a moment to watch the flame. I should have been scared of it. That’s what killed my dad, right? That’s what killed Dream Trevor. But… I found that there wasn’t any fear.

  I lit the wick, put out the match, and tossed the spent piece of wood into the little trash bin under the desk.

  Then I planted both hands on my hips, took a moment to look over the shelves, and set off to try and find something interesting.

  For the most part, I spend my days cooped up in my own bedroom. I’ve always got the tablet out, trying to add more into the world. And I was going to do that this week, too! Just… Later. After I figured out exactly what had happened with Molly.

  For now, I was mostly content with, you know, looking around the house. I… I hadn’t really done that before.

  There were plenty of books in the room on writing and storytelling, which I thought was a little bit strange. But hey, maybe someone else in the family liked to create things, too? My dad—he didn’t talk about family too much, and my mom… I just had never met anyone on her side. I was pretty sure they didn’t get along.

  Like, at all.

  That’s why I ended up coming out here, you know?

  So, book after book, I pulled from the shelf. I flipped through them, cleaning the dust away from the covers with my hands, never reading one all the way through to the end but thumbing through them. Looking at this line, that one, so engrossed that I didn’t hear the footsteps approaching the library until it was too late.

  “Quinn?”

  I yelped, jumped, and dropped the book. It hit the library floor with a heavy-sounding thud. “You scared me!”

  “Sorry,” said Gramps, though he didn’t really sound sorry at all. “You know, I thought I heard something in here. Thought it might have been the mice.”

  I picked the book up. “Grandma says there aren’t any mice.”

  “We both know there are mice,” said Gramps, with this strange heaviness to his words. He walked over to join me, and held out one hand.

  I gave him the book. “Am I in trouble”

  “Should you be?” Gramps countered.

  I paused, then shrugged. “I don't think so. But I’m in trouble a lot lately, so....”

  “Gee,” said Gramps, sounding a touch amused. “I wonder what you might have been in trouble for. Wonder who’s thoughts and actions might have caused that.”

  I frowned at him.

  He laughed, and reached out to ruffle my curls. “You look just like my Annie when you make that face.”

  Ugh. That was not a compliment… but I knew what he meant, too. Grandma had this look she got, where her lips puckered up like she had just taken a bite out of a sour lemon wedge. Note to self, try not to make that face anymore. I did not want to be compared to Grandma again.

  That was like, the ultimate insult.

  After ruffling my curls, he bent down and picked up the book I had dropped. We haven’t bonded much—even less than me and my grandmother had. That one trip out to the hardware store and the two times that he came in to fuss at me, you know, that sums up most of our non-dinner interactions.

  My own fault, probably. I just didn’t much feel like being around people these days. At least, not the people in this world that I had to actually behave around. Sometimes, it was so hard to not just grab up a pencil, swivel around in my school desk, and slam it down into the back of May’s stupid hand.

  “Stories of Stories, eh?” Gramps said, reciting the title. “You know, I would ask what you were doing up, but I couldn’t sleep either.”

  “Do you come in here to read a lot when you can’t sleep?”

  “Oh, sure. Often enough. Books—they run in my family, don’t you know?”

  I didn’t know. I told him, “I just started taking a creative-writing class at school.”

  “Did you now?” Gramps said, sounding genuinely interested. He led the way over to the writing desk and set the book down. “I see you found my matches.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No sorries. You know how to use them without burning yourself, right?” Even though I nodded, Gramps still whipped a match out, struck it, and then pinched the flame between two spit-slick fingers.

  Gross.

  He tossed it in the bin. “What sort of stories were you looking for, Quinn? We have a bit of everything. Your aunt—she loved her dolls, and so does your grandma, but it’s always been books for me.”

  “I was looking mostly at the books about writing other stories,” I admitted.

  “Fair enough,” said Gramps. “You know, if you want a real book to read, I’ve got one around here that my grandpappy used to read to me. It was a doozy. I think it was a doozy.”

  “What was it about?” I resisted the urge to point out how old that story must have been, but only barely.

  “Lord above.” Gramps’ voice rose a few octaves. “Hell if I remember.”

  I snickered, watching as he moved to one of the nearby shelves and started to search for this mystery bedtime book.

  “Grandpappy—he said that he wrote it himself, penned it down on paper, stapled it together, sent it out to the presses. Presses didn’t pick up on it, though, so he just bound up a few copies himself. Passed them around to the people he knew.”

  “And read it to you?”

  “And read it to me.”

  I paused. “Were you two close?”

  Gramps hummed, reaching out and running the tip of one finger along the spines of the books on the shelf. “My daddy—he was… He was a trying man. Liked to split his time between the mines and the bar. Didn’t see too much of him at the house. Mostly it was Ma and Grandpappy and me.”

  I nodded, pulling out the desk chair and sitting down while I watched him look.

  Gramps kept talking, “It’s old, old, old, Quinn. You haven’t been very good at taking care of old things, so you have to promise me—” He pulled an ancient-looking leather-bound book off of the shelf. “You won’t lose this. It’s the only book I’ve got of his, the first one. It’s—it’s a lot.”

  “I promise,” I told him, eagerly shoving my hands out.

  Gramps hesitated. He clearly didn’t trust me. I wondered if he was thinking about the lost key chain, or the broken doll.

  “I promise,” I repeated, more seriously. “I’ll take good care of it.”

  And so Gramps gave me the book, wished me goodnight, and went on his own way, toddling out of the library and leaving me alone once more.

  Grandpappy's Storybook

  Gramps said that his grandfather, Grandpappy, took a book and made some copies. But this isn’t a copied book. It’s got everything handwritten on the pages in neat, dark ink lines. The words curl, bigger on the titles, and each one carefully, meticulously hand numbered at the bottom corners.

  I sat down in the library, because I was already there, and tugged the candle close. There was something sort of thrilling about sitting and reading a super-old book like this—while I was sitting next to a candle.

  It was less thrilling when I started reading the book.

  For one, it wasn’t actually like, a whole story. It was a bunch of smaller stories, inside of the big book. And even more bizarre, I recognized the characters.

  Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Tabitha. She loved to paint. When she painted, she could pretend that the world around her wasn’t actually happening. None of the bad. None of the mundane. And… None of the good, either.

  You see, Tabitha was a girl rather easily frightened, and while she wanted good things to happen, as any properly polite good little girl might, she was also dreadfully afraid of them. Each time a new girl came to the orphanage, she would run away!

  Oh, she would run—and then she would trip, and then she would fall, and then when she stood back up, she would say, “This is exactly why I was so afraid!”

  And Tabitha would go off to hide again.

  When she wasn’t hiding, she was dreaming, and she would paint those dreams. But even her paintings would become filled with her fears. The dog would bite. The tree would fall. The picnic would be ruined by storm clouds.

  Tabitha was always scared. And she was lonely, because she was so scared. She would watch others from the edge of the door, and she would hope they would speak to her…and she would fear that they would speak to her.

  One day, a stranger came to the orphanage in the middle of the night. Tabitha had been up painting. She was the only one awake.

  Instead of running and telling the nun, Tabitha handled the situation the same way she always did. She ran, she fell, and she hid. She hid in a closet, far away from the stranger. She stayed very quiet.

  The man came into the orphanage with a sack and a knife and a match. First, he filled up his sack, and then he stabbed the nun who ran the orphanage. Finally, he struck his match and lit the building on fire as he left.

  The other children smelled the smoke and felt the flames. They got up and they ran outside. They called for Tabitha, but she was so scared that she ignored them. Instead, she tucked her face into her knees and she stayed right there in the closet, hiding.

  The smoke got thicker. The heat got hotter. And soon enough, there was nothing that Tabitha could do.

  She had hidden herself straight to death.

  I swallowed hard as my gaze landed on that final word. My lips pursed. The Tabitha in this book sounded exactly like the Tabitha in my dream world.

  But that was crazy, right? It wasn’t like Tabitha was a weird name. Plenty of people were named Tabitha, especially in Grandpappy's time. Probably.

  I chewed on my lower lip. It was just a coincidence.

  I turned the page, to the next story.

  Clowns, as we all knew, were meant to be funny. They were meant to come out of their cars with horns and pies and brightly colored makeup on their faces. They would make jokes, do the splits, and then leave again. It was a simple job: make children laugh.

  But at the Starry Big Top, there was one clown who just couldn’t ever seem to get his job right.