SANDMAN SLIM

"I should be there already." I pull a wad of bills out of my pocket and hand them to Allegra. "There should be around a thousand dollars there. The rest of Muninn's money is in an envelope under all the junk upstairs at Max Overdrive. If I don't come back, it's yours. If I do come back, I'll need some of it back. The place needs a little fixing up."

Their heart rates and breathing are all over the place. The stress is going to kill them quicker than Mason or the Kissi. They both want to say something. I make sure I have my knife and step through a shadow before either of them can get out a word.

THE THIRTEENTH DOOR looks older and more battered than the others. If the other doors are portals to different planes and places in the universe, the thirteenth is the entrance to a prison. Strange sounds leak through it. Growls. Vibrations. A faint stink of vinegar. What could be the wind or voices whispering. A slow but relentless scratching, like something is trying to dig its way out.

I throw the bolt and open the Door of Nothing.

The name is pretty damned apt. Some of the other doors, I still can't figure out. What does the Door of Abandoned Melancholy mean? Not much. But the Door of Nothing is right on the money.

There's nothing beyond on the door. Not darkness. Not emptiness. Nothing. It's the total and absolute absence of everything. Especially light. I step inside and pull the door closed. Immediately I hear sounds all around me. Scurrying, secret sounds. Bugs under dry leaves. Something wet pulling itself through mud. Hungry things, chewing their claws and grinding their teeth. Things touch me in the nothing. They crawl on me and try to work their way under my clothes. I can't move. I don't know where to go. Then I remember the thing Mason left for me because he knew that sooner or later, I'd be standing here. I take out the lighter.

Let there be light.

The Zippo flares, looking like an oil-well fire in all that lightless empty space. A billion soft, pale, half-formed anti-angels limp back into the dark. Their big blank eyes glitter like black chrome. The Kissi are crowded into every inch of their chaotic nonspace. They live piled on top of each other, like dead and dying angels. The piles of bodies look like pictures of Auschwitz. This is what Heaven must have looked like after Lucifer's war.

When I start walking, the wall of Kissi bodies parts like the Red Sea, then closes in behind me.

I'm moving just to move. Standing still feels like asking for trouble. But every direction looks exactly the same to me. I can't tell if I'm walking on something solid or just the idea of something. One minute, it feels like I'm on hard-packed dirt, then the next, I'm sinking into sponge cake. I don't stop or slow down. I keep walking, like I know exactly where I'm going.

A Kissi puts its glowing hand on my arm. I look at it like I talk to zombie angels every day. Its face is half-baked dough. I can't quite bring it into focus.

"I told you we'd meet again."

The Kissi's face rearranges itself for a second. Turns into Josef's Aryan poster-boy mug. "He's waiting for you. Straight ahead. We've all been so looking forward to this."

"Hang around, ugly. When I'm done with Mason, the two of us can get some dim sum before I kill you again."

Josef laughs, turns his sluglike head, and dissolves into the writhing mass of Kissi bodies. They pick up his laugh and it spreads out across the colony, so that in just a few seconds the sound surrounds me. Thunders down on me from a billion throats like a storm. It rattles every molecule in my body. I'm being mugged with sound. I turn and shove the lighter straight into the heart of the closest group of Kissi. They shriek and scatter. Shove the lighter in another group. And another. They still surround me, but they're not laughing anymore. And they keep their distance.

Straight ahead is the Faim family's Beverly Hills mansion, a Tudor playhouse standing in a universe of nothing. I don't bother knocking.

Head straight downstairs to the basement. Mason's magic room. The room where he sent me to Hell and where I found the lighter.

I open the door at the bottom of the stairs and, like that, it's eleven years ago.

The room is exactly the way I remember it. Even the circle drawn on the floor in lead is the same. I never figured Mason for the nostalgic type.

"I know you're not going to believe me, but it's really good to see you, Jimmy."

Mason sounds exactly the same. He looks the same, too. I can't tell if he's keeping himself young with magic or if time works differently here.

"When you've spent as many years as I have with no one to talk to but Parker or the Kissi, it's a real thrill to run into someone with some brains. Who isn't here to kiss my ass or be my Renfield."

"That's funny. I always thought you and Parker were best buds. Not Vlad and Renfield."