The kids are looking at me like I've been looking at the woods, ready for me to pull a knife and go Robert Mitchum on them. Ordinarily I'd come up with a heady metaphor; right now I just want this to not be happening.

"Those are Michael, Sadie, and Brent," Gary says, gesturing toward our three little observers. I'm too busy staying upright to process the names.

What has to be Sadie shakes a head full of red curls and backs with terror on her face. I start to move forward before I consider what that might mean to her.

"Sadie, Sadie," Gary coos, rolling himself onto the ramp. "Sadie, it's alright. Give them a little space," he urges, a quick glower my way. "They aren't exactly inclined to trust strangers." He turns back to them, voice louder. "Kids, this is Mr. Chatham. He's a friend. A good man." He taps his own chest at that, thus winning my award for least appropriate parallel.

"Hi," the kids say in discord, Sadie boldest with her chin thrust out and the black boy all but fleeing, mouth an O.

I flex my fingers, fight to keep the upset off my face. "Hi."

"Mr. Chatham just wanted to see what we were up to." He says it bright-eyed, every period a surprise. "You don't mind him visiting, do you?"

The white boy eyes me through floppy black hair, not sure what to make of me. "I guess," he clucks, disgusted.

"Excellent." Gary nods to him. "Thank you." And then he's down the last stretch of the ramp, all but ignoring me.

Two more children come out of hiding, a Hispanic girl with supermodel-wide eyes and another white boy growing what might one day be a ponytail. The kids don't react to Gary the way they do to me; Michael and Brent fall in alongside and behind him, and the other kids all look at him with a smile, that preprogrammed look you give to family friends and teachers. I step down the ramp, too numb to stagger, feeling the psychic goulash of relief and fear slithering down my synapses.

The cellar is capacious, even with five kids squirming through it, and cement from top to bottom; space heaters stacked every ten feet are all that keep the place from being cold. Kids' show posters dot the wall in between the bits of soundproofing, doing very little except remind you how oppressive the rest of it is. There are three sets of bunk beds; a refrigerator with a sign saying 'Rock Candy Mountain' that makes me want to punch Gary in the stomach; and on the far wall, tall and wide as he could get it, is a flatscreen TV, plugged into a DVD player and currently frozen on a shot of two familiar faces tormenting a middle-aged woman.

I come closer to the TV, squint at the image of Sunflower and Walt. The whole scene is bulbous and glossy, a faint outline of a Camcorder black and beady in the foreground; whoever was filming was doing it through a window. The woman is strapped to the table I found Walt on, so at least I can pretend there's such a thing as poetic justice; they've got a knife like the one the muggers used in the trailer park, held up theatric-high above their victim. Walt's mouth is forming some syllable I can't quite determine; Sunflower is just grinning like a predatory bird.

"The sacrifice videos are the worst," Gary mutters at my side. "But the lectures don't seem to stick without them. It's their age." Something deflates in him. "They feed on shock."

My thoughts clack against each other, baseball cards on a bicycle. "Horror movies. You're showing them horror movies."

"Horror movies aren't real," the black boy insists. "This is." He's got that too-fierce attitude, that jeer that tells me he's not sure he's right either.

I cross my arms before another tidal wave rolls through me, and look over at Gary. "Why? What the hell are you hoping to do with these kids?"

For a second there, Gary wants to smile. "The truth." His eyes shine with a child's insistence. He turns to the boy at his side, the one with the black floppy haircut and the stare. "Brent"—that narrows that down—"tell this man what you know."

Brent looks at him, shocked. "About what? About the world?"

Gary nods, provoking even wider eyes. Brent looks at me and lets out the words like someone pulled a cork out of him, a whole-body tingle of relief.

"The monsters are just hiding," he tells me, voice fighting to decide which octave it's in.

I cock an eyebrow. "Monsters."

"And wizards," the boy tells me fervently. "And psychic powers. And ghosts."

"Wizards." I say it like road tar, laying the hate on thick for old Gary. He's not fazed when I look him in the eye.

"It's none of it untrue," Gary counters, defensive before I'm even in the ring. "And you know it."

"Yeah," I say, nodding with a head full of hatred. "Yeah, it is true. Which is why we teach them that after we get them to designated homes."

"And thus spread them out." Gary's lips curl upwards in triumph. "I'm trying something new. Something powerful."

"Shoving kidnap victims in a cellar and playing them videos of wannabe Satanists?" My fire is relighting at speed.

"Not wannabes," Gary corrects, warning me with his eyes. "Not wannabes."

I'm coming to a boil. "If you insist." I cross my arms.

"It's not just videos," the black boy—must be Michael—insists. "The demons have come here, too. Demons like Mr. Milk. They've shown us"—the kid's aura goes grey—"they've shown us the truth..."

A flashbulb bursts behind my eyes. "Shown us" my ass. I have no idea how I stop myself short of strangling Gary, but I do, and there's a part of me wondering why. "You had demons in these kids' heads? You let them root around in there?" Count the fingers: One, two...

Gary's lip twitches, but he's otherwise the portrait of calm. "They had to learn."

"For what?" I swing a hand around the room. "Why would you—what is this worth?"

His grin just won't budge. I wonder how it'd look with a little blood on it. "Far from it. Kids." He swivels toward them. "I'm going to do a demonstration for Mr. Chatham. Would you mind helping?"

Everyone's mental dice roll, coming up fear, awe, suspicion. The two kids who hid from me look like Gary just suggested they fart on a church altar, but Michael is already stepping forward with a grin.

"Whatcha need, sir?"

Sir. Welcome to Stockholm. Gary puts his hands on the boy's shoulders, tender but firm.

"Good, Michael. Good. That's exactly what we're hoping to teach here." We? He squeezes the boy's shoulders for encouragement. "Go pick something, anything, whatever you want. Just make sure it isn't too heavy."

The boy lights up; he's out of Gary's grasp in a second, scuttling through the detritus by his bed. Gary watches him, every inch the proud proxy-father, and turns to me with earnest in his expression.

"Where we are today—we as in psychics, we as in all the supernatural beings of this world—well," a self-effacing grin, "these worlds—is because of what the world doesn't believe."

I feel a rhythm forming in his words, a weird dance of emphasis and gesture that I'd expect to see on the other end of a camera. There's no brimstone here, no psychosis, but I can still see this man standing on the business end of a dozen pews with faith pouring out onto him. All I can do is try to concentrate.

"The second Inquisition was worse than the first Inquisition ever was: the first one drove us underground, but the second one destroyed us. When they failed to find us it ripped the faith right out of the world, right? Faith in God, in witches, in monsters...it cancelled Halloween, it closed churches, and it left us: you, me, the demons"—there's a hitch as he makes himself say that—"all the magical and the wonderful and the weird, it left every one of us in a desert. Just a trickle of belief to support us, enough to keep us around but not enough to do anything. Not enough—"

"—to work magic."

There's that fervor in his eyes again, the flip-side of the hate he's shown every other time this has come up. He wags a finger at me, pleased at my powers of perception, and turns as Michael comes jogging back up with a crucifix.

"Hum," Gary says, turning it over. "This isn't the one hung from your bed, is it?"

Michael shakes his head, and gets a pat on the shoulder for his trouble. Gary takes the crucifix with bona fide reverence.

"Ironic, huh?" He grins, chuckles squirming through his teeth. "Here's the deal, Mr. Chatham. Here's the deal." The crucifix jiggles in his grasp. "These kids...they're being raised right. Raised to believe. And they"—he swirls a hand out to compass all five of them—"will live with me, here, inside this house. I'll protect them from the darkness."

He holds the crucifix high, swings it over to a little table in the center of the room.

"And in exchange..." He drops it with a flourish. "They will give me belief."

The kids were mixed a second ago, either confused, or angry, or scared. But now they're unified, all looking at the same silver trinket and letting the same wet, painful light shine in their eyes.

Gary clutches his fists tight, bites at his lip. His face goes red and blotchy, strained like he's passing a boulder.

The room changes, just enough that I'm trying to deny it's changed. There's nothing visible—kids in their places, fascist Romper Room still bright-colored and sterile—but it's different in here: colder, darker, a place full of shadows and a place where you expect something to peer back out of them.

Gary reaches out a hand, and claws at the air, curling fingers beckoning to the crucifix.

"No way." I'm too out of breath to be snide.

"Magic," one of the kids whimpers.

Gary bares his teeth, shudders with the effort.

On the table, there's a jingle of metal, and the strings holding me up disappear. I feel the ground club my tailbone, a cold sting in a body gone shrieking and snowy. I shiver under whorls of joy.

I think it might have moved.

"You see?" Gary says, after six or seven years. He's looking down like I'm one of his kids, hands folded on that Santa Claus belly and a fizzy glow behind the mess of beard. "You see why this is worth it?"

I pull a knee up to my chest. I think I'm trying to stand up. All I can look at is that little plastic table.

"You can't..." My whole body sways as I breathe in and out. "There's no way you..."

"What?" Gary feigns concern. "This?" He holds up the crucifix, a little star under the light. When he chuckles you know it's because he likes you.

"The kids..." I'm twenty again, I'm scribbling in a notebook, trying to make sense of a page from Foucault. "The kids' belief...they're a little microcosm..."

"In their own world. More or less literally." There's sadness now, morose ridges above his eyes. "I don't like it any more than you do, Randall. But the world is wounded. We have to start somewhere."

I'd love to say that statement takes me places. I'd love to say it makes me think about riding unicorns, or sailing with ghost pirates, or riding a robot fucking centaur down a street full of flying cars while I throw lightning at the goblins in the gutters. But all that statement takes me to is the weight that just spread long, emaciated black hands all along my shoulder blades.

I look at the kids, look down again. My eyes are starting to burn. Gary's wheelchair creaks as he moves closer, leaning in like I'm one of his co-conspirators. I really want that to be a compliment.

"I told you for a reason, Randall."

I get the poker face on, eyebrows high and mouth disdainful. "You think I have a taste for Kool-Aid?"

He smiles just for me. "I think you're in our world for the right reasons." The sadness comes back, and brings its cousin empathy. "You believed once. I can see it. I'm betting whoever got you into this did it on some kind of Lewis Carroll-J.R.R. Tolkien kick, right? Seeing the hidden world or something?"

Somewhere in the interrogation rooms of my mind, I'm remembering every time I ever cried. But for Gary all I've got is a long, cold stare.

It's not cold enough. He grins, shakes his head at the poor kid with the insistent tough-guyism. He's got the nutcracker firmly over my skull; all that's left is deciding when to close it.

"You're kidnapping kids." That's it, Randy; keep on thrashing. "You're risking federal attention." I swing back and forth between looking at him and the children. "If the demons in charge find out they'll—"

"—they'll finance my whole operation." He scoffs. "Think about it, Randall. Whatever's pulling our strings is already on the level of the Illuminati. We cover up kidnappings all the time already." He's chuckling at me. "Kidnappings, murders, gang violence, underground clubs and boxing matches...the whole fucked-up enchilada, and we do it for, what?" He shrugs. "Maintaining the status quo?" His face gets a shade darker. "Imagine the effort they'd put out to get the height of our power back. Why would they fight that?"

Breathing hurts; my brain's a block of cement. "There's some reason." My nostrils flare. "There's some reason or they'd already be doing it—"

"Because demons lack creativity," he parries. "Because they're just mouths, jungle cats looking for their next meal. We could offer to make their hunter-gatherer life civilized. We could bring ourselves back out of the jungle. I'm offering you an opportunity, Randall." He smiles softly, understanding my reluctance. He extends the hand, makes the metaphor nice and literal. "I'm saying you don't have to do a whole lot in order to help me get this world back on track."

I water up at that one, look away blinking; like that's going to fool a psychic in a brightly-lit room. My chest feels like there's a cat clawing at it, and I'm not so much tired as I am made of exhaustion; the room is sinking around me and the worst thing in the entire world is that I'm awake. I look at the kids, all at once happy and terrified, heads full of stories that aren't so much wrong as expired; and when they look back, I have to bow my head and very closely examine my hands.

"Bullshit."

I think I said that. I look at Gary, his face looking like someone just rubbed a lemon in it, and my brain catches up to my tongue.

"Bullshit."

Gary cocks his head to one side, thinks real hard about what I'm saying.

"Excuse me?"

My finger thrusts out toward the exit. "Don't even try it. Don't. I know what all you've been doing out there, Gary; you think I'm stupid?"

"What we all want and are all too afraid to try."

"Still bullshit!" It's a lot redder in here all of a sudden. "A peacekeeper was kidnapped, Gary, and forced to terrorize these kids. Kids who were taken from their families—"

"Kids who were going to be taken anyway—"

"And people are dead!"

The argument stops cold. You could park a semi in Gary's mouth.

"What?" he blurts, with that feral grin just before an explosion.

My thoughts are all lava and spider legs, too jittery to control. "Walt." I slash my hand toward the television. "For one. And you tried to put me and mine down for the count with Sunflower. And then there's Milk shooting at us, and Anna Doring, and oh, the small matter of a police officer who was promised a peacekeeping position in exchange for—"

"What?"

I stop. I look into his eyes. The man is staring at me with the open frown of the totally lost, eyes rolling all over my face as he tries to figure out what I'm saying; and all I'm listening to is the wind tunnel that's opened up behind my thoughts as the final pieces click into place.

Gary didn't know.