3: Into the Valley of No Death

Floating around in the Between is usually highly relaxing: It’s a very calm place, being outside all Planes and therefore outside all emotional states, and since very few people seem to know about it, and it’s such a huge place, you practically never have to worry about meeting anything while you’re there.

So I was quite surprised when I saw someone there while I was trying to locate which sphere contained the Astral Beacon I had placed the previous night. For some reason, I had been unable to simply will myself to the beacon, and so had come to the Between in an effort to find my way to it. And whilst I was wandering, I saw a human figure flying around.

Since there was no particular urgency to my quest, I went bouncing across the spheres to see who it was: I had only met a very few others in the Between, so I was curious to know who else had found it.

In the event, they found me first: As I flew from sphere to sphere, a dark figure suddenly leapt out from behind a nearby globe and slammed right into me. Didn’t hurt, astral bodies being sturdy things, but it did disorient me slightly. As I span to face them, I conjured up spheres of light around my hands, in case they might be useful.

To my surprise, it was a vampire.

An awful lot of fiction has grown up around vampires in recent years. The name has become all but meaningless, with so many different meanings given to the same word. But the true vampires are descended from a very powerful prehistoric archetype. They are manifestations of early man’s fear of the night.

Think of how you would feel if you were on your own, in the middle of the night, walking through some dark, unfamiliar woods. You’re lost, alone, and carrying no lights, weapons, or anything else. You feel afraid... there are things out there... things with fangs and claws, things that can see you without you being able to see them, things that are dreadful beyond your imagining.

Imagine that feeling made flesh, and you have a vampire.

Most vampires you meet these days are human avatars: Normal humans who, for whatever reason, have allowed the vampire spirit to enter their own souls, giving them some of its power, but corrupting them as well. It’s one of those "easy paths" to power that sensible people avoid. You get abilities without the study, the understanding, or the discipline that people who harness their own power posses.

So I don't usually want to hang with them. And this one's immediate attack had done little to change my mind. Light flew from my hands to ward off his next pass, and sent him reeling into one of the spheres that fill the Between, which he bounced off. His head snapped up, and he fixed his glaring eyes on me and snarled.

Silly me. I should have just left, but had remained, and now he was using his hypnotic power to make sure I didn’t leave. His will manifested itself as an invisible barrier I could not pass through. Rather than put a lot of effort into trying to break through it, I decided to try talking my way out first.

"Uhh... Is there any reason for this?"

"It’s been a long night. I need a snack" he grinned.

"I taste bad. Why don’t you go look for easier prey?"

A quite impressive sneer followed that remark. "You’re human. You’re easy."

Oh dear... he was a typical vampire then.

One of the main problems I have with vampires is their belief in their own superiority. They seem to think that their slavish obedience to their hunger and inability to walk in the daylight makes them somehow superior.

Okay, there’s more to it than that. But they DO always seem to overlook their glaring weaknesses. And nothing annoys me more than an ignorant idiot who claims he’s superior to me simply because he thinks he proved himself better than somebody else. Vampires always get on my nerves. And his introduction had done nothing to placate me.

"Interesting position you’ve got there. I hate to break it to you, but you leeches aren’t actually any better or stronger than humans."

Vampires always seem to have superiority complexes. He yelled in fury "You’re nothing but cattle to us. You are NOTHING!!"

"Have you ever seen what happens to a human caught in a cattle stampede?" was the answer I couldn’t resist giving. Obviously he didn’t appreciate the joke, because he leapt at me, and I was still caught in his immobilising will-made-solid.

Still, just because I couldn’t move didn’t mean I couldn’t do anything. A beam of white light leapt from my brow, pushing him back. Taken by surprise, he was knocked away, but then started back towards me, pushing closer and closer, until he was only a foot or so away, and unable to move closer.

Each held immobile by the other, I pondered what to do. I knew what I was tempted to do, but it was something I was philosophically opposed to. But he was really irritating me, so I thought "What the Hell."

The beam weakened, and he leapt at me. His fangs closed on my neck, and I felt my vital energy being drawn out of me.

I know a lot of people think that vamps only need blood, but it’s really the life energy within it that they need. Vampires are ‘undead’, which means they are unable to produce their own life force. Therefore they steal it from others. Blood just happens to be a good source of it.

Feeling dreadfully weakened, it was all I could do to keep myself Projected. He laughed and sneered "Like I said. Weak."

Weakly, I muttered back "And like I said, I taste bad."

A puzzled look came over his face, along with a slight greenish tinge. "Wha..?"

I smiled. "You know the saying, ‘your life is what you make it’? Well, that’s MY life sitting in your stomach. And I choose to make it hurt." And suddenly, he doubled over, clutching at his stomach.

"What have you done to me?" he gasped.

"That’s my life force sitting in your stomach, vampy. MY life, not yours, so it’s under my control. Didn’t you ever read Dracula?" Mina Harker, you may remember, was able to tell them a lot about Dracula’s whereabouts by being hypnotised, because she had swapped blood with him.

He just groaned in reply, and his body started to shudder. His face twisted up, and he became the first person I have ever seen who threw up while out-of-body. My energy had been acting like a poison within him, and he had had to eject it. As soon as it was free, it swirled into a luminous cloud, and I called it back to myself. As soon as it re-entered me, my weakness vanished.

The vampire, however, was still looking very unhappy, gasping and moaning. I decided to be kind, and visualised a doorway leading to the Vampire plane, then kicked him through it. It closed behind him. I wondered if he would pass on what he had learned. But I doubted he’d really learned anything, so I shrugged and decided to get back to my reason for being here in the first place: I had a beacon to get to.

I still had no idea why I couldn’t just will myself straight there, but I was confident that it would be find-able from the Between. I had been nearly there when I had been interrupted, so I started leaping from sphere to sphere, heading towards the part of the Between that held my beacon. Eventually, I bounced off a final sphere, and hurtled towards the globe that I could sense my beacon within.

I hit the surface, and was flung back like a bouncy ball thrown against a wall.

More slowly this time, I returned to the globe, and felt the surface. Instead of being a springy, bouncy layer that yielded to the touch, it was solid and immovable. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t force my way through it.

What was going on? Last night I had entered this Plane by pure accident, and now I couldn’t get back in even when I devoted all my strength to it. What was keeping me out? I couldn’t understand it.

I had one trick left up my sleeve, which I hadn’t used previously because it’s not the easiest thing to do. The beacon I had left behind was a part of my own energy, and therefore controllable by me, even if I couldn’t get into the Plane it was inside. I concentrated on my awareness of it, making myself feel it as much as I possibly could, and then I ordered it to change its nature, from a simple beacon, to an Astral Doorway leading from it’s current location to me.

It took some doing, as it’s hard work controlling energy that’s a long way off. Eventually, though, a white circle appeared in front of me, and I knew I had succeeded. I stepped into it, and was surrounded by a white glow, which faded to reveal the same town corner I had arrived at yesterday. I looked back, and saw the beacon had reverted to a small white ball.

Since getting to this Plane was obviously not the easiest thing in the world, I decided to make life a bit easier for myself next time I wanted to come here, and install a permanent doorway. I went down the alley near me, and found a battered old cardboard box. I sent a glowing mist into it, which resolved into a doorway to my Private Plane, a Plane I had created myself and kept in existence as a Plane no-one but myself could enter. It was kept within a crystal I had used for a few other spells in the past.

With a doorway permanently established between this Plane and my own, I could now return to it whenever I wished. I closed the box’s lid, and hid it under a few bits of litter. Time to go and explore!

Back on the main street, I checked my observations of the previous day. The general population were definitely human, and were definitely dead – there’s a subtle difference in the auras of dead people, something to do with the lack of etheric (life force) energy. Nobody visible was alive. But they were all ACTING as though they were – absolutely nobody was making use of any Astral abilities: They were walking or driving, buying things at the store with money, watering their gardens. The more I wandered around, the stranger everything got. It would have been an absolutely normal scene if it had been happening in the Physical Plane, but in the Astral, it was truly bizarre. Why were they all acting like this?

Suddenly a connection formed in my brain, a memory that had been trying to surface: I had heard about places similar to this one before, somewhere. What had it been? I racked my brain, trying to think. And then I got it. In an on-line diary written by an AP'er about his experiences, he had mentioned going to a place, a ‘Rest Home for the Recently Deceased’. It had been a place where newly-dead people could get used to the concept of being dead and in the afterlife in a slow, comfortable pace. But he had described it as being very different to this. Rest home occupants didn’t pretend they were still alive, they just stayed in a Plane where things were similar to the Physical plane while they adjusted. There was no adjusting going on here, these people were acting entirely as though they were not dead at all.

I decided to call into the store and see what it was like inside. It was a curious place. It was like a store from fifty years ago, only with newer things in it as well. It made sense, as there could easily be people here from years ago who would have made a store as they knew it, and then newer people would populate it with newer products. But that would only work if somebody deliberately made it happen, and if they could do that, they could just create the goods themselves, so why bother with a store?

There were only a few people in here, so I decided to see if I could strike up a conversation with the guy at the counter. I picked up a chocolate bar, created some money, and went to pay.

"New in town, aren’t you?" he said as I paid.

"Yes. Just arrived." I replied. Obviously he knew all the local people.

"Ah. Feeling a bit tired, I imagine. Most people do, after coming such a long way." he said knowingly.

"A little. Get many people coming through, do you?"

"Oh no, people don’t come THROUGH," he said in surprise. "People come here to stay. No other reason, there’s no way out of the valley other than the road you come in on."

"Oh, I see. Well, how often do people come here to stay, then?"

"Oh, it varies. Sometimes we go ages without seeing a new face, other times they come in within days of each other."

"Fair enough. How long have you been here?"

"Oh, a long time. This is the oldest store in the whole town, you know." He said proudly.

"I didn’t know that. What did they do before you came along?"

He looked confused. "What do you mean?"

"Well, if this is the oldest store, where did they buy things before you moved here?"

He looked genuinely puzzled. "Never really think about it these days, but there was another store once. I forget what happened to it... but it isn’t there now. Must have closed down. Guess my wife was right about my memory going!"

"Oh, you’re married?"

"I was, before I moved here" he said, a slight tinge of sadness.

"Oh, sorry to hear that. What happened?"

He looked very unsure, and also slightly panicked. "I’m uh... I’m not.."

"Forget it" I said quickly. "Not really my business."

He cheered up again almost immediately. "Well anyway, I’m sure you’ll like it here. Everyone does, you know!"

"Must be hard for them to leave then" I commented as I started to turn away.

"Oh, no-one leaves!" he replied cheerfully.

I walked back outside into the sunshine. A shiver ran down my back. This place was freaking me out!

I started wandering around, chatting to people at random. Almost everyone immediately knew I was new to the area. Almost everyone told me that they had been there for ages, and that it was a long, hard journey to get there. Almost everyone got puzzled when they were asked to think about the past, especially when it came to why they had come, and where they had heard of it. Everyone said that it was a wonderful place, and they were glad they’d come. Everyone said that no-one ever left.

The last part was the worst. If this was some kind of "adjustment home" for people, then there was no way they’d stay here forever. Nor would they insist that they had travelled here by road. As far as I could tell, nobody in the entire town knew they had died and gone on to the next world. They remembered a long, hard journey, but nothing else, and they looked very unhappy if you started worming for details.

It wasn’t until I found the church that everything became clear. It was a small old church, a traditional, grey stone building with stained glass windows and everything. Only one thing looked strange to me: There was no graveyard.

Every old church I have ever visited (I live in England) has been a stone church with headstones everywhere through the grounds. This was that kind of church, only there were no graves. And that’s what made me realise at last.

This was a town filled with people who were afraid of death.

Not just people who were afraid of dying: Everyone has some fear of dying, if only because it might hurt. But these people... death was a phobia to them, something that they found utterly terrifying. I had never thought about it before, but... If you were truly afraid of dying, if the very concept that you would stop living was abhorrent to you... how would you react when you finally died?

You’d be terrified as your life faded away, and so when your soul left your body, you would very likely travel to a nightmarish Astral Plane, a place made out of fear. You’d run, desperate to get away from all the chaos and unpleasant things surrounding you, and you’d finally come... to this place. Where, since you were, if anything, MORE afraid of the concept of death than you had been before your ordeal, you would enter a state of denial, and try to forget everything that had happened.

This whole place was a huge lie, a place where people could forget the truth, hide from it, and pretend that it was "life as normal". That was why they thought of it as a long and hard journey, why they never left, why they were confused when you asked them why they came...

This place was seriously screwed up. The great cycle of life and death and rebirth had been short-circuited here. What could I do?

Should I do anything?

How would they react if I were to show them that they were dead? Anyone normal would say "Well, okay, I died but I’m still here, so why be scared?" but phobias are irrational things, and I seriously doubted that anyone here would take it as calmly as that. And besides... was there anything I could do to prove it?

It’s very hard to prove magic works to a sceptic: Their belief that nothing magical will happen manifests as a mystical construct that will prevent anything from happening. Maybe that was why I had been unable to get here a second time? Their desire for things to be ‘normal’ had prevented me doing something so abnormal as appearing out of nowhere?

It was possible, but... how had I made it here in the first place then?

I decided that I had found enough questions. It was time I left to do some thinking about it. I walked back to the alleyway where I had left the box, and checked that it was still there and working. The gateway was still present, so I stepped through it, into my own world, and checked the doorway from the other side. No problems. I returned to my body.

I had deliberately projected early that day, so it was evening rather than night-time. I logged on to my computer, and started searching the Web for some explanations.

After a while, I believed I had found it. An experienced AP'er had put an article up about higher spirits giving him missions. He would be on a normal Projection, and then be guided to a place he had not intended to go, and find something that needed doing. This happened because very high spirits would see something that needed fixing, but rather than doing it themselves, they would have it done by someone who was more at home in that level. In other words, projectors get given missions because we already dwell on the normal Astral Planes, rather than the higher ones.

This explanation would explain the events: My random travel had been guided by a higher spirit to a place where a problem needed fixing, and had therefore eased the way. My more recent journey had been attempted under my own power, and had therefore been much less easy.

But why now? This Plane had been in existence for years, decades, possibly even centuries. Why had I been sent there now? What was I missing?

Why had a vampire been hanging around so near to a pleasant, cheerful Plane?

Suddenly, I felt worried. I had no idea if my sudden idea was true, or even possible, but I knew I had to find out immediately. I closed my eyes, and started to meditate. More than ever before, I wished I could project faster.

Finally, I was Out. Once again, I skipped to the Between, and headed immediately to the sphere that contained the valley and it’s town and all it’s people. I didn’t even bother with rebounding from sphere to sphere, just flew as fast as I could, on my guard against attack the whole time. I thought I saw a few shadowy figures, but wasn’t sure.

When I arrived at the Valley’s sphere, I stood on its surface, but then looked at all the other spheres around us. The spheres are all coloured according to the kind of Plane they have within them. The Valley’s sphere was a bright, golden kind of a colour. Those around it were somewhat duller, less cheerful. It stood out. And as I watched, it seemed to me that, whilst all the spheres were drifting randomly around as usual, the Valley sphere was heading very slightly downwards.

Like energies attract each other in the Planes, and they strata out. Happy energy pools rise up and come together to form a happy place, while sad thoughts sink down and form a depressing place. Evil sinks, good rises. Anger tends to show up all over the place, lust hovers around the midpoint, and so on. The Valley was a very happy place, there was no way it should have been sinking.

But it wasn’t really sinking. It was being pulled.

A closer examination of the sphere revealed that my previous impression had been in error. The sphere itself was NOT hard and unyielding. A very hard-to-see layer over the top of it was hard. A layer that was made out of negative energy. My fears had unfortunately been realised.

The humans who lived in the Valley didn’t leave it, as I had discovered. Their phobia chained them to it. But since they were able to hide from their fear there, it was a happy place. Unfortunately, it had been discovered by some negative entities. They were not able to enter such a positive Plane: Evil spirits cannot enter a Plane filled with happy, cheerful, kindly people.

The beings that had discovered the Valley, however, had come up with an idea: They could get at the humans within it, if they could pull the Plane down to their own level. As the Plane moved lower, the people in it would tune into it’s newer, less positive state, desperate to remain in the valley. Populated by less positive people, the Plane would become even less positive, and so the negative beings would drag it down even further, and so on. Given time, they would be able to drag the Valley and it’s inhabitants so far down that there would be no barrier to them entering. And then they would have all the inhabitants at their mercy. Their own miniature Hell.

And this, apparently, was what I was supposed to stop.

Talk about being at a loss... there was a great deal of power being put into dragging the Valley down into Hell (The Christian Hell doesn’t exist, but I usually think of all the negative planes as being Hell) and there was no way I could just dispel it. There had to be a large number of beings involved with this, not just one vampire I could outwit or give stomach pain. How on Earth was I supposed to deal with it?

While I was pondering this problem, another one suddenly occurred to me: How the blazes were the Negatives able to affect a positive Plane in the first Place? For the same reason they couldn’t enter it, they should have been unable to affect it.

One type of Negative, I realised, would be able to do so: A Vampire. Vampires are humans, so are sophisticated enough to be able to affect positive energy. But there would be no real reason for vampires to get involved with this matter: The humans were all dead, so had no life energy for them to drain. They would have no interest in these people, except for sadistic pleasure. Surely this had to be the work of simple demons, entities formed from accumulations of negative energy?

Time to go fact-finding. I had to get this question answered!

Only difficulty, I had no idea where to start. I began by studying the construct surrounding the Valley’s sphere very closely. If it was pulling the sphere down, presumably it might be anchored to something. But there was nothing I could see. Acting on a hunch, I sent out a glowing mist, which flowed around the cloud. I had it flow around the sphere, looking for anything hidden. And it found something.

The negative energy was not a perfect sphere. At the bottom, there was a thick, invisible ‘rope’ connecting it to something far below. I shrugged my shoulders, and sent the mist coiling down the rope, making it visible to me, then I leapt off the sphere and dropped downwards, following the rope to its source.

Or, as it turned out, sources. It connected to three spheres, a long, long way down. I had no desire to enter any of the Planes within these spheres: I was a long way down, so they were sure to be very nasty places. However, I needed to know what was in them. Maybe I could find a method of "Look, but don’t touch"? After all, I didn’t need to MEET whatever was in there, just find out what it was.

The mist was still forming a glowing spiral around the three threads that the rope had split into. I split the mist itself into three, and its glow dimmed and faded until it was a black smoke. Then the three small clouds followed the ropes along into the spheres, and back to their source.

I called up three small circular clouds, and the images of what my key figures were seeing appeared in each one. The first to find the source showed a revolting monster, like a cross between a spider and a lobster, all legs and claws and slime. Pure negativity, that one.

The second found its way to a crowd of red-skinned humanoid figures. After studying them for a short while, I concluded they were demons conjured up by humankind’s recent belief that all demons are red with horns and pitchforks. Again, there was no indication of enough sophistication to affect such a positive place as the Valley.

The last one found its way to the Vampire god. Dead end three. Individual humans-turned-vampires may retain enough of their humanity to be able to travel some of the higher Planes, but the Vampire God itself was pure evil.

However, it made me think of a possible answer: None of these demons were of the type that could enter the Valley. But, a vampire might have been able to enter the Valley, and, once inside, act as an ‘anchor’ for the other end of the rope pulling the Valley downwards. That would mean that the envelope around the sphere was just a barrier to prevent interference, whilst the rope itself penetrated the sphere and was pulling it down from within.

Recalling my sendings, I re-absorbed them, and returned yet again to the Valley’s sphere. I tried to send another tracer along the rope to the inside of the sphere, so I could locate the anchor quickly, but it was unable to pass through the barrier. No simple solutions here, apparently.

I went to my Private Plane and flew to the doorway I had left in the alleyway. It was strangely discoloured, like looking through dirty glass, and when I tried to pass through it, there was resistance. The barrier must have noticed the new doorway. But this door was made of MY energy, and I knew that I was it’s master, not the barrier. I forced my way through.

Emerging in the alleyway once again, there was a sudden pain in my head, and the doorway exploded into sparks. The pain and sparks both faded in moments, but the doorway was gone. And I was unable to make a new one: I was sure I could still just will myself to a different place, but without a doorway in place, I would be unable to return. I had to find the anchor this time, or I would never be able to.

It may have been my imagination, but the place seemed less cheerful this time than before. It had lost that cheerful busyness that had struck me on my first visit. And the sky was more clouded, so every now and again, it became gloomy as the clouds overcast the sun. It was clear that I didn’t have a great deal of time. I had to work fast.

I tried to take to the air, to search by flying, but my feet were glued to the ground. Damn! I thought, I forgot they were all opposed to anything abnormal. I started running.

My suspicions were that it was a vampire in here. Vampires don’t like sunlight, even Astral sunlight, so he would probably be somewhere dark. And it would be a nasty-looking place: All the negative energy being directed at this place was focused on it. But I couldn’t find anywhere in the town that met the description. Nor could I detect any vampire auras. Where WAS that anchor??

After I had searched every street in the whole town, I sank to the ground. I had run out of places to look. The whole place was a nice, cheerful little town straight out of an old movie. The only visible change anywhere was the sky, which was growing ever more grey and gloomy.

As I sat there, the storekeeper I had spoken to earlier came walking by. Like most of the people around me, he was looking less cheerful than the first time I had met him. But seeing me sitting down feeling miserable, he stopped and said "Hi, there. Something wrong?"

I shook my head. "Nothing, really. Just not too happy with myself right now."

"Ahh, it’s just the weather getting to you. You’ll feel better when the sun comes back out." He said, but there was a slight note of uncertainty in his voice, as if he was trying to convince himself as well as me.

"I’m not sure it will come out again." I said sadly.

He laughed at that. "Don’t be silly. It’s always sunny in this valley. It’s just because you’re new here, it seems..."

I missed the rest of what he was saying. My brain was suddenly aflame with remembered voices saying "You’re new here, aren’t you?" "Hi, you must be new." "When did you get here." "Oh, I know everyone"

I leapt up and grabbed the storekeeper’s apron. "Who else is new here??" I yelled. "Who came here recently?"

I could have kicked myself. Everyone knew everyone in the Valley. And nobody ever left. If anyone else had come in here, they would have noticed him!

"Well... there’s been hardly anyone new recently." He stammered nervously.

"There must have been someone. Someone who came here before I did. Probably the last person to come here before me. Who was it??"

"Well.. there was that gypsy guy. Came in here a few weeks ago." He said nervously, obviously thinking I was out of my mind.

"WHERE IS HE??"

"I... I don’t know, haven’t seen him in ages."

"Nobody leaves the valley! He must be somewhere!"

"I don’t know" he said. "He sleeps rough, y’know. Usually in the alley by the store."

A firework went off in my brain. How could I have been so stupid? The only place in the entire town that was dark, dirty, trashy and generally horrible was the very place I came into the town through! The alleyway where I had left the beacon that I had found it so hard to return to. The alleyway I had put a Doorway in that had been blocked by negative influences. He was hiding in the alley!

I didn’t even stop to think. I ran as fast as I could, as fast as the scepticism of a town full of fanatically ‘normal’ people would allow, as fast as my imagination could move my legs. Clear across town, I burst into the alleyway, panting so hard I thought my ribs would break, until I reminded myself that I didn’t HAVE ribs and I certainly didn’t need to breathe.

I looked around. There were several bits and pieces of rubbish, and one big pile of garbage. Out of sight of all the townspeople, in an area being heavily influenced by mystic influences, I was able to use some of my Projector’s powers again. I called up a wind that blew the rubbish all over the alley, and underneath it...

There was nothing.

Underneath ME, however, the ground erupted as something leapt out of the mud and sent me flying. Ambushed!

I looked up. It was a vampire alright. I should have remembered their predilection for sleeping in dirt. It leapt onto me before I had a chance to recover, and its fangs sought my neck.

Hardly believing I could get so lucky, I didn’t resist him.

He stopped. "No..." he hissed. "I was told about the human whose blood burned." And he hurled me against the opposite wall.

Damn again! After all the times I’ve wished vampires would learn, they had to start NOW??

His shape blurred and shifted. Very quickly, the humanoid shape was gone, and a wolf stood before me. Oh boy... his powers were working fine, and I was still stuck in this town’s...

Hang on a minute! If HE could use magic, so could I!

As the wolf leapt at me, a blaze of light leapt from my hands, and the wolf was thrown back in mid-leap. I leapt up and followed with a cloud of sparks which would explode against his skin, each explosion generating new sparks. But the wolf exploded into a flock of bats, and darted out of the cloud, then merged back into the wolf, which hurled lightning at the sparks, blowing them apart.

This was bad. This vampire was the focus of three very powerful Negatives, and that made him powerful. He could do anything I could, and probably more.

"Where’s a sceptic when you need one?" I thought in frustration, and then the answer came like the sun on a cloudy day, "Right behind you. A whole townful."

Of course! The whole town was filled with people who refused to believe in magic! If I could get him out into the crowd, he would be powerless! In fact, he would be...

A plan leapt into my mind, fully formed. I turned and ran towards the entrance to the alley. He followed, but stopped at the corner just before the entrance, out of sight. He had no need to chase me, just to stay where he was. I had to beat him, he only had to avoid being beaten.

But this was close enough. With all the strength I could muster, I conjured up a chain around his neck, and grabbed hold of it. And I yelled for help.

Instantly, his shape started to blur. But I couldn’t allow that to happen. He HAD to stay wolf-shaped. I concentrated, putting all the willpower I could into holding him in his canine shape. And since it takes more power to change something than to keep it the same, I managed to hold him there. And then a group of concerned citizens came running down the alley in answer to my yell, and it was suddenly no effort at all.

They took in the whole situation in one glance: A ferocious animal snarling, and bedraggled person shouting for help and holding the wolf. And they ran to my aid. Each of them grabbed hold of the chain "collar" and started pulling it towards the street. And when we got him into the crowd, in the presence of all those people, he was unable to change shape, however hard he tried. He was chained to a wall.

I knew that wasn’t really enough. He had to be removed from the town before the negative energy directed at it had an irreversible effect. There was some talk about shooting the "rabid wolf" as a mercy killing, but vampires don’t die when you shoot them, especially not Astral ones.

I called out to the crowd that I had a better idea: The wolf should be taken well out of the town and released back into the wild. It was, after all, not it’s fault that it had scared people. This charitable idea met with a lot of approval, except that no-one was willing to drive out of the town. And I knew I couldn’t take it myself, as it would only turn back into a vampire as soon as it was out of sight of the townspeople. Compromise time.

"I’ll take it!" I called, "But I don’t have a vehicle to transport it in, and I can’t do it by myself. I’ll need someone to come with me, to help me. We won’t go far, or for long."

Silence.

Then "I’ll come!". The shopkeeper. "I don’t want that thing in the valley! And we can use the store’s delivery truck."

"I’ll come too" called another voice. I didn’t recognise this man, but he was clearly a friend of the shop-owner.

And that was that. I volunteered to drive, so they could keep an eye on the wolf. And off we went.

As we drove up the only road, the two of them devoted their attention almost equally to the wolf and to the town, until finally, we rounded the top of the hill, and it was out of sight.

I pulled the truck up, and went round to the back. Grabbing the vampire’s collar, I hauled him out of the truck.

"This is fine, gentlemen, I can deal with the rest. Why don’t you head back to your town?" I said.

"Are you sure?" asked the shopkeeper.

"Trust me." I said. "I’ve dealt with animals like this before."

"We’re a bit close to the town" said the other dubiously.

"Don’t worry. He’ll never go back to the town again. He didn’t have a very good time there this time, after all."

"I suppose so."

They walked round to the front of the truck and opened its doors. The storekeeper hesitated, and looked around him. He sighed.

"I’d forgotten what it was like outside the Valley. All these wide open spaces..."

Ahh... A chink in the armour.

"It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?" I said quietly. He nodded. "You know, that valley of yours is a great place, but it isn’t everything. Maybe you should remind everyone that there’s a big wonderful world outside of it."

"I’ll do that" he said, climbing back into the truck. "There’s a whole world outside our valley. And it took a wolf to remind us that it was out there."

He started the truck up.

"Sure you don’t want a lift?"

"Don’t worry. I may come back to visit, but I’m heading back out of the valley now."

"It’s a long, hard journey." He said, concerned.

"No sir, the route out is a lot easier than the route in. Trust me." I smiled

He nodded, and with one last look around the grassy plain, he started the truck moving. As he headed back into the town, the sun broke back out of the clouds.

With them gone, the vampire was no longer trapped in his canine shape. But we were still in a pleasant Plane, in the full sunlight, and that left him very weak. He stayed as a wolf. I bent down to be face to face with him.

"You’re probably very angry with me right now," I said quietly, "and you probably want nothing more than to attack me. But remember," I twisted the collar tighter, "I came into this place that you thought you had sealed off from everybody. And my blood burns vampires like Holy Water. Think about what that means."

He looked suddenly afraid. I concentrated hard on the chain around his neck, and for a moment, it glowed bright white.

"That collar will prevent you from changing back" I told him. "I hope that your Masters are forgiving enough to help you to change back and explain why you failed."

Judging by his reactions, he doubted that very strongly.

So, time for one last complete fabrication, just to make sure. I stood up, and a pair of glowing white wings unfolded from my back, and a white light shone from the top of my head. I gestured, and a doorway opened, not to the vampire realm, but to the spidery monster that I had seen in the first sphere. I hurled him through.

His belief that I was some kind of angel strengthened his belief that the chain around his neck really was an unbreakable spell holding him in canine form. He was unable to change back, unable to speak, unable to explain what had happened.

All that the monster knew was that, with his departure from the Valley, there was no anchor present, and it’s plan was foiled. Its claws ripped into him, and tore him to pieces. The chain around his neck snapped, and vanished into mist, which returned to me. Freed, his shape returned to human, and he screamed "No! It was HIM!" and pointed his remaining arm at me.

I closed the doorway.

Walking along the road, I looked down on the valley. The truck was just pulling back into it, and as I watched, the last shadows from the clouds vanished, and the town seemed to positively glow. I could hear the applause and cheering from where I stood.

And, as I watched, a group of townspeople climbed into the truck, and it started back up the road. At long last, they were willing to think about leaving the valley. It would no longer be a dead end.