"It was back in üineleeü-ninely-three. I wrote a letter to the editor of a comic book called The Tomorrow Syndicate. Just a tongue-in-cheek paragraph with a fake return address poking a little fun at the way the editor—Affable Al—used alliteration. Well, lo and behold, they published it in issue number six. I tell you, it was such a rush seeing my name in print as the author of that letter that I knew then and there I had to be a writer."

"Fascinating." Not! "Now, where do you get your ideas?"

Winslow smiled. "I've been told most writers hate that question, but I love it. But then, of course, I'm just happy someone's asking me any sort of question."

Okay, okay. We get the picture: P. Frank Winslow is underpaid and unappreciated.

"The ideas?"

"Dreams."

"Dreams?"

"Yep. They come to me in dreams and I adapt them to the books."

"What was the dream that led to the first book?"

"Rakshasa! started off with a real nightmare. I was trapped on a rooftop where I was being chased by a monster or demon of some sort—I can't remember a thing about how it looked, just that it was after me—and no matter what I shot at it, threw at it, cut it with, the thing kept coming."

Jack felt a chill. Winslow had just described what he had gone through on the roof of his own building nearly two years ago.

"When did you have this dream?"

"Summer before last. Early August."

The temperature dropped a little further. The mother rakosh had been chasing Jack in early August.

"I woke up all out of breath, like I'd been doing all that running around and fighting myself. I knew if I could capture that terror and frustration in a story, I could sell it."

"That was it? You got a whole book out of that?"

"Well, no. I had another dream the next night about this cargo ship filled with all these nasty little creatures. So I put the two dreams together and had Jake Fixx come along and clean up the mess. I used real life, too. If you remember, it was right about that time a freighter caught fire and burned in the harbor, so I made that part of the book."

Jack wiped his palms on his jeans. Yeah, he remembered… remembered all too well.

"Where's your character Jake come from?"

Winslow lowered his voice and leaned forward, as if about to impart some ancient wisdom.

"Now here's where the art of writing and creating conies in: The character in the dream was this nondescript sort of ne'er-do-well urban mercenary. 1 mean, you had to pay him to help you out."

"No!"

"I'm not kidding. Well, I hadn't had anything but the letter published back then, but I knew right off that wasn't going to fly."

Jack had an unsettling thought. "Did you get a good look at him in your dream?"

He shook his head. "Just like I didn't get a good look at the monster. The only thing I remember is that he wasn't very memorable. But his looks weren't the only problem. Dreams don't need logic, but novels do. As Mark Twain said, 'The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.' I mean how could a loner like that run license plates and check out fingerprints or call in old debts to get reinforcements or the latest weaponry? The readers weren't going to buy that and neither were the* editors. So I created a highly trained professional soldier with tons of survival skills and named him Jake Fixx. Much more realistic."

"Oh, I agree. Especially that name."

Sally arrived with their food. Winslow attacked his eggs and hash as if he hadn't eaten for a week while Jack picked at his salmon. He wasn't nearly as hungry as when he'd come in.

After a few moments of silence, he said, "What about your new book, Ber-zerkl—was that also a dream?"

Winslow wiped some yolk off his chin. "Berzerk! was the next book, but not the next dream."

"You skipped? Why?"

He shrugged. "The second didn't come till about Christmas. It was kind of science-fictiony—about a new power source and such. My editor didn't like the idea. Vetoed the next dream as well. That was about all these different conspiracy theories—UFOs and anti-Christs and whatever rolling into one. It ended with this big hole in the Earth swallowing up a house and damn near gulping down our hero. That was probably influenced by that house that disappeared in Monroe last year. Too weird. We settled on the fourth dream I'd had about that drug that was so hot for a while and then disappeared."

Jack's gut knotted. "Berzerk."

"Right—or Eliminator, Predator, Killer-B. It had a bunch of names. In my dream it came from one of the surviving monsters from the first novel. The editor liked that idea because it was a sequel of sorts, so I went with it."

"When was this dream?"

"Last May."

Just when those real-life events were going down.

"How about your next book? Any ideas for that?"

"Way past the idea stage. I just handed in the finished manuscript."

"Already?"

"The publisher's pipeline is long. If I want this one out next spring, it's got to join the queue now. This one's called Virus!—and yeah, it's got an exclamation point. Our buddy Jake has to call in some favors from the CDC to stop a mind-controlling bug."

A wave of sadness swept over Jack as he thought of his sister Kate.

"Any more dreams?"

He smiled. "Plenty. I had one about a haunted house last summer that I think will become my next."

This was sick—this guy's dreams connected to Jack's life. He wondered if any of them saw into the future.

"What's the latest nightmare?"

Winslow smiled and winked. "Can't tell you that. Trade secret."

Jack fought the urge to reach across the table and grab him by his chicken neck.

"Just a hint?"

"All I'll say is it involves a stolen book and a stick figure like that Kicker Man you see all over the place. It's still developing. I don't know yet if I'm going to be able to use it."

That just about did it for Jack. As disturbing as all this was, none of it was helpful. And he wanted away from this guy with the creepy dreams. Somehow, some way, he and Winslow shared a circuit. Why? Some cosmic accident? Or did it mean something? He didn't know. Maybe he'd never know. But either way, he hated it. Wanted no one with a periscope on his life, but didn't see how he could stop it.

Who knew? Maybe Winslow would come in handy one day.

He signaled Sally for the check and started gobbling the lox.

"My treat," he said.

Winslow looked up. "Don't you want to know about my childhood?"

"Why would I—?"

"Because anyone who writes weird stuff is assumed to have had some sort of childhood trauma."

"Okay, I'll bite: What was yours?"

He smiled. "Nothing. I had a completely normal childhood."

"So did I."

"Yeah, but nobody thinks you're weird."

Jack didn't comment.