"We're here, sure enough," Nigel Cholmondeley said; as soon as he spoke, I could see his virtuous image.

"But where is Aere?" I asked to help him see me.

"A bad place," Madame Ruth said, springing into apparent being. "Very bad."

As in my earlier venture into virtuous reality, they both appeared idealized to my second sight; Cholmondeley handsome, with more meat on his scrawny bones; Madame Rudi minus about half of her corpulent self and her screechy tough-guy accent. As before, I couldn't see myself at all.

I couldn't see any skin of Judy, either.

Not as before, I couldn't see anything but my spirit guides. The Nine Beyonds were dark as an underground cave at midnight. My sight had been totally obscured when I slipped the virtuous reality helmet over my eyes. What I was sensing now felt darker than totally obscured. I don't know how, but it did.

It was just dark like a cave; it didn't feel as if we were inside one. If we'd been in a garden before, my guess was that we were in jungle now, jungle on a moonless, starless night a million miles - or maybe farther - from anything of man's. Though I knew my body was back in a cool room at the West Hills Temple of Healing, the air that seemed to be around me felt hot and wet and smelled as if dungs I didn't want to know about were just beginning to rot somewhere not far enough away.

Things were moving there, too, and I didn't know what they were because I couldn't see them. Whatever they were, I didn't think they meant us well. This was not a place where we were meant to be. A sudden sharp noise made the self I didn't have start in alarm: it sounded as if something had stepped on a dry twig, although where you could have found a dry twig in that stifling humidity, I couldn't tell you.

I remembered the One Called Night was also known as the Crackler. Having remembered, I wished I could forget again.

I turned to Madame Ruth. "How are we supposed to find Judy in all this?" We were somewhere in one Beyond; even if we somehow went over every inch of it (and I was afraid it had a lot of inches), that left eight more to search. We were liable to be there forever, or maybe twenty minutes longer.

The Emperor Hadrian's death poem ran through my mind; Animula vagida blandula… Little soul, wandering, gentle guest and companion of my body, into what places will you go now, pale, stiff, and naked, no longer sporting as you did? If I'd perceived myself as embodied in that dreadful place, I would have burst into tears. The image fit only too well what I feared was happening to Judy's spirit.

"We'll do the best we can, Mr. Fisher," Madame Ruth answered. "Beyond that, I don't know what to tell you. This domain is not shaped by us alone; the Power who dwells here influences our perceptions. We must attempt to move, and hope we find ourselves guided toward Mistress Ather."

She'd warned before we set out that this wouldn't be as easy as contacting Erasmus had been. She hadn't warned how bad it would be. Maybe she didn't know till we tried it; virtuous reality is a technology that's just opening up, which means one of the things its practitioners are still discovering is what can go wrong.

I got the feeling that if anything went seriously wrong in the Nine Beyonds, Hr. Alt Murad would learn some things he hadn't expected - and some new intrepid explorers of virtuous reality would have to try to rescue three more spirits lost in this suffocating place.

Would they have any better fortune than we did?

Madame Ruth had said we had to try to move, to explore the Nine Beyonds and hope we found Judy. Move we did, but it wasn't easy. The Nine Beyonds resisted every metaphysical motion we made. We cried out, but everywhere in vain. It was as if we were drunk, as if the Nine Beyonds themselves were having sport with us, mocking our search.

We might as well have been wading through mud, through quicksand, through hot dinging slime.

And it felt as if the area in which we stood and moved was growing smaller all the time. With everything perfectly black all around us, with Madame Ruth and Nigel Cholmondeley the only things my second sight could perceive, I don't know how I got that impression, but I did. That led me to another interesting question (if interesting and horrible are synonyms): what would happen if it closed real tight around us?

Someexperiments you'd rather not see performed, especially on you.

No sooner had I thought that than I discovered I wasn't the only one feeling the invisible closing in. Voice tight with concern, Nigel Cholmondeley said, "I think we had best withdraw, lest we be overwhelmed by that which lurks in darkness here."

"How do we get away?" I asked.

"Break me circle; free your hands," Madame Ruth said.

"Quicldy!"

That hadn't been easy even when we were leaving the virtuous reality garden. Remembering you had an actual physical body that could do things was tough; making it do those things tougher.

And not for me alone - I watched the virtuous images of Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth twist in concentration as they struggled to make their bodies respond to their wills.

No doubt my own virtuous image bore a similar grimace in their second sight Madame Ruth had been right; we needed to hurry. Something was breathing down the neck I hadn't brought along to the Nine Beyonds. I didn't know what the One Called Night could do to me, but I was very conscious of operating on the Power's turf - or rather, muck. If it took hold of me…

Just then, one of us (to this day, I don't know who) managed to get a hand loose and break the circle. Coming back wasn't like returning from the garden; I seemed to be falling and falling in a forever compressed into maybe a second and a half. Worse still, I thought the One Called Night was falling after me, falling faster than I was, reaching out with black, black hands in which never a star would shine.

Under the virtuous reality helmet, my eyes flew open. I saw only darkness there, too, but it was a darkness I knew, the familiar darkness of This Side. Unlike the blacker than black of the Nine Beyonds, I knew what to do about this. I yanked the helmet off my head and sat blinking in the mellow afternoon sun.

I got my helmet off just ahead of Nigel Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth. Their faces - their real, everyday faces, not the idealized images they bore in the realms of virtuous reality - were pale and haggard, as yours would be, as mine surely was, after such a narrow escape.

Cholmondeley leaned forward, pulled off Judy's virtuous reality helmet Her face showed nothing, just as it had before the helmet went on. Her spirit hadn't been in there to experience what we'd gone through.

Madame Ruth wiped sweat from her forehead with one sleeve. I didn't think the sweat had anything to do with wearing the helmet. "Jesus," she muttered. "It tried to follow us back."

Too bloody right it did." Cholmondeley also sounded shaken to the core. "I think it used Mistress Ather as its conduit: it controls her spirit, after all."

"I never heard of that," I said.

"Nor had I," Cholmondeley answered. "Nor, so far as I know, has any practitioner of virtuous reality. Of course, there is the caveat that anyone encountering the phenomenon at full strength, so to speak, is unlikely to remain a practitioner of virtuous reality, or, indeed, of any trade thereafter." He essayed a laugh; it came out as a series of nervous little barks.

The procedure was unsuccessful?" Hr. Murad asked. He hadn't been there with us. Lucky him.

"Buddy, you're lucky - we're lucky - it's us sittin' here talking to you, and not the One Called Night," Madame Ruth said. Nigel Cholmondeley's nod in support of that was as herky-jerky as his laugh had been.

I stood up. I felt as if I'd been away from my body for a long time, slogging through the steaming, lighdess swamps of the Nine Beyonds. The physical part of me, though, the part that hadn't left the chair, rose now so smoothly that I knew virtuous reality had fooled me again, Before Hr. Murad could turn Judy the right way around on her bed, I leaned over the footboard and looked down into her face. Her eyes were open, and looking back at me.