The tremblings grew more pronounced. Then light, like firelight, flashed through his window. Josh got up, moved to the window, and there beheld a throat clutching sight. Materializing on the porch roof just below his second story window was a phantom, a silver metallic, mercury-like mass taking shape out of a portal of fire. Josh stumbled back as it oozed up and through his window glass to reform inside his room. A silver tendril from the thing shot out along the floor and latched gently onto the toes of Josh’s bare foot.

     “Be unafraid, Joshua Miles,” a feminine voice said soothingly inside his head. “I am scanning your mind. Seeking a form more acceptable to you.” Then the thing began to evolve, her ethereal voice saying, “I shall change into something you find more—appealing.”

     Indeed, she did, suddenly somehow becoming Emily Kinicki, also barefoot, wearing the same purple one-piece bathing suit Emily wore that hot summer day when Josh saw her at the pool party, and fell in love. The silver tendril of ooze became the bare leg of Emily Kinicki, her toes resting flirtatiously on top of his. This brought them almost nose-to-nose. Of course Josh and the real Emily had never spoken, even though she was in his chem class, math class, one study hall and home room. The real Emily didn’t even know Josh was alive. Still, she was his dream girl, thick hair dark as midnight, skin like cream. The only part incongruous was a wide chrome arm band wrapped around her upper left biceps. The band had tiny blinking lights and buttons the functions of which Josh was too stunned to contemplate. In Emily’s voice, her breath close enough to caress Josh’s cheek, she added, “There.” Then she stepped away, turning like a fashion model, so Josh could get a good look at her beautiful, thus unthreatening, manifestation.

     “Emily?” Josh said, knowing full well it wasn’t her.

     “My name is Tempo,” the girl replied. “I have taken on the image of your dream girl, as you call her. To make it easier for you to relate to me.”

     “Uh, gravy,” Josh stammered, “but it’s not like I’m gonna forget that a second ago you were a glowing metal mass oozing through my window!”

     “You may call me Emily Kinicki, if you wish.”

     “I don’t think so.”

     She responded with the same warm, easy laugh through perfect teeth Josh had seen Emily Kinicki emit from afar.

     “I’m a space/time entity,” the girl went on in a gentle form of Emily’s voice. “A morph. A changeling.”

     “Yo, like, this isn’t really happening, right?” the boy asked hopefully. “I’m still haulin’ Z’s.”

     “This is no illusion,” the girl replied, a hint of consequence in her statement, which was otherwise matter-of-fact. “Nor is it what your dimension calls—a dream.”

     “My—dimension?”

     “I am from Quaternion. A world of four dimensions.”

     “Whoa. There are only three dimensions: length, width and depth. Three dimensions.”

     Again, she laughed warmly. “In my dimension there is a fourth. Space altered by time. It is a special world. There are a thousand such special worlds existing between the three common dimensions you know. I was sent to wake you. To warn you. Do not sleep, for tonight—he comes.”

     “He? He who?”

     “Chaos,” Tempo said with what sounded like a worried sigh, “he is in league with The Evil Cluster. There isn’t time to explain it all. I must get help. I will return, but you must stay awake.”

     “This—Chaos,” Josh wondered, “what does he want?”

     “Your brain,” was Tempo’s shocking reply.

     The girl then touched some buttons on the chrome band on her arm. In a sudden blaze of unearthly fire, she was gone. The patch of smoldering space into which she vanished seemed to suck in upon itself and it, too, evaporated.

     Weak-kneed, Josh sat back on his bed. What had just happened? He pinched himself hard. Ouch!

     Josh burst into his parents’ bedroom and told them what had transpired in an unintelligible stream of words. His father replied sleepily exactly the way Josh expected.

     “Go back to bed, Josh. It was just another one of your nightmares.”

     Just another nightmare, Josh considered, as he gingerly returned to his room. He touched the glass in his window. It was hot—much hotter than the cool Midwestern night should have allowed. His logical mind played over thoughts only a boy Josh’s age could entertain: if Emily does come back, I gotta look cool! At least cooler than standing here barefoot in these stupid striped pajamas!

     Josh hurriedly got changed. His hands were shaking. He calmed himself by thinking that there was still a good chance this was all a dream. He slipped into his best jeans. At least they were a little faded. He put on his favorite sweatshirt, the black one with the yellow skateboarder on the front, and thick socks. He decided that, if this wasn’t a dream, his hiking boots would be better than his smelly old Nikes, his flip-flops or his dreaded Sunday shoes.

     Josh sat down on his bed. His mind was spinning. Dizzy, he lay back on the bed. I’ll just rest my eyes for a second, he thought. Seconds later, he was asleep, and the tremblings began again, this time in the wall behind his bed. That’s where he’d tacked up the poster of his favorite rock group, The Dragons, their face-painted visages grinning down on him as some sort of protection against evil. One of the tacks vibrated out of the wall. A corner of the poster curled over on itself and caught fire. Electric flashes, then a dark gray patch, appeared. First, extruding through the gray patch, came a pair of hands bigger than baseball gloves followed by muscular arms with skin bearing the gray pallor of a dead man. The trembling increased as the arms were followed by a hideous head, one with glowing red eyes and sporting a snake’s nest of metal coils in place of hair. Josh was awakened when his window blew out! He sat up with a start, turned and beheld the horror! The thing looked deep into the boy’s green eyes that were open wide in fear beneath a tumbled mass of thick brown hair.

     “Nice weather you’re having,” the hideous specter growled, “but it looks like brain!”