Ted Halliwell tried to tell himself he wasn’t dead.
He could see and hear, though both only dimly and distantly, as though he was submerged in shallow water. At times it seemed he broke the surface and those two senses became sharper.
For the most part, those were his only senses. Yet there was a third-the tactile-that troubled him. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a sensation. He could see hands reach out-long fingers with sharp talons-but he could neither control their movements nor feel what they touched.
In the dark, he approached a small military encampment. Horses grazed nearby, and they whinnied as he passed, a shiver running up their flanks. They snorted, spooked as hell, and the terror in their eyes was wild. But he passed by and the sounds of their skittishness faded.
Tent flaps danced in the breeze, as did the banners flying the colors of King Hunyadi. Halliwell had met the king, once, and had felt an immediate loyalty to the man. He had been strong, yet fair and wise-a man Halliwell himself would be willing to follow into war. In another world. In another era.
Now he couldn’t follow anyone.
He could only drift along behind the eyes of another. What troubled him most, however, wasn’t what he couldn’t feel, but what he could. There was no weight to him, none of the burden of flesh he’d felt all his life. But he still felt as though he had substance, and within that substance, he could feel sand, shifting. It eroded his bones, sifting against his insides.
Impossible, of course.
Ted Halliwell couldn’t be the Sandman.
But he felt as though he existed only behind the monster’s putrid lemon eyes. Somewhere within the creature’s mind, he could feel a third presence. He knew that it could only be the Dustman.
Halliwell had come upon the brothers while they were attempting to destroy one another. Like a fool, he had interfered.
Now he slid through the night toward the military encampment. Sentries marched the perimeter but did not see him. If they heard anything, it was a whisper on the breeze. Through the Sandman’s eyes, Halliwell saw a sentry yawn, widely, and he wondered if this was the presence of the monster or mere coincidence. For this was no storybook Sandman, gently easing children off to sleep. It was the savage fiend of older stories who punished little ones by plucking out their eyes and eating them.
Halliwell tried to tell himself that he was alive.
He was aware. From that bit of information, he deduced that he couldn’t possibly be dead. In the ordinary world-before crossing the Veil in pursuit of the answers he’d thought Oliver Bascombe could give him about a series of murders and disappearances-he’d been a sheriff’s detective. Now his old life had been erased and he wished that he had not needed those answers so desperately. Trapped beyond the Veil, Halliwell had come to care only about returning to make amends with his estranged daughter, Sara. They had fumbled their relationship badly, and Halliwell wished for another chance.
But he couldn’t go back.
That truth had broken something inside of him, so that when he finally caught up to the Sandman, he had attacked the creature on his own. The Sandman had been in the midst of a savage battle with his brother, the Dustman. Halliwell had gotten between them.
The biggest mistake he had ever made.
He could still feel the way the whirling sand and dust had scoured his flesh, stripping meat from the bones. He had tried to scream, sand rushing down his throat. Then, for the longest time, nothing.
Awareness had returned slowly. At first it had all been darkness, and then he had begun to see, and to hear. From time to time that skittery whisper of the Dustman had come to him as though from the black shadows at the bottom of a well.
Halliwell had no idea if the Sandman knew he was alive, inside. All he knew was what the monster felt, and that was hatred. Oliver and Kitsune had turned his own brother against him and then, for a time, destroyed him. Now the Sandman wanted vengeance. No matter what his former masters asked of him, he had no desire other than the murder of Kitsune and Oliver Bascombe.
And now he hunted.
The Sandman cascaded across the ground between tents, peering at the few of Hunyadi’s soldiers who sat in a tight circle, smoking cigarettes and sharing the grim talk of war. How far they were from the battle front, where this camp was in relation to the few other places he’d been in the Two Kingdoms, Halliwell had no idea. Not that it mattered. The Sandman moved from place to place with a hideous ease. His sandcastle still existed in multiple locations through the kingdoms, replete with doors that allowed him to travel to a thousand points on both sides of the Veil simply by passing through.
Through the monster’s eyes, Halliwell saw a tent ahead. The king’s banner flapped overhead. For a terrible moment, Halliwell feared that this would be the tent of King Hunyadi himself, but then he sensed what the monster knew, and understood that this was simply the tent of the commander of this battalion.
With a swirl of dust around his feet-and it could have been that just for a moment this was not sand, but dust, because after all, the Dustman was in here as well-he paused at the rear of the tent. The night seemed quiet save for the distant susurrus of conversation and the flapping of the tents. The Sandman reached out a clawed hand and sliced the fabric. It split like flesh, pouting open.
Halliwell wanted to scream, to try to shout through the Sandman’s mouth in hopes that the commander would hear him. But he didn’t dare, for certainly the Sandman would hear him, too.
So he kept silent. Just in case.
No. Act. Stop him, the Dustman whispered in his head.
Halliwell ignored him but could not prevent himself from hearing. Just as he could not prevent himself from entering the tent. As the Sandman twisted his body to duck through the tear in the fabric, he felt the grit scraping against his bones again, felt the sand all around him, and wished the Dustman could understand.
He was powerless to do anything but bear witness.
He wondered if his daughter, Sara, was asleep somewhere in another world, and he prayed that she had found some peace.
The commander was not sleeping. As the Sandman entered, the man looked up, forehead creased in a frown at the intrusion. Realization shot like lightning across his face and he started to rise, opened his mouth to shout even as he reached for his sword.
Halliwell felt hatred and disgust well up within him and tried to exert some kind of control, to reach his consciousness out into the Sandman’s hands and stop what was to come.
He could do nothing.
The monster clapped a hand across the commander’s mouth, forestalling any cries for help. With his other hand he disarmed the man, breaking bones in his wrist and arm.
“You know what I am?” the Sandman whispered.
The commander, wincing in pain, nodded. Halliwell wondered if he recognized the Sandman from his legend, or was merely aware that death had come for him.
“Excellent,” the monster rasped. He bent and darted out his tongue, running it over the commander’s left eyeball. The tongue was rough with grit, like sandpaper, and the commander screamed into the hand covering his mouth.
“You will tell me, sir, of the war between the Two Kingdoms, and especially anything you know about the Legend-Born filth called Oliver Bascombe, and Kitsune of the Borderkind. You will speak softly. If you fail in either of these, I will suck the eyes from your face and chew them while the nerves are still intact.”
The commander whimpered.
The Sandman pulled his hand away.
The man trembled as he began to speak.
When it was over, the Sandman did precisely what he had threatened. The commander had not disobeyed him, but the monster simply could not resist.
Halliwell had spent weeks on the precipice of madness. He teetered there once again.