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It was barely half past nine, and Kate was lying in bed with her eyes shut, holding her husband’s hand and trying to fall asleep on purpose, which, as any nurse who had ever worked nights could have told her, was the one reliable way to stay awake.

It wasn’t going well. Rain came at the bedroom windows sideways, and the old panes shook in their frames. Every time she got close to drifting off, the wind found some new loose thing on the house to bang.

“You’re not asleep,” Tom said quietly.

“Neither are you.”

“I’m waiting for you.” His thumb moved across her knuckles. “It doesn’t work if you lie there being skeptical.”

“I’m not being skeptical, I’m being awake. There’s a difference.”

There wasn’t much of one, and she knew it. That was the deal they’d struck across his desk that afternoon: she would fall asleep, and he would—his words—bring her with him. As though sleep were a gym he had a guest pass to.

She had promised him an open mind, and she was keeping the promise, though by now she was holding it open as you hold a door for someone who is taking too long to reach it, politely, and with an arm that was starting to ache. She had spent the whole evening, all through dinner and the dishes and brushing her teeth next to him at the sink, thinking about what she would say if a patient’s wife came to her with this exact story. My husband says he visits other worlds when he sleeps. He wants to take me with him tonight. She knew how that sounded. She knew what she would have written in the chart.

So what was she doing here, holding his hand in the dark?

She didn’t have a good answer. Only that he had looked so tired when he asked, and so sure, and that when she said yes he had looked, for a second, like the Tom who used to fall asleep on the train home with his head on her shoulder. And then a minute ago he had squeezed her hand, once, as he used to in movie theaters right before the scary part. It was the first time he had reached for her in weeks.

Kate squeezed back, and made herself breathe as she coached other people to, slow in, slower out, feeling a little silly about it, until somewhere in the middle of pretending to be calm she stopped having to pretend.

She never did notice falling asleep; what she noticed was the tug, sharp and low, as if someone had hooked a finger behind her navel and yanked, and she opened her eyes to tell Tom to quit it and found that she wasn’t in bed. She wasn’t even lying down. She was standing in a hotel lobby, one of those stately old ones, under a chandelier the size of a car that lit everything a sparkling white, with a grand central staircase climbing away to the higher floors and corridors leading off in every direction, and down the nearest of them, because for some reason this was the detail that stayed with her afterward, a long row of doors that were every one of them shut.

She had about a second to take this in before someone caught hold of her hand, and she would certainly have screamed if a palm hadn’t come down over her mouth at the same moment, warm and smelling faintly of their own bathroom soap.

“Shh. We can’t let them know we’re here.” The whisper was hot against the side of her neck. She knew the voice, which was the only reason she didn’t bite.

“Tom?” She got free of him and turned around, and she was scowling, she could feel it, because her first thought, which shows how far her mind still was from the truth, was that she must have dozed off in the car and he had let her sleep through some long drive to wherever this was. “What’s going on? Where are we?”

None of it felt like a dream, that was the trouble: the Persian carpet was plush under her feet, and when she put her hand flat against the wall, the dark wood paneling was as solid as any wall at home. The only thing that looked wrong was Tom. He looked wonderful. The gray was gone from his skin, the bags were gone from under his eyes, and he was grinning at her like a kid who had snuck her in somewhere. “Welcome to the In-Between Hotel,” he said. “This is where all the worlds connect.” He was pointing up the longest of the corridors now. “Down there is the Reality Vault, where they store the access portals. To get there—”

A bell went ding. It was a small, polite sound, like the bell on a bicycle, or like…

Kate turned around slowly, as you do when you already suspect you aren’t going to like it, and there was a reception desk behind them that she would have sworn on her license had not been there a moment ago, except that you don’t overlook a desk like that, a waist-high slab of solid oak about the size of a rowboat, with a scalloped green lamp on top like the ones in the reading room at the New York Public Library.

Beside the lamp sat the bell, and she could see the brass of it still quivering. Somebody had just hit it. There was no one there.

“Shit. They’ve noticed us.” He had her by the wrist again, and tighter, as he used to hold on to her crossing Eighth Avenue against the light. “This way.”

He towed her off to the right, away from the long hallway, through a sitting room that she saw only as a warm blur of firelight and plush furniture, and around a corner into what turned out to be a dining room, its table set for at least twenty guests. Two were seated at the far end, deep in conversation. They wore suits, like bureaucrats, and when Kate and Tom entered, they both looked up in unison, startled.

Kate had just enough time to register the fact that one of the bureaucrats was a professionally dressed blonde woman with sleekly ironed hair and furry cat ears sprouting from her head. The ears twitched in their direction, then flattened with suspicion, exactly like a cat’s, which disposed of any idea of Kate’s that they might be a decoration from a dollar store.

“What the—”

But Tom was already moving, backward now, toward the sitting room. Behind them the two bureaucrats were on their feet in a clatter of flying cutlery, and one of them was shouting something Kate couldn’t make out, and she remembered wondering, even then, even while she was being hauled backward through a doorway by her own husband, whether it was English they were speaking, and deciding that it had to be, since English was all she had, and surely you couldn’t dream in a language you didn’t know.

He was cursing under his breath by the time they were back in the sitting room with the fireplace.

“Tom, who are those people?” Kate hissed.

“We need a way out.” He looked around the room, and then up at the bookshelves, which went all the way to the ceiling, and he seemed to come to some decision, because the next thing he did was jump, a little hop like a man testing ice, except that he didn’t come down from it. He went on up.

He drifted along the top shelves as though he were on one of those rolling library ladders and someone had taken the ladder away, running a finger across the spines, and Kate stood underneath him with her mouth open and said the only thing available to her, which was, “What are you—how are you doing that?”

“This is basic,” he said, without so much as looking down. “Wait until you see the real conceptual stuff.” He found what he was after and jerked a book free. “Quickly, now.” He sank until he was within reach of her. There were footsteps in the next room now, and more coming from the lobby side. Whoever had rung that bell was on the way, too.

Tom landed and thrust the book into her hands, then closed his own hands around hers, hard. He wasn’t grinning anymore. “Kate, listen. There’s something you need to understand. My journals, the dreams, they’re all real. But there’s somebody out here who has figured out how to manipulate it. Reality, I mean, the actual fabric of it. He can reach out and change other worlds.” He swallowed. “Including ours.”

Kate looked at the fireplace, the armchairs, the lamps with their little fringed shades. A minute ago it had all seemed sort of charming. “What does he want to do?”

Tom shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m close to figuring it out. I just need more time. There’s only so many hours in the night, and in dreaming, time doesn’t run the same as it does in our world.” The doorknob out into the main reception area began to turn. Swearing again, Tom opened the book and grabbed Kate’s hand, planting it on the page. “Go. I’ll be right behind you. Just remember—”

But his sentence cut off suddenly. Kate looked up, startled. “Tom?”

She was alone in a dark, vacant landscape. Gone was the In-Between Hotel, their pursuers, the book she’d been holding. And Tom was gone, too. There was no sign of her husband at all. One instant he’d been there, alive and vibrant beside her. And the next…

Kate started to walk through the nightmarish landscape. Everywhere she looked, all she saw was desolate, empty country. Soon, this landscape would grow as familiar as her own house in the waking world, but she did not know that yet. It was her first time here.

Panicked, she began to run. “Tom?” she called. Her voice echoed back to her, magnified a thousandfold. “Tom?” Tom, Tom, Tom… She tipped forward, screaming as she fell.

Just as Kate struck the ground, she bolted upright in bed, gasping. She whirled around, groping at the sheets. But the bed beside her was cold. In Tom’s place, where he’d been lying as she drifted off to sleep what felt like just minutes ago, only his pajamas remained, neatly folded on his pillow.

That was the night Tom disappeared for good.