The two were walking on a path around the mountainside.

“I’m not going back down there,” said Gregory.

“There must be a way past him, though,” figured Brian. “We just have to think how.”

“Sure.”

“Every time we’ve come up against one of those ‘Solve the Riddle’ things, we’ve needed one specific thing to solve the puzzle—like the weathervane and the propeller. Something we knew about that we had to connect with the puzzle.”

“Say, do you think that soup tureen at Uncle Max’s is a panzer tank in disguise?”

In the light of day, they could see that a well-worn path rambled away in either direction from the old cellar. They randomly chose a branch and began marching resolutely down it. Surrounded by the dark fir trees, the boys were protected from much of the frigid wind that muscled its way between the swaying treetops.

They had traveled for about an hour, recognizing nothing, getting nowhere, high up on the mountain when, in the midst of a gully edged by boulders, the path ended abruptly at a sign reading TURN BACK. Do NOT ENTER.

“This is a little shabby,” Gregory complained. “You’d think that with hundreds of miles of forest, they could at least manage to hide things better than this.”

Brian peered past the boulders and into the woods. “Do you want to leave the path?”

“Sure.”

“But what happens if we’re found out?”

“I dunno. We get mangled.”

The boy strode off toward the forest, stepping up onto the rocks. Brian followed him.

Forging their path was difficult: Branches scraped them, hidden rocks tripped them (Brian especially), and dirt gave way beneath their shoes.

Eventually they broke out of the wood. Large boulders lay about, lime-green with lichen, surrounded by thick blueberry bushes. Gregory scrambled up onto one of the boulders and turned around to survey the land above the trees. “Brian, come look!” Brian stepped up to his side.

Above the pines, they could see the land that lay around the mountain far below.

Hills rose and fell, the trees painted in impossible colors; in the distance, great blue mountains towered from the patchwork earth. Small dips where creeks ran, a few browning pastures, an occasional black roof or white steeple—these were the only features that broke the continuous expanse of glowing forest.

They could see the places they had wandered in the course of the week, laid out almost as clearly as on the gameboard. The mansion, with its lawns around it, smoke curling from its chimney; the Ceremonial Mound, rising dark, far, far below; the Crooked Steeple and the ruined Grendle house; the woods; the bridge; and the River of Time and Shadow, which ran under a distant road, past Gerenford Green, joining other rivers until, in the blue distance, it flowed through mill towns and suburbs and under highways and led, eventually, to the distant city the boys called home, and from there, into the sea.

They stood there several minutes, watching the distant trees sway in the breeze.

The clouds drifted across the crisp sky.

They felt the wind all around them.

An hour later, they were far above the tree line. The climbing was getting harder. There were wide granite faces all around them.

That is when they came upon a door in the stone.

On the door, there was a brass sign that read WEE SNIGGLEPING.

“Eh,” said Gregory. “Isn’t that cute.”

Brian stepped up to the door and knocked.

There was a pause of a few seconds before the latch handle snapped up and the door opened. A little man stood there, shorter than either of them—a bald little man, dressed in a red vest and skewed round glasses. His ears were distinctly pointed. He had on a hat made of owl feathers, dried swamp flowers, and pipe cleaners.

“Yes, hello,” he said, looking impatiently from one boy to the other.

Brian ventured, “Um, we were out walking and we, we got a little lost, and thought you might help us find the way.”

“Hmm! The ‘way’ to what? A refreshment stand? You’re on a mountaintop. Top of a mountain. Hmm? Savvy?”

Gregory cleared his throat. The man glanced up at the boy, one elfin eyebrow cocked suspiciously. Gregory said, “You’re Sniggleping, then?”

“Yes.”

“An elf.”

“Close enough.”

Gregory simply nodded. “Yup,” he said.

There was an awkward silence for everybody. Gregory tried to fill it by wearily clapping his hands together.

Sniggleping inquired, “You’re not playing the Game, are you?”

“Yes,” said Brian.

“You are. I see. You’re playing.” The elf-man rapped his knuckles angrily against the door frame. He turned and walked back into his house. “Come in,” he said. “You’re out of bounds. The Thusser will be having an absolute fit.” The door was still open. Brian followed him, with Gregory tailing close behind, hands jammed in his pockets, head bowed down so his light hair swung before his eyes.

Sniggleping’s peculiar apartment was one room on two levels, with a small flight of stairs leading to the loft. The place was a shambles, crammed with great cogwheels and boxes of bolts, wrenches and hammers and hack-saws, huge leather portfolios of diagrams, half-constructed engines of brass and ivory, welding tools wired to dismantled lightning rods, crystal balls of various sizes, obsidian pentagrams and, over the mantel, some sort of stuffed beast that either had one leg too many or one leg too few, depending on how you counted them. The two stood uncomfortably while the wizened elf gabbled nonsense syllables into the horn of an Edwardian telephone.

Brian glanced at one of the plans that lay on the table. Snarth the ogre was drawn upon it, colored in full, grue-some detail, with all the warts marked. Arrows jabbed at particular features on the monstrous body, labeled in the illegible runic language. A windup key was drawn protruding from his back.

Sniggleping slammed down the phone and turned to them. “Right. That’s that.”

“We should probably go,” said Brian. “We’re sorry for getting off the path.”

“Stay here,” said Sniggleping. “Talk.”

“No,” said Brian. “We should—”

“Talk.”

“Okay,” said Gregory. He moved over to examine the diagram of Snarth more closely. “What are these diagrams for?”

“By ‘talk,’ I meant about something else, like boating or sleet.”

“These look like Snarth,” said Gregory.

“All right, get away from those!”

“What are they?”

“Nothing.”

Gregory said, “Did you build the ogre?”

“Yes. Yes. So?”

“So it’s a machine?”

“Would you stop it with the questions?” shouted Sniggleping. “Yes. Nothing you’d understand. Yes.” He began to mutter, pacing back and forth, his hands forced into gnarled fists, his wrists flexing this way and that. Gregory and Brian continued to stare at him. He looked up after a moment and shouted fiercely, “Don’t look at me like I’ve just sat on your pet goldfish! So the ogre’s a fake, all right? Do you know how hard it is to find an ogre these days? No—no! Not just hard! Impossible. Im! Poss! Ib! Ul!”

Brian assured him, “We didn’t mean to—”

“Do you know how long it took me to make that ogre? Do you know the technologies necessary? Do you know the scaffolding that has to be assembled every time we want to wind the thing up? Does that sound like fun? No! Does it sound easy? No! No! No!”

He stormed over to a table, threw around some sprawling blueprints, and finally flung a few off the balcony at the boys. “And look at these!”

The papers drifted to the ground, sliding against one another as they came to rest. Brian and Gregory inspected them. Gregory said, “Burk and Daffodil. Burk. Whoa.”

“Yes, yes, YES! They wanted servants down at the mansion. But no, they couldn’t be silent servants, they had to talk! And no, they didn’t just have to talk, they had to have a whole history. Personalities! Do you know how long that took? Weeks of nailing and wiring and summoning!”

He wrinkled his lips and kicked a gremlin-formed banister. After a minute, he looked up again. “Oh, you don’t understand, do you? It’s the little things that make a Game good.”

Brian protested, “We’ve appreciated it a lot.”

Gregory said, “Yeah, when you’re being killed by something cool, you really appreciate the hard time and effort someone—”

Brian said, “We didn’t mean to upset you or make it seem—”

“Why? Who am I? Just an ‘elf’! Living under a rock! Oh, wait! I’m supposed to live in a tree, right? And HAND-MAKE DOUBLE-FUDGE COOKIES! ‘Oh, what wonderful wafers! What great wafers you have, elfy!’ IS THAT WHAT YOU’RE THINKING? HUH? HUH? THAT’S IT, NO? NO?” He bellowed, then kicked a chair full of blueprints so hard that they flew up into the air and slid in a heavy mass across the floor.

Gregory looked at Brian.

Brian seemed to have suddenly thought of something awful. He had frozen. He didn’t look well.

Sniggleping collapsed back into a cluttered chair, his knuckly hands wrapped around his face. He slouched in the seat as blueprints of a three-headed pterodactyl slid out from underneath his rear.

Brian said carefully, “What other…what other creatures have you made that have been difficult?”

Sniggleping glared out from between his fingers. “Oh, no. No, no, no. You’re going to have to figure the Game out for yourself. No, no, no, no, no. Sniggleping’s too clever by half. Hah. No, it’s not all me, kiddies. Some of it was here long before me. Some of it was imported from distant places. Some of it stumbles in from other worlds when the stars lock up.” He dropped his hands from his face and stared at a chandelier that lit the place, draped with drying bow ties. “And to do it all with amateurs,” he said wearily. “I used to work on the city, when the Emperor Taskwith was here. When the People of Norumbega were here. Before they all fled. And now?”

Brian asked quietly, “The troll,” he said. “Did you make Kalgrash?”

“He’s one of mine,” said Sniggleping. “Miserable job. Never really worked out all the kinks. He gets seizures whenever the Ceremonial Mound is active. Hallucinations. It runs complete haywire with his brain. Oh,” he said, frowning at the boys, “I guess I should stick to what I’m good at, hmm? Little elfy? Stick to what he’s good at? Huh? TOWN HOUSE CRACKERS—” He yelled, banging his fist, “THAT RIGHT? MAKING! YOUR! TOWN! HOUSE! CRACKERS?!?”

The latch rattled. The door swung open, creaking slightly on its hinges. A dark cape blocked most of the sunlight from outside. The creature stepped in, ducking to avoid hitting its head.

“Thank God you got here,” said Sniggleping. “They’re driving me loopy.” To the boys he said, “Speculant.”

The Speculant was about eight feet tall, and was far bonier beneath his heavy black cape than any human could ever have been—even if their legs, like his, bent backward at the knees. He wore a black hat with an exceedingly wide brim over a face that consisted of little but an impossibly long, spiky nose, not unlike Kalgrash’s—almost, in his case, a beak. His alien skin was the kaleidoscope browns of a moth’s wings. Spiny fingers like jointed twigs clutched at the cape, flexing and pulling restlessly.

“Don’t stay and talk,” said Sniggleping. “Take them away. How you let this happen, I don’t know.”

The Speculant spoke. His voice was deep and grainy, and sounded as if it were echoing in a tunnel. “The darkness fell on the Flower That Speaks No Riddles, and—”

“Oh, don’t give me that.”

“Come,” ordered the phantom-like figure, sweeping his gaunt arms in a wide gesture. “The Boundaries that are set in fire have cried with their siren voices, for you stepped through the Bounding Stones into the Unwritten Places, where no hand has scrawled with Quill Supernal.” And then he repeated, “Come with me.”

The boys moved slowly toward the door, the towering Speculant falling in behind them, his fingers clutched together in front of his chest.

“Uh, good-bye,” said Brian.

Sniggleping answered, “Just shut the door.”

So they did.

They stood outside, once more in the glaring daylight and the chilly breeze.

“Follow,” beckoned the Speculant, and he glided off into the wood.

The two moved to keep up with him. The Speculant loped up rock faces, drifted down pathways, and floated between the trees, occasionally turning silently to wait for them.

Gregory watched Brian walk along ahead of him. Brian seemed preoccupied. He was frowning slightly, and did not speak.

Finally, they reached the remains of a ruined square tower that jutted out of the boulders and dreary grasses of the mountainside. “It stands from the epoch when these mountains,” said the Speculant, “were coated in metal, when from the Gulf Unknown the Enemy issued.” He ducked inside, and the two friends followed him.

The interior of the tower was a void, most of the floors evidently having collapsed centuries before. They walked down an old staircase into the shadows of a deep basement. There were occasionally passages branching off to the sides. When Gregory asked where these went, the Speculant just replied, “The corridor of Truth lies closed; the darkness of the Unspoken Void yawns closer.”

“Huh?” said Gregory. He tried to catch Brian’s eye, but Brian wasn’t listening. Brian looked miserable.

“The Day approaches when the Vast One shall be greater than He Who Found the Key. Then shall we all be left upon the Plain That Has No Name.”

Gregory coaxed, “Oh, come on…they could give the plain a name! Any old thing would do!”

“When the Time of Naming arrives, then shall the unnamed and unnameable be called by its True Name.”

“I’ll bet it has a name, and you just can’t remember it, you sly devil.”

The Speculant swiveled around, his cape settling around him slowly. He grated, “The Unnameable has no Name. Truth cannot be concealed behind Fiction. The Casket of Deliverance has found the Pearl of Wisdom lacking, and the Bone of No Sight shall, in the latter—”

“Okay,” said Gregory. “You win.”

The Speculant waited.

“Really,” said Gregory. “Ten nothing. Your game.” He nodded. “More walk, less talk.”

The Speculant nodded triumphant, turned, and walked on.

They came to a dimly lit chamber, in which there were broken arches and columns all around them. The Speculant continued out into the center of the floor, his feet whispering on the dry dust. Gregory and Brian followed him.

When they reached him, standing by his side amidst the fallen columns and echoes, he swept up his arms and chanted in his gravelly voice. The words fluttered through the chamber, echoing and re-echoing, until finally they faded.

Silence closed back in around them, save that they heard, only faintly, an odd, sandy shuffling in the unlit recesses and colonnades. “This way,” beckoned the Speculant, and he drifted away across the floor. He led them to a small archway, beneath which they ducked, and up a ladder. He halted at the top.

With a heave, he reached above him and shoved a heavy iron disk to the side. Light streamed in from above. He climbed the last few rungs. They followed. Gregory, at the top of the ladder, looked back down toward Brian. He was concerned. Brian was moving slowly. It looked like something was weighing on him. They went up the ladder.

They found themselves blinking and squinting in the bright sunlight, closely surrounded by an entangled knot of hemlocks. They were in a small clearing at the top of a thickly wooded knoll. A ring of tall stones was there. Nearby was a tent, with Jack Stimple’s hat hanging on the tent pole. When they looked at their feet, they saw that there was no sign of the manhole cover that the Speculant had thrown aside. “Do not look for the passage. It would not take you back where we came from. Now follow me.”

The figure darted into the underbrush and followed a hectic, zigzag course down the steep side of the knoll. The two tripped and climbed after him, finally emerging from the trees.

They discovered, finally, where they were. They had come out on top of the Ceremonial Mound. Now they were back by the burnt-out snowmobile, in the midst of the Tangled Knolls.

“Do you see where you are?” said the Speculant.

“Yes,” said Brian.

“Very good. The Game must now continue. Do not venture off the paths. You are but Pawns. You can be Taken. Go.”

“What do you mean, ‘Taken’?” asked Gregory.

“Snatched up in moment,” said the Speculant. “By a gaunt hand.”

Gregory smiled. “Great. Well, it’s been nice talking to you. Thank you very much.”

Brian suddenly exclaimed, “Wait! We’re going to need the boat to get back into the cavern! It’s at the wrong end of its route!”

The Speculant nodded his proboscis. “Yes. Go.” He pointed forcibly toward one of the many paths that led away from the Ceremonial Mound.

Gregory and Brian left him standing there. They walked away, into the forest.

He turned and climbed back into the hemlocks of the Mound.