CHAPTER 7

“HEROBRINE?” MAISON REPEATED. “YOU MEAN you have Herobrine in the Overworld?”

“He’s just an old ghost story,” Alex said. “When I was little, older kids used to scare me with stories and say that Herobrine would get me in the night.”

“Do you have Herobrine in your Minecraft game?” I asked Maison, feeling the panic of the dream rising up in me.

“No,” Maison said. “He’s just a hoax. I don’t know how he got started, but he’s not really in Minecraft. People just say he is and come up with all sorts of creepy stories about him. Like he’s a ghost or he’s a virus.”

“He’s a sickness?” Alex said.

“No, a computer virus,” Maison said. “It’s something that can damage your computer and keep it from working right.”

“If he’s not really in your Minecraft game,” I said, “how come there are pictures of him in it?”

“Oh, these?” Maison said, looking back at the images on her computer screen. “You can just put a mod of him in there. That means you ‘modify’ the game. People put images of him in the game and try to trick people into believing he’s real.”

“What can you find out about Herobrine?” I asked Maison.

Her fingers flew over the keys of her computer. She opened up some webpages and skimmed them. “Not a whole lot,” she said. “He’s like an urban legend. There’s no canon on him because he’s not real. So one person will say this is true about him, and another person will say something totally different is true about him.”

I was feeling sweaty. I wiped my head.

“Are you okay, Stevie?” Maison asked, concerned. “You look really sick.”

“Yeah,” I said, but my tone sounded more like I was saying the opposite. “It’s dumb. I’ve just been having dreams about him …”

I trailed off. I expected both Maison and Alex to be like Dad and tell me to get over dreams about some made-up ghost. However, both of them cringed and then looked at me with wide, telling eyes.

“I’ve been having dreams about him, too,” Alex said. “Ever since I found the music disc.”

“This last week,” Maison said, “I’ve had a nightmare about Herobrine every night.”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. No wonder the dreams had gotten under my skin so much … if Alex and Maison were dreaming the same thing, these were more than regular dreams!

“What happens in your dreams?” I gasped.

“I’m by myself and I feel really scared,” Maison said. “Then Herobrine pops out at the last minute.”

“Same,” Alex said.

“Does he talk to you?” I asked.

They both shook their heads.

“He’s talked to me in my dreams,” I said. “At least, I think it was him talking. He said that the Overworld is doomed and there’s nothing we can do about it. The dreams must be the connection to this prophecy. It makes sense now.”

“This still doesn’t make sense to me,” Alex disagreed. “How could a make-believe ghost be behind all this?”

“That’s not the only thing,” Maison said. “How do you defeat something that’s hurting you but isn’t even real?”