AS IT TURNED OUT, FINDING the portal wasn’t hard—there were smatterings of blood half in and half out of it, human blood, I knew. Finding Ghost, on the other hand, would be a different matter, one I wasn’t sure I was up to—even as I stepped over the transom into his world. And yet that too proved unfounded when I sensed something moving almost immediately, something big, something bipedal, crashing through the cycad fronds like an earth mover, vibrating the ground like a tiny earthquake.
“Ghost? Is that you?”
The fact was, I couldn’t be sure, and began backing away—back through the portal to our fishing spot near the Mohawk River, back to what I perceived to be safety—though I should have known by then there was no such thing. Until at last a great, grayish snout emerged and was followed
