Nightmare journey

from its desert motif-and hoped that the ruins might somehow form a barrier between their unknown guest and themselves. All of them badly needed a good day's sleep.
    As they lay beneath the gnarled elm, however, the unseen being pressed itself upon them more vigorously than ever: Melopina woke, crying out, with the feeling that some creature had hold of her and was pressing her down into the earth…
    She kicked at it.
    She flailed the air and snarled in fear.
    She gasped for her breath. Jask could see that she was really having some trouble getting it, as if someone were choking her.
    Mellie…?
    Help me!
    Jask bent over her and, as he touched her face to feel for a fever, he felt the… thing rise from her. A cold, damp force pushed over him, lingering long enough for him to recognize that distant psychic fuzziness, was gone without a trace.
    When she had explained how it had felt, a formless mass of invisible flesh crushed into her, they discussed this new development.
    It's getting bolder, whatever it is, Tedesco 'pathed.
    Perhaps my grave robbing is finally being punished, Chaney 'pathed. Maybe this is the spirit of one of my victims, come to torture us.
    No one laughed. They were willing to consider any possibility.
    By the time they reached the abandoned port of Kittlesticks on the Hadaspuri Sea, they had all experienced physical contact-or something quite similar-with their unwanted companion. It approached them boldly now, while they were sleeping or while they were awake, as if it wished desperately to tell them something, to impart the essentials of a tale, an ethereal Ancient Mariner full of its own history of curses, calms and death.
    The five espers walked through the cobbled streets of Kittlesticks, which was little more than a thousand years old but which had been abandoned more than eight centuries ago. Its inhabitants had reported that the ghosts of Indians could be seen in the streets at night, slinking from shadowed door to shadowed door and that in the morning skeletons were found in the beds of men who had gone to sleep with all their flesh. Whether Kittlesticks lay upon ancient Indian burial grounds or whether the sea had washed unclean spirits under the extensive docks in the harbor, no one could say. When half the town's population had died in this mysterious manner, the rest picked up their belongings and moved down the coast, where they founded the town of Last Resort, which had thrived as a Hadaspuri Sea marketplace for many centuries after.
    They came out on the docks, where a hundred boats still lay, half rotten and sunken, others of metal and in relatively good repair.
    Perhaps, 'pathed Chaney, the thing cannot follow us across water.
    I fear that's an empty hole' Tedesco said.
    By this time the women were staying close to their men, and the men continually cast wary glances over their shoulders. All of them were heavy-eyed and fuzzy-minded from lack of sleep.
    We've nothing to lose by trying it, Melopina 'pathed.
    She's right-Jask.
    And by taking a ship, we would save days and days of marching around the shore of Hadaspuri-Kiera.
    The water slapped at the docks.
    The dead and dying ships caught pieces of the morning sun and shone in brief remembrance of their youth.
    I've never sailed-Tedesco.
    I have-Chaney.
    You think you could teach us to man the rig of a ship like that one? Tedesco pointed at what appeared to be a sound, yellow alloy ship, which still rode high in the water after so many years and which contained three masts, all empty of sailcloth.
    I could, I think-Chaney.
    Jask?-Tedesco.
    I'm for it.
    Please! Let's try it!-Melopina.
    They boarded the yellow ship, which was chained at the far end of the dock, and they found that she was in excellent condition. Her sealed engines, which had been placed in her hull during the Last War, were still functioning, monuments to the great technology of that age. Of its twenty robot tenders, twelve still rolled about the gleaming ship, polishing and repairing, scouring away the gradual erosions of time.
    We could forget the sails, Jask said. The engines will carry us across the Hadaspuri.
    Chaney stood on the bridge of the vessel, staring at the complex controls, his hairy fingers working them cautiously, his mouth twisted in concentration. Lights popped on; buzzers sounded; gauges registered levels of liquids and of power in the batteries. He looked away from all this for a moment and said to Jask, That's a bad idea.
    We'd save a week or