Excerpt: The Lantern-Bearer

Dracula jumped out at him, with its shiny new paperback binding—a cheap edition, but the best in that it was the most portable. This one had to be the gateway; it was the only Stoker book a drunken eighteen-year old might have heard of. *He picked it up off the shelf and stroked its binding like it was an old friend. He'd pulled more people out of it than he could count, and this would be just another one. There wasn't anything unusual about it, to be sure.....
“Though I could use something with more variety than my usual routine....”
He flipped through its pages, and then he stopped cold, his body rigid and his heart racing. Silent prayers for the mercy of the gods sprang forth from every corner of his mind. The book itself was completely innocuous, but there were things within its pages that did far more than go bump in the night. The wolves were, of course, the least of them—and the bandits, the spirits, the shades, the Count, his serfs...all were as real as anything in Earth's reality for the Stoker universe. He could only hazard a guess as to where in the book Alexander Demarchis had ended up—but his guess made the possibility almost tangible. It dropped like a stone into his stomach, and left him no choice. His hands—once divine, now caught in limbo between humanity and divinity—raised the book up to his face, and his lips formed words.
“We were entering the Borgo Pass....”
He reached down to light the lantern pendant on the chain around his neck. As the light sprang up, he whispered, “Through the gateway, take me where I wish to go, and where you fear for the fabric of the world's realities....”