Paul Slater. Paul Slater.

"What are you doing here?" I asked. "Are you ... are you dead?"

"I was about to ask you the same question," Paul said. He looked at Jesse, who was still clutching my shoulders. "Who's your friend? He is a friend, I assume."

"I - " I glanced from Jesse to Paul and then back again. "I came up here to get him," I explained. "He's my friend. My friend Jesse. Jack accidentally exorcised him, and - "

"Ah," Paul said, rolling back and forth on his heels. "Yes. I told you that you should have left well enough alone with Jack. He'll never be one of us, you know."

I just stared at him. I could not figure out what was happening. Paul Slater, here? It didn't make any sense. Not unless he was dead. "One of ... what?"

"One of us," Paul repeated. "I told you, Suze. All this do-gooding, mediator nonsense. I can't believe you fell for it." He shook his head, chuckling a little. "I would have thought you were smarter than that. I mean, the old man, I can understand. He's from a completely different world - a different generation. And Jack, of course, is ... well, clearly unsuited for this sort of thing. But you, Suze. I'd have expected more from you."

Jesse let go of my shoulders but kept one hand firmly around one of my wrists ... the wrist with Father Dominic's watch on it. "This," he said, "is not the gatekeeper, I take it."

"No," I said. "This is Jack's brother, Paul. Paul?" I looked at him. "How did you get here? Are you dead?"

Paul rolled his eyes. "No. Please. And you didn't need to go through all that rigmarole to get here, either. You can, like me, come and go from here when you please, Suze. You've just been spending so much time 'helping' " - he made quotation marks in the air with his fingers - "lost souls like that one" - he nodded his head in Jesse's direction - "you've never had a chance to concentrate on discovering your real potential."

I stared at him. "You told me . . . you told me you don't believe in ghosts."

He smiled like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. "I should have been more specific," he said. "I don't believe in letting them walk all over me, like you clearly seem to." His gaze roved over Jesse contemptuously.

I was still having trouble processing what I was seeing ... and hearing.

"But . . . but isn't that what mediators are supposed to do?" I stammered. "Help lost souls?"

Paul heaved a shudder, as if the fog swirling around us had suddenly grown colder. "Hardly," he said. "Well, maybe the old man. And the boy. But not me. And certainly not you, Susannah. And if you'd bothered giving me the time of day, instead of being so caught up trying to rescue this one" - he sneered in Jesse's direction - "I might have been able to show you precisely what you're capable of. Which is so much more than you can begin to imagine."

A glance at Jesse told me that I had better cut this little conversation short if I didn't want any bloodshed. I could see a muscle I'd never noticed before leaping in Jesse's jaw.

"Paul," I said. "I want you to know that it really means a lot to me, the fact that you, apparently, have your finger on the pulse of the mystical world. But right now, if I don't get back to earth, I'm going to wake up dead. Not to mention the fact that if I'm not mistaken, your little brother might be having a really hard time down there with a guy named Diego and a chick in a hoop skirt."

Paul nodded. "Yes," he said. "Thanks to you and your refusal to acknowledge your true calling, Jack's life is in danger, as is, incidentally, the priest's."

Jesse made a sudden motion toward Paul, which I cut short by holding up a restraining hand.

"How about giving us some help then, huh, Paul, if you know so much?" I asked. It was no joke, holding Jesse back. He seemed ready to tear the guy's head off. "How do we get out of here?"

Paul shrugged. "Oh, is that all you want to know?" he asked. "That's easy. Just go into the light."

"Go into the - " I broke off, furious. "Paul!"

He chuckled. "Sorry," he said. "I just wanted to know if you'd seen the movie."

But he wasn't chuckling a bit a split second later when Jesse suddenly launched himself at him.

I'm serious. It was way WWF. One minute Paul was standing there, smirking, and the next, Jesse's fist was sinking into his tanned, handsome face.

Well, I'd tried to stop him. Paul was, after all, probably my only way out of there. But I can't say I really minded when I heard the sound of nasal cartilage tearing.

Paul was pretty much a baby about the whole thing. He started cursing and saying stuff like, "You broke my nose! I can't believe you broke my nose!"

"I'll break more than your nose," Jesse declared, clutching Paul by his shirt collar and waving his blood-smeared fist in front of his eyes, "if you don't tell us how to get out of here now."

How Paul might have responded to this interesting threat I never did find out. That's because I heard a sweetly familiar voice call my name. I turned around, and there, running toward me through the mist, was Jack.

Around his waist was a rope.

"Suze," he called. "Come quick! That mean lady ghost you warned me about, she cut your rope, and now she and that other one are beating up Father Dominic!" Then he stopped running, took in the sight of Jesse still clutching a bloody-faced Paul, and said, curiously, "Paul? What are you doing here?"

A moment passed. A heartbeat, really - if I'd had one, which, of course, I didn't. No one moved. No one breathed. No one bunked.

Then Paul looked up at Jesse and said, "You'll regret this. Do you understand? I'll make you sorry."

Jesse just laughed, without the slightest trace of humor, and said, "You're welcome to try."

Then he tossed Paul aside as if he were a used tissue, strode forward, seized my wrist, and dragged me toward Jack.

"Take us to them," he said to the little boy.

And Jack, slipping his hand into mine, did so, without looking back at his brother. Not even once.

Which told me, I realized, just about everything - except what I really wanted to know:

Just who - or, more aptly, what - was Paul Slater?

But I didn't have time to stay and find out. Father Dominic's watch gave me a minute to return to my body, or be placed in the difficult position of not having one ... which was going to make starting the eleventh grade in the fall a real problem.

Fortunately, the hole was not far from where we'd been standing. When we got to it and I looked down, I couldn't see Father Dominic anywhere. I could hear the sounds of a struggle, though - breaking glass, heavy objects hitting the floor, wood splintering.

And I could see my body, stretched out beneath me as if I were sleeping, and sleeping so deeply I wasn't stirring at the sound of all that racket. Not a twitch.

Somehow, it seemed a much longer way down than it had climbing up.

I turned to look at Jack. "You should go first," I said. "We'll lower you with the rope - "

But both he and Jesse shouted, "No!" at the same time.

And the next thing I knew, I was falling. Really. Down and down I tumbled, and while I couldn't see much as I fell, I could see what I was about to land on, and let me tell you, I did not relish crushing my own ...

But I didn't. Just like in dreams I've had where I've been falling, I opened my eyes at the moment of impact, and found myself blinking up at Jesse's and Jack's faces, peering down at me over the rim of the hole Father Dom had created with his chanting.

I was inside myself again. And I was in one piece. I could tell as I reached down to make sure my legs were still there. They were. Everything was functional. Even the bruise on my head hurt again.

And when, a second later, a statue of the Virgin Mary - the one Adam had told me had wept blood - landed across my stomach, well, that really hurt, too.

"There she is," Maria de Silva cried. "Get her!"

I have to tell you, I am getting really tired of people - particularly dead people - trying to kill me. Paul is right: I am a do-gooder. I do nothing but try to help people, and what do I get for my efforts? Virgin Mary statues in the midriff. It isn't fair.

To show just how unfair I thought it all was, I heaved the statue off me, scrambled to my feet, and grabbed Maria by the back of her skirt. Apparently, recalling her last incident with me, she decided to make a run for it. Too late, though.

"You know, Maria," I said conversationally as I reeled her in by her flounces, the way a fisherman reels in a really big trout. "Girls like you really irritate me. I mean, it's not just that you get guys to do your dirty work for you, instead of doing it yourself. It's this whole I'm-so-much-better-than-you-because-I'm-a-de-Silva thing that really bugs me. Because this is America." I reached out and grabbed a fistful of her glossy black curls. "And in America, we're all created equal, whether our last name is de Silva or Simon."

"Yes?" Maria cried, lashing out with her knife. She'd apparently gotten it back. "Well, do you want to know what irritates me about you? You think that just because you are a mediator, you are better than me."

I have to tell you, that one cracked me up.

"Now that's not true," I said, ducking as she took a swipe at me with her blade. "I don't think I'm better than you because I'm a mediator, Maria. I think I'm better than you because I do not go around agreeing to marry guys I'm not in love with."

In a flash, I had her arm pinned behind her waist again. The knife fell to the floor with a clatter. "And even if I did," I went on, "I wouldn't have them murdered just so I could marry somebody else. Because" - keeping a firm grip on her hair with my other hand, I steered her toward the altar rail - "I believe the key to a successful relationship is communication. If you had simply communicated with Jesse better, none of this would be happening now. I mean, that's your real problem right there, Maria. Communication goes two ways. Somebody has to talk. And somebody has to listen."