We all have had that dream: where we are being chased through a dark and cluttered forest by some nameless horror. We run as fast as we can, gasping for air like a fish out of water and knowing that we dare not pause to look behind to see what follows for fear they will catch us. For Danny Fenton that dream was more common that for others. When you're a half ghost the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night are always coming after you.

But this dream was different. It seemed more real. Details were oddly specific. The air stank of compost and stagnant water. The trees gave off a cinnamony scent as his crashed through their branches. From time to time a puff of brimstone warned him that the nameless horror was getting closer, requiring him to put on a fresh burst of speed.

Suddenly a ravine opened up in front of him, he tumbled down with painful bumps and jolts. He sprang to his feet as soon as he stopped rolling and tore down the bottom of the ravine. After a time it seemed like the pall of dread behind him was receding. Had the monster gone in the other direction? He hoped so. His strength was gone. He had to find a place to hide and rest.

Ahead he saw a thicket of some kind growing up around a large stone that had rolled out of the bank of the ravine. The space behind the stone formed a sort of cave. He crawled under the brambles and around the rock. There was just enough space for him to curl up.

He sat there scrunched up for several minutes trying to breath softly, silently. The miasma of terror, of evil, that had driven him ahead of that thing seemed to have drifted away. It would be back. Or perhaps not. He couldn't tell. He squirmed around in his hidey-hole trying to get more comfortable. He brushed twigs out of his long hair, rubbed mud off his short white pants. He reached up under his shirt and pulled the sweaty bra that was rasping on his already irritated breast down...

Bra?

Danny woke with a start.

He ran his hands over his chest to be sure. No boobs, no bra. Just his normal skinny self. "What was that all about?" he wondered.

The dream remained vividly in his mind. He replayed it over and over. The chase, the nameless dread. The oddly vivid details. The touching of breasts that he did not have.

He picked up his cell phone.

"Do you ever dream about being a boy?" he asked when Sam answered.

"Do you have any idea what time it is," she demanded.

"No. Seriously, do you ever have dreams about being a boy?"

"No, Never. Good night!"

"Sam, wait, don't hang up! I had this really weird dream where I had breasts!"

"Danny. You're fourteen and a boy. Thinking about boobs is normal."

"I was dreaming I was a girl."

"I'm glad you're finally getting in touch with your feminine side. Now, good night!" and she snapped her phone shut.

***

Danny lay in bed for a long time trying to figure out what the dream meant, if it meant anything at all. Part of what Sam had said was true, he had dreamed about making out with girls, but he had never dreamed of being a girl. That was something entirely different...and creepy. At some point in the long hours of the night he fell asleep and woke with a start when his alarm clock sounded.

School didn't go any better. He was groggy from lack of sleep and musing about the dream and got bawled out by Mr. Lancer when Danny not only didn't know the answer to a question his teacher put to him, but didn't even realize that Mr. Lancer had asked him a question. This lead to a long speech about how not applying himself to his school work would ruin the rest of his life and an hour's detention after school. The detention came because Danny started mouthing the all too familiar speech. Mr. Lancer did not like being mocked.

At lunch Danny was so distracted that Sam and Tucker had already finished most of their meals before Danny made it through the line. Tucker was sneaking some baby carrots from Sam's vegetarian salad plate when Danny sat down and drenched the meatloaf on his plate with catsup. He forked a few bites into his mouth before Sam asked, "Did you tell Tucker about your dream?"

"No, he didn't." Tucker replied. "What dream was this?"

Danny shoveled more food into his mouth so he wouldn't have to answer.

"He dreamed he was a girl so he could feel himself up!"

"I did not!" Danny shouted, or tried to with a mouth full of meatloaf.

"Dude, that is messed up!" Tucker laughed.

"That's not what happened!"Danny sputtered. "I dreamed I was being chased by something."

"That part sounds natural enough," Tucker said. "Who was it- - Skulker? Vlad? The Fright Knight?"

"I don't know. That was odd in itself. I thought I knew every frightening thing in the Ghost Zone."

"Maybe you weren't dreaming you were in the Ghost Zone?" Sam suggested.

"It seemed like I was but during the dream I didn't know where I was. I found a place to hide, and after whatever it was went away settled down to take a nap. That's then I dreamed something was itching on my chest. I went to fix it - - and it was a bra. And that's when I woke up."

"That's your weird dream?" Tucker scoffed. "You woke up before anything happened. Now if I were dreaming about T'Keisha I wouldn't wake up until we..."

"Too Much Personal Information, Tuck." Sam interrupted. "I do not want to know what you dream about!"

"Sam, you a girl," Danny began,

"Thanks for noticing."

"Do you have problems with your bra when you get all hot and sweaty?"

"I" she emphasized, "do not get 'all hot and sweaty.' Goths do not sweat.!"

"Right!"

"Still you make an interesting point," Sam continued. "Some girls, wearing poorly fitted brassieres can experience skin irritation during prolonged physical activity. A detail I can't imagine you knowing."

"So you believe my dream is real?"

"Danny, you had a nightmare, We all do. So what? big deal!"

***

But that night it was the same dream, only different.

He was being chased through a dark and formless jungle. Something was panting close on his heels. He pushed through some large, leafy brushes and suddenly ran out into the air. He fell with a sickening lurch, which was weird because Danny could fly and wasn't afraid of height because of it. He caught a brief glimpse of an endless sky filled with millions of floating islands, some large, some small. Some with trees and rivers and waterfalls as the rivers ran off the edge of the islands. He closed his eyes tight to drive out that insane, illogical, impossible sights. (But that's just the way the Ghost Zone, Danny thought to himself in his dream. Why am I frightened by something so normal?)

As he fell he could feel long hair whipping about his face. Then came a loud scream, like the opening of a rusty gate, only louder, and longer, "r-r-r-r-r-r-ck" and slithey tentacles wrapped themselves about his body.

Danny opened his eyes and looked up. A thing like a frog the size of a minivan with bat-wings and tentacles instead of limbs had swooped out of the sky and seized him. Danny screamed in terror, a high pitched girly scream such as had never come out of his mouth. The monster replied with another cry like the creak of a rusty gate.

It was carrying him - her? - back to its master, the nameless horror that had been chasing him - her? - for the last several days. Going back was not an option. His or her hands flailed about until they touched a stick that had been shoved under his (or her?) belt. It was a bit over a yard long. Danny pulled the stick out and began whacking the beast with it. The beast screamed in protest and tried to grab the stick out of his - her - hands but it's tentacles were too clumsy. Suddenly Danny made a lucky struck, cracking the beast firmly on the side of its head.

There was a loud "snap" and the head seemed to cave in on itself. The beast's tentacles went limp and Danny fell out of its grasp. Danny - or whoever's dream he was in - breathed a sigh of relief, then sucked in his or her breath in fear of what would happen next.

'Next' was a flurry of whacking tree branches through which Danny smashed. They rained a hundred bruising blows on him, slowed his fall so that when he hit solid land it was only mildly stunning. He staggered to his feet, brushing off the branches that continued to rain down on him - or her. Vaguely he noticed that his legs were bare, his shoes were white tennies with a pink stripes. His socks were white with lacy tops. His eyes swung around the clearing he was in, searching for cover. He saw a fallen tree, a giant, three or four feet in diameter off in the distance, brush grew thickly around its upraised stump. Danny pushed his way through the thicket until he found a small hollow deep within. He slumped against the fallen tree, brushed long, tangled hair out of his eyes (?) and broke down into uncontrollable crying.

With a gasp, Danny sat up in bed.

There were no tears in his eyes. No brambles, oozing scratches on his arms and legs, no log or floating islands.

Danny looked around his bedroom. Street lights coming in through his window made the room shadowy. It was comfortably familiar: the outlines of posters on the wall, the jumble of dirty clothes on the floor. Danny found that he was breathing heavily, his heart was pounding.

He grabbed for his cell phone, flipped it open and was on the verge of pressing Sam's name on the speed dial when he stopped. What was he going to tell her: that he had a dream where he'd cried like a little girl? She'd love being awaken in the middle of the night to hear that! He put the phone back down and laid back on his pillow and sighed. What was going on? Why was he having these dreams? Were they even dreams? It was like he was seeing things that were happening to someone else. But who?

Danny tried to get back to sleep but couldn't. After an hour of restless tossing and turning, he got up and went downstairs and turned on the TV. He flipped through the channels somewhat mechanically, looking for something interesting. At some point sleep must have overtaken him because he was back in the thicket on the floating island. He was cold and shivering, sitting with his arms wrapped around his bare knees. The knees were skinned and covered in dirt and clotted blood. Clutched in his hands was a photograph. He was staring intently at the photo and whispering. For some reason Danny couldn't make out who was in the picture. He wanted to look around the thicket, see what was there. Maybe something would give him a clue to what was going on, but his eyes wouldn't leave the faceless photo. Although the sense of reality was intense Danny couldn't not make himself do anything. It was like he was a remote observer, a rider, disconnected from his own dream. He tried again to make out the image in the photograph but the dreamer was focusing through the picture, staring off into infinity.

A sense of panic swept over him, of helplessness, desperation. If only....

"Danny!"

He was back in the living room, cold sweat running down his back.

"What are you doing out here?" his mother asked. She had coming down in her bathrobe to start breakfast.

Danny didn't answer for a moment, confused because the voice calling out his name hadn't been his mother. The dreamer had been calling his name. And with another start, Danny realized that it was he in the picture the dreamer had been starting at! Why would he dream about himself?

"Danny?" There was a note of concern in his mother's voice.

"Had a bad dream, Mom. Couldn't get back to sleep."

"About what?" she asked.

"Being chased by some nameless horror."

"We all have those, sweetie. It's a school day, though. You'd better get ready. Don't want to be late for class." She turned to go to the kitchen.

"Say, Mom." A thought had come to him.

"What, Danny?"

"Have you and Dad ever studied telepathy? Telepathic ommunications with the Ghost Zone?"

"You mean like mediums, seances, Ouija boards and the like?"

"Yeah," Danny agreed, not wanted to introduce his dreams into the discussion just yet.

"Yes, we did, but the problem with any kind of study like this is setting up a control. How can you prove that what the people are saying they have heard from the Ghost Zone really comes from there. Since no one has ever been to the Ghost Zone there's no way of knowing."

Danny never understood why his parents thought their Ghost Zone Portal didn't work when so obviously it did.

"So could one receive telepathy from the Ghost Zone?"

"There have been some very intriguing cases; we could never validate any of them."

Maddie Fenton was always the sensible one in the family. She would never commit to something she couldn't absolutely prove. This was about as close to a 'yes' as she would give,. Danny wanted to ask some more questions but his mother told him to get dressed.

At school that day Danny tried to avoid Sam and Tucker while he thought about the dreams he had had. But they caught up with him at lunch.

"Have any more strange dreams?" Sam asked as she slid into a seat across from him.

Danny sighed and recounted his dream.

"You cried like a little girl!" Tucker chortled just like Danny expected him to.

"The nameless horrors sound like something out of Lovecraft," Sam said. At Danny's blank stare, she explained. "H. P. Lovecraft. Wrote a lot of horror stories in the 30s about creatures of monstrous forms from alien dimensions."

"I'm sure these are visions from someone trapped in the Ghost Zone," Danny insisted.

"Who?" Sam asked.

"I don't know."

"Why you?" Tucker asked.

Danny shrugged. That was another question haunting Danny. He suspected it maybe was because of his half-ghost nature. Strange things always happened to him, whether he wanted it to or not.

Danny found himself unable to concentrate in class after lunch. The question of who was trapped and being hunted in the Ghost Zone kept going around and around in his mind. When the bell sounded ending the class Danny got up and walked out of the room, walked down the hall and straight through the doors. He kept on walking until he came to a nearby park. He sat on a bench there and thought.

He was convinced now that someone - someone he knew - was lost in the Ghost Zone but how did they get in there? There were only two working Ghost Zone Portals as far as he knew. His parent's and Vlad Masters' No one could get through his parents' portal without triggering an alarm – aside from Sam, Turner, Jazz, and himself. And all of them were accounted for. It was hard to tell what his worst enemy - Vlad Masters - was up to, but it wasn't like him to throw mortals into the Ghost Zone. So how else could anyone have gotten onto the other dimension?

Of course it could be a trick to get him to enter the Ghost Zone. He had a lot of enemies there. Actually, pretty much all the inhabitants of the Ghost Zone qualified as enemies. But not all of them would think of such an elaborate ruse, if ruse this was.

Skulker, the greatest of ghost hunters, immediately came to mind. He long had wanted to nail Danny's hide to his lodge's wall. Literally, alongside all the other skins of ghostly beasts he had hunted down and killed. He was a clever and remorseless hunter. He was heartless enough to steal a mortal and use them as bait to snare Danny. But the flying monster that Danny had seen in his second dream was unlike any he had ever seen in the Ghost Zone.

That could imply Desiree, the ghost genie. She could make monsters of any form out of nothingness. And, again, could snatch a mortal into the ghost zone. But this seemed too subtle for her. Not that Desiree wasn't above making indirect, complicated plots. It just wasn't part of her nature.

Ember McLain was cunning but tended towards music related plots. Penelope Spectra, who lived off the depressions of others was more likely to kidnap someone and torment them the way his dreams seemed to imply. Walker, the ghost warden, wouldn't use monsters to chase escapees from his prison.

In all, it did not seem likely that this was a plot by any of his known enemies to lure him into the Ghost Zone. That much was a relief because it was obvious that Danny would have to enter the Ghost Zone to rescue them.

But who?

It had to be someone who had a picture of him. That sort of eliminated the person Danny would most like to rescue - Paulina, the prettiest cheerleader at Casper High. Danny, like most boys at Casper High had a crush on her, not that she ever had time for a mere freshman. She couldn't be the person in his dream because she had never accepted any of Danny's school pictures. Besides the girl in his dreams - it had been a relief to Danny to realize that the person in his dreams was not him - had a very pale skin. Paulina was Latina, with a Latin's brown skin. For that matter, it ruled out both T'Keisha and Valerie Grey, who were Black.

While Danny wasn't what you would call a popular kid, he was gregarious. He knew most of the kids in his school. There were a lot of girls he knew – vaguely ay least – who fit the image of the girl in his dream, but Danny had a pretty good idea who it was. It was a girl he had met over the summer at Camp Sleepy Hollow. A red-head with long hair, and very pale skin that showed off her many freckles - Abigail Farley-Smythe-Hyde.

She was the daughter of a Guy in White, the government's official ghost fighting organization. She desperately wanted to be a Guy in White when she grew up, something her father was opposed to. Her father was a real Marionet; did not want her doing anything adventurous. Which, not unlike Sam Manson, only made her want to do dangerous, risky things. That didn't explain how she got into the Ghost Zone but if there was anyone who could get into ghost-related trouble, if would be her.

At the same time she would have to be in really serious trouble before she would think of calling on Danny for help. Danny Fenton, that is. She didn't know that Danny was the ghost, Danny Phantom. This had made things difficult at Camp because she had come to go ghost hunting and Danny had to go to great lengths to make sure that the ghost she found wasn't him!

After camp Danny had called her a couple times to have her dig up information from her father's Guys in White computer. While Danny had been desperate at the time for the information, this had only encouraged Abigail to continue her ghost-hunting. And convinced that Danny was ghost-hunting on the side, she was always trying to insert herself into his plans. Danny had mixed feeling about the girl. She could be very pleasant but other times bossy and demanding.

Danny had worked hard not to encourage her, so he couldn't imagine why she would think that staring at his picture would send a message to him.

Of course, it didn't have to be Abigail.

There was one way to find out.

Danny pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his contacts till he found Abigail's name. He hit 'send' and waited.

There was no sound of dialing. He looked at the display and saw "No connection."

She could be out of range of any tower, only she lived in the Washington, DC area. It was hard to imagine any place there out of range of a tower. She could have shut down her phone for school but looking at his watch and adjusting for time zones, he figured she had to be out of school by now. Or she could be no place on Earth...

At home, on his desk somewhere, were papers she'd given him from the Guys in White computer files. One of them had Abigail's father's phone number. Her father would certainly know where Abigail was. Danny looked at his watch again. It was too early to show up at home. He looked around. No one was in sight. He went ghost, turned invisible and flew off to his home at Fentonworks.

Danny stayed invisible as he searched his desk. He moved papers as quietly as possible. In accordance to Murphy Law, the last paper he looked at was the one with the phone number. He typed the number into his phone but flew out of the house to a quiet location before pressing 'send.'

The call was picked up on the first ring.

"This is a private number." a gruff voice said. "How did you get it?"

"I'm - ah - a friend. I'm - ah -calling about - ah - your daughter...." Danny stumbled, unnerved by the anger in the other's voice.

"What do you know about my daughter?"

"Is she home?"

"I think you know better than I?"

"Abigail safety is very important to me." Danny said.

"What do you want for her return?"

"What do you mean?"

"Don't play cute with me, Daniel Fenton. I know who you are. I know where you're calling from. If you think you can get money from me you are sadly mistaken. You don't screw with the federal government. Give up now. Tell me where my daughter is. It will go better for you."

"Are you nuts? I didn't do anything to you daughter. I'm trying to find her."

"The F.B.I. is closing in on you at this very minute. You can't hope to get away with this!"

"I - -" Danny snapped his phone shut, then recalling how the F.B.I. had been able to track people by their cell phone even when turned off, he turned the phone over and dug out the batteries. He stuffed the separate parts into his pocket. He looked over the edge of the rooftop he had been standing on expecting to see F.B.I. cars closing in on their house. He didn't see any. Had Abigail's father lied about that? Then again he knew who he was. Caller ID! Danny rolled his eyes. How could he have not thought about that before making the call? Gack, what an amateur. Mr. Farley-Hyde-Smythe hardly needed to send agents scurrying after him; they need only camp out at his house and wait for him to come home.

What was he to do?

He reached for his cell phone to call Sam and Tucker, then stopped. They might be already listening in to his conversations. Besides what could she suggest? Either to run or to surrender.

Running would be a sign of guilt, but if he surrendered it would be days, perhaps weeks, before they stopped questioning him, and all that time Abigail would be stuck in the Ghost Zone waiting to be rescued. He could hardly tell the F.B.I. about his dreams, or about traveling to the Ghost Zone and least of all about being a ghost. The simple fact was that he had to get into the Ghost Zone was quickly as possible and bring Abigail back out.

Danny turned ghost and flew back to his bedroom. He wanted to leave a note to someone in case things did not go well in the Ghost Zone. It couldn't be Sam or Tucker because he didn't want to get them involved. Or worse, have them insist on going with him. He could hardly tell his parents since they neither knew that Danny was a ghost or that anyone could travel into the Ghost Zone. He'd have to tell Jazz, but Jazz wouldn't never let him go, she was too responsible that way. Ah! Maybe she wasn't home yet!

Danny grabbed a pen and tore a page out of one of his notebooks. "Gone to Ghost Zone" he wrote, left it unsigned and phased through walls into her room. He tucked the note into a corner of the writing pad on her desk. She wouldn't find it for a couple days, he guessed. If everything went well, he'd be back and could retrieve the note before she ever saw it.

That done, Danny dropped through the floors into the basement labs where his parents had built their portal. He slapped the DNA-based security-lock, opening the steel shutters that usually covered the swirling vortex of ecto-plasm leading from the mortal dimension to the dimensions of ghosts, spirits and things that go bump in the night. It took several seconds for the shutters to fully open and another few seconds to close. Time enough for a ghost to slip through the portal. Danny hit the 'close' button then dived into the void,