It was while she was ill and in bed for several weeks that Marianne found the pencil. It looked quite ordinary, but it wasn't. The things she drew with it - a house, a landscape, the face watching at the window - came alive in her dreams. Sometimes what she drew was good and friendly; sometimes bad and frightening. Once, without quite meaning to, she put herself and the boy in her dreams into a very real danger, from which the only possible escape needed more courage than Marianne thought she could possibly find ...