“Daniel! You’re here,” Gabriel says. “It worked. Chris, it worked!” Gabriel grabs Daniel’s arms and shakes him as if to prove that he is real. Then he hugs him, hard. Daniel winces and then stands there, stiff, unsure how to react. He waits until Gabriel lets go.
“What happened?” Chris asks.
“I don’t know. I just fell,” Daniel says. “I was in these ruins, and there was a circle on the ground, like…like this one right here! He points down. Only, without the picture on it. Just stone. And I was standing there, and then, the bottom dropped out. And now I’m here.”
Christopher and Gabriel look at each other and say at the same time: “It worked!”
“There’s more. I saw them both,” Daniel blurts. “I mean, not just now, but I did see them…” Daniel struggles to explain. “I saw Henry, and then Helen. They’re both alive. Henry was in a little room, and, Helen, I saw her, too, but it was in the future. Way in the future. There were just ruins left. I think. But I saw her, I swear! I saw them both! No, wait, I saw Henry, but I only heard Helen. Calling out to me. I couldn’t find her.” His words tumble out. Gabriel and Christopher struggle to follow.
“Okay, hold on,” Gabriel says, holding out both hands. “You had contact with both Helen and Henry, but at two different times?”
“Yeah,” Daniel says. “I saw Henry when my uncle pushed me into a temporary rift. But time ran out and I was pulled away and I couldn’t make contact with him. And then just now I heard Helen calling out, and then I glimpsed her. But then she was gone.”
“You know what,” Daniel says, looking around at the room, “Both times, I was in some type of stone building. A big one. Kind of like this one. The first time, it was dark, and I climbed up and looked in the window. The next time there were only ruins left, just the foundation pretty much. But…” he turns around again, “I could swear it was this place. Just, different.”
“Good man, Daniel,” Gabriel says, slapping Daniel on the back. “Good man. You’ve brought us far. We’re gonna get the kids, and then take care of Monder on a permanent basis. This represents progress.”
“I helped by falling through a hole?” Daniel says. “Okay…”
“We may have found this place, but we still don’t know how to locate Helen and Henry,” Christopher points out.
“I know, but now we have discovered the convergence point,” Gabriel says. “Something is anchoring us to this spot, even if it’s at different times. Just like it says in the Chairman’s research; there’s a single pin running through this space and it looks to be at the center of this labyrinth. Many thanks to you, Daniel, for falling through it. He points at the tree image in the floor at the center of the labyrinth. “Somehow, that’s our way in. That’s how we will get the kids back.”
“Here’s the concept,” Gabriel continues, beginning to pace back and forth. “We find a way to collapse all of the space-times in this rift together at once, thereby gaining access to and retrieving Helen and Henry. And for that, we will use the one thing we know has enough firepower to focus all of the layers at once: the Shard.”
“Here’s the most important requirement,” Christopher says. “We have to accomplish all this without letting Monder out. That’s kind of the tricky portion. Since the whole point of the rift is that he remains in there. Forever.”
“Agreed. Keeping Monder from escaping is going to be the toughest part of this venture,” Gabriel says. “It will require extremely precise timing and the element of surprise. We have to do it all in one move: Shard in position, kids out, Monder in, close rift. That’s the way this has to go down. That’s where the Shard will make all the difference. It will give us the power we need.”
They hear two motorcycles arriving out front. Gabriel runs out, crosses the entry hall, and bounds down the front steps in time to see his wife and cousin climbing off of their bikes. On Kate’s back, the handle of the Shard shines bright in the sun.
“Ah! Good, you’re here,” Gabriel says, kissing Kate’s cheek as he runs by her toward the van. “Good news: We’ve got most of a plan. We just need to get set up and then we’re in business. Daniel fell through a hole which was very helpful.” He grabs an armful of equipment and runs back in the front door, trailing wires and cords behind him.
“They’re closing in!”
“Okay then, draw us a way out of here.”
“I don’t know how!”
“You do know how, Henry, just concentrate. But concentrate fast. Do like you did when you were changing the shape of your room. Remember?”
Henry clutches a pen in his fist. He squishes his eyes shut.
A creature dives out of the air and grabs Henry by the shoulders with birdlike claws, attempting to take off with him. On its digital face it displays the scowl of an angry old man. Its robes flap like wings. It is a more predatory version of the figures from the white room.
“Helen!” Henry screams, kicking his legs.
Helen throws her hands forward and the creature tears apart in mid-air before it can travel more than a few yards. It drops Henry to the ground and white wisps dissipate into nothing. But two more of them swoop down and grab hold of Henry and again Helen must focus her energy to destroy them. Helen is having trouble holding off these attackers and Henry is getting dropped a lot.
Meanwhile, the desert around them has degenerated into a stampede of the bizarre. Machines and animals and combinations of the living and mechanical walk and roll and slither in every direction. A bulbous metal thing with spider-like legs made of chopsticks tramples into a flock of winged worms, which flap angrily into the air. Every which way, Helen’s and Henry’s minds have jumbled together into a chaotic disaster filled with fears and creatures and confusion. It is a land of nightmares.
“We need a place to go, Henry; I can’t keep up with these attacks,” Helen says. “My super powers are helping less and less. Can you make us a shelter? Anything?”
Henry scribbles a big rectangle on his paper with a handle on one side. A trap door appears in the ground. Helen runs to it and pulls up on the handle.
There is only dirt underneath. She drops it back down with a puff of dust.
“We’ll need more than that!” Helen yells, raising her voice to be heard over the shrieks and roars and the squeaking of gears and hydraulics. “Could you make us a door that actually leads someplace?”
“I know, I know!” Henry shouts. “I’m trying!” He stomps his foot and closes his eyes again. A cloud of black creatures is forming high in the sky, and they can hear screeching noises through the wind. Helen jumps out of the path of a knee-high tank with tiny bat wings.
Helen knows she has to quiet her mind in order to stop creating more chaos and noise. Her anxiety is getting the best of her. It’s impossible to tell who is conjuring what, but she suspects the cloud of black creatures appearing above them right now is her own creation. They seem terribly similar to swarming Tromindox.
Henry draws another picture and a lone wooden door appears standing in front of Helen. But there’s no building behind it.
“I promise it works,” Henry says to his sister.
“It had better,” Helen says, and throws the door open. Inside, they find a staircase leading down into the ground. The swarm swoops down out of the sky. Just before it overtakes them Helen and Henry pile through the door and slam it shut behind them. They can hear hundreds of bodies crashing into the other side.
Wherever this place is, it’s dark. “I can’t see,” Henry says, hurrying down the steps as fast as he can but careful to keep the pencil in contact with the paper. He’s afraid of drawing them into an underground tomb. He doesn’t even know if that’s a possibility, but he definitely doesn’t want to find out.
Helen switches on the light in her knife handle and holds it out to illuminate their path. “Here. Let’s keep moving.” Light flickers on the walls and at least lets them see their feet.
Henry draws a passageway, and then another, and then a big opening where
they stop to catch their breath. For once it’s quiet.
The underground refuge reminds Helen of the tunnels she fell into when she first came to the rift. That, too, was a place that took shape as she went and could easily fly out of control.
“We’ve got to find Renata,” Henry says.
“What?” Helen says. “Henry, we can’t!”
“She helped me. She’s trapped in here, too. Somewhere. I’m not going to abandon her.”
“Henry, that’s a dangerous thought right now,” Helen says. “What if you land right back in that little white room again? After all we’ve done to get out of there?”
“We can’t just leave Renata behind,” Henry says. “They’ll eat her or something.”
Helen looks Henry in the eye and puts her hands on his arms. “Henry, we don’t even have any idea how we are going to get back to Mom and Dad. We don’t know where we are. This place, it doesn’t have normal space or time in it. I don’t know why Monder hasn’t come after the fragment, or after you. It’s like he’s playing a cat-and-mouse game. Everything just keeps getting weirder. It’s not what I expected. It doesn’t make any sense at all. And if we try to go back right now, wherever ‘back’ might be, we could end up with you stuck in a little room, and me in the desert, wandering around, forever. I came here to get you, and I’m not going to lose you again. We’ve got to try and master this situation and figure out how to escape. And we have to do it together. Okay?”
Henry looks at his sister, but he still pictures Renata’s face. “Okay.”
“Now where is that music coming from?” Helen asks.
“What music?”
Helen puts an index finger in the air and tilts her head. It’s faint, but she can hear piano music. Classical. Chopin. A waltz.
“It’s this way,” Helen says.
There’s a different staircase leading back upward. The music seems to come from there.
“Uh, Helen? I didn’t put those stairs there,” Henry says. “I didn’t draw that.”
“So there’s someone else creating this place, too? Who plays piano?” Helen asks. “Could you hear music when you were in your little white room?”
“No,” Henry answers. “There was nothing but weird monsters in robes and pens and paper and Renata. And me, trying to get out.”
“Okay, well, let’s investigate. Maybe we can find a clue as to where we are. Maybe there’s a connection up there, back to where we came from. In any case, it’s better than running around a desert being dive-bombed by our own imaginations or taking up residence permanently under the ground.”
Henry doesn’t like the idea of climbing stairs that he didn’t create, but he follows Helen anyway.
These new stairs take much longer to climb than the others took to descend. Helen and Henry struggle upward, Helen listening for the piano and Henry hearing nothing. When they finally reach the top, instead of a door they find a flat square of wood over their heads. Helen pushes up on it, but it appears locked.
“I don’t like this,” Henry says.
Helen pushes harder, but it doesn’t budge. And then, out of nowhere, the lock opens itself and drops off of the latch into nothingness below.
“I didn’t do that,” Helen says.
“I didn’t do it,” Henry says.
“Someone else is definitely here,” Helen says.
They lift up the trap door expecting the unexpected, and they are not disappointed. The desert is gone, replaced by a vast room with high ceilings and plaster walls. At one end they can see the framework of a sweeping staircase in the process of being built.
They climb out, still half expecting to be run over by more frightening imaginary creatures. But none appear here. All is quiet.
Except the music.
“That piano,” Helen says, “maybe it’s a message—someone on the outside trying to communicate with us. Maybe it’s a clue to finding the way out. Does Renata play piano?”
“No, she doesn’t. And I still don’t hear any piano,” Henry says.
Helen turns in circles but she still can’t tell what direction the music is coming from.
“What is this place? It looks like they’re not done building it,” Henry says.
He’s right. They can see the sky right through the roof beams. Everything around them looks incomplete; columns don’t reach to the ceiling, stairs have no bannisters, there are holes where the windows and doors should be. Sunlight spills in everywhere and creates criss-cross patterns on the floor.
The floor looks like an unfinished stone puzzle. Tiles lie everywhere, many of them arranged in a circular pattern, but more sit in big stacks against the walls.
“This is some rich person’s house,” Henry observes.
“Seriously,” Helen agrees. “This place is huge. And it looks like whoever-it-is can afford all the fancy gold-plated doorknobs and stuff they want.”
The back wall is only a frame, with a long row of window frames waiting for glass. Henry looks out one of the empty windows at the trees outside.
Helen notices a single round tile leaned up against the bottom step of the future staircase. There are no others like it. “Wow,” she says, eyeing the tree design stamped into the stone. “This looks like a Silverwood symbol. Like we saw in those notebooks Mom had that time. You know the ones, with the legends written in them? About the tree in the mountains?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Henry says, turning from his view. “Let me see.” Something about the symbol is familiar to him. “I’ve seen this, but not in the legends,” he says. Henry digs the thick pile of maps out of his pocket. “Helen, that’s this.” He points to the one symbol that appears on all of the maps, and then the bigger version that he drew on its own page. The shape is an exact match with the tree on the tile. Round leaves, meandering roots.
“That’s the link!” Helen says. “That’s the pin we found that connects all of the maps together. This must be the real-world version. But how? How does it work?” She places her hand on the stone tree. “How does it fit?” She rolls the heavy circle out onto the floor and lays it down. It’s just a simple piece of stone; it doesn’t seem like a portal. Could she activate it somehow? She lifts it up and looks at the underside – nothing there. This appears to be nothing more than a decorative rock.
Henry comes toward the stone to get a closer look. But when he gets halfway across the room, something happens to him. It’s as if his sight goes blank, and all of his thoughts crash into his head at once. He sees the past, and the present, and the future, and himself falling through it. And he sees his parents, and Clarence the dog. And a pile of electronic equipment, and Christopher’s face. And moonlight, and the red van, and the white room…
He stumbles backwards. “Woa,” he says. “Something happened in my mind.”
“Are you okay?” Helen asks. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Henry says. He puts his hand on his forehead. So dizzy…
He tries to cross the room again, and again he feels like he is falling. He sees a motorcycle. And a piano. The floor spins. Then he takes another step forward and everything vanishes. He’s back in the big unfinished room with Helen.
“Helen, I saw a piano!” Henry says.
“Where? Henry, what happened?” Helen asks.
“It’s something with that tree,” Henry says. “It has to be. It’s in the maps and it’s here, and I saw Mom and Dad, Helen, and…I feel weird.” He sits down.
Helen can’t find anything about the stone that suggests any kind of special characteristics. She slaps her hand down on it. “Why can’t you tell me anything, tree? Why are you here?”
She stops to consider. “Why are you here…” Henry, maybe it’s not the stone itself, but where the stone is that matters. Or where the stone belongs when the floor is finished. Where were you when you started feeling strange?”
“Right there,” Henry points toward the middle of the room. Many of the tiles have been laid down there, a circular pattern
working its way out. And in the center there’s a round gap—roughly the same size as the tree stone.
Helen looks down at the blank spot, stepping around it carefully. “Henry what if this is the way out, right here?”
“Or it could go nowhere,” Henry says. “How can we tell?”
“Let’s try something,” Helen says, pulling out her knife and flipping it open. She sits cross-legged next to the circular spot, careful not to step in it.
Next she reaches out with the knife and carves in the loose dust: ARE YOU THERE H+H
Just as it did in the tunnels when she first arrived, and when she first saw Henry, the carved letters immediately start to fade. Soon they are gone entirely.
They wait.
And then, letters write themselves in the floor: YES
Helen and Henry look at each other, eyes wide. “This is it,” Helen says. “This is the way out. Back to normal space-time.”
“How do we know who is on the other side of this?” Henry says. “What if it’s Monder, or a big cave full of Tromindox, just sitting there waiting to eat us?
“Let’s ask something that only Mom or Dad could answer,” Helen says.
But before Henry can come up with a question, a wad of paper comes popping out and rolls onto the floor.
Helen opens up the paper and flattens it. The piano music sounds closer now, echoing in her ears. She wonders again why Henry can’t hear it.
She reads out loud: We are here. You are in a rift. Going to collapse it. Timing important. When we say GO you jump through. Not before.
“Jump through?” Henry asks. “Is that going to hurt?”
“Who cares?” Helen says. “The important thing is to get out.”
And then another piece of paper pops through. Henry grabs it and flattens it out.
It’s a photograph of Clarence.
“It’s them! It’s really them!” Henry yells.
“I wonder how long we wait until we’re supposed to go through,” Helen says. “A minute? A day?”
“What if the crazy monster things come flying in here?” Henry asks, glancing uneasily at the open windows. They have no protection in this frame of a house.
Silver Shard Page 20
