Then there was the touching down in the new world, as though that wind-hand had tired of him and tossed him to the ground with no concept of “smooth landing.” On top of that, it seemed to have no regard for what he’d be facing on the other side: bullets, explosions, an angry mob . . . hungry tigers! The not-knowing messed with David’s mind the way waking in a different place every day would: if he had to do it, he’d handle whatever he faced; but he wouldn’t like it. And finally, there was the knowledge that he was leaving his home and family with no guarantee of returning. What if someone on the other side detained him? What if the antechamber items stopped showing him the way home, or—as had almost happened several times—he lost them? He’d be in the deepest cavern imaginable with a broken rope.
Despite all of this, David was determined to land—and stay—on his feet this time.
Didn’t happen. As soon as his sneakered toes hit the ground, they slipped backward and he slammed down on wet grass. He was able to lift his broken arm, so it didn’t hit for a change, but the air in his lungs gushed out as from popped balloons. He sucked in, getting a mouthful of dirt, pine needles, and grass.
He coughed, groaned, and rolled over—just as Xander landed in the very spot where David had been lying. His brother copied his actions exactly: his feet slipped back, and he came down hard. He lay splayed there, cheek to the ground, one eye closed, heaving for breath.
The portal hovered beyond David’s sneakers, five feet off the ground. Behind a shimmering, wavy rectangle of air, the empty antechamber seemed like a perfectly good airplane from which he’d just leaped. Then the door slammed, and the portal shattered away like glass.
David turned back to Xander, who was still wheezing in the grass. “You hurt?”
“Nothing major surgery won’t fix.” Xander rolled over and sat up. “Glad I didn’t land on these.” He looked at the items in his hands: the claw hammer and planer.
David got his feet under him, rose, and helped his brother up. While Xander worked the tools into his back pockets, David slapped needles and grass off his chest and legs. He glanced at his surroundings and remembered what Xander had said when they first arrived in Pinedale: nothing but trees. Water dripped from tall pines and leafy oaks, sounding like the rain hadn’t stopped. But the sky above them bore the blue tinge of faded jeans. In the distance, dark clouds rolled slowly away.
“Musta rained,” David observed.
“You think?” Xander said. He was holding the front of his wet T-shirt away from his body. He made a sudden worried expression and stuck his hand in the front pocket of his jeans. He pulled out the scrap of blueprint from the antechamber, sighed when he saw it wasn’t wet, and pushed it back in.
“Close to the house,” David said. He pointed to “Bob”—the cartoon face his family used as their special identification— carved in the tree. Jesse said he’d carved it when he was a boy, which meant the face had been in the family longer than Dad and even Grandpa Hank.
“No hammering this time,” Xander said, pointing, “but I think the house is that way.”
They began walking. David said, “It’ll be nice to see Jesse without tubes up his nose and needles in his arm.”
“He’s just a kid here,” Xander said. “Taksidian doesn’t stab him for another eighty years.”
“We gotta tell him,” David said. “Maybe it won’t happen if we tell him.”
Xander stopped. “You think he’d remember?”
“Something like that? I would.”
Xander shook his head and continued approaching a wall of bushes that David recognized: it would take them into the meadow where fourteen-year-old Jesse was carving what would become a wall light in their house in Pinedale.
“I’m not sure it’ll help,” Xander said. “If we tell him now, then he knew it when he came to the house the other day. It still happened.”
David skipped over to him and grabbed Xander’s arm before he could plunge into the thicket. “But wouldn’t that be cool?” he said. “We go back, and there’s Jesse, all better . . . never having been hurt?” He laughed at the thought.
Xander smiled back, but all he said was, “We’ll see” and pushed into the bushes.
“I guess we wouldn’t know that he had ever been stabbed either, though,” David said, following in his brother’s leafy wake. “It’ll be a history that we changed, and we’d forget that it ever was.”
On the other side, David was bummed to see that Jesse wasn’t sitting on the log. He’d had it in his head that they’d come into this world at the same time they had before and everything would be the same. But that wasn’t the way time travel worked. If you returned to a place, you could be there later than the previous time—which made the most sense to David—or even earlier than the time you were there before, which was just plain weird.
That got him thinking: what if they were here now earlier than the last time? Jesse wouldn’t know them; he would not have met them yet in this time. But then, last time, he would have already met them. He wouldn’t have been so surprised to see them then, right? Trying to figure it all out made David’s head hurt.
They crossed the meadow diagonally, heading in the direc-tion of the hammering they’d heard the first time they were here. They broke through more bushes, went over a hill, and David slapped Xander’s arm.
“There it is,” he whispered, as if they’d stumbled onto a sleeping beast. To David, it looked like an incomplete popsi-cle-stick model of their house, framed without walls.
No, not popsicle sticks, he thought. Bones.
He had the feeling he was seeing the skeleton of the thing that had caused so much heartache. After all, he had often thought of the house as something living. Even Jesse had said it was “hungry”—hungry for them. He half expected the tow-ering structure to suddenly grow walls of scaly hide, spring up on dragon legs, and attack them.
“David,” Xander said, and David realized he had frozen in place.
He shook off his apprehension, his “over-active imagina-tion,” and caught up with his brother. As the trees thinned, he spotted Jesse. He was sitting on the porch, elbows on his thighs, his face down in his hands.
“He doesn’t look happy,” Xander whispered.
David stepped on a twig, and Jesse looked up. His mouth fell open, and his eyes flashed wide. Without taking his eyes off the boys, he yelled, “Dad! Dad!”
We are here before the last time, David thought, figuring Jesse was reacting to seeing them as strangers.
But then he hopped off the porch and ran toward them.
“David!” he yelled.
As he approached, David could tell Jesse had been crying. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot, and tears had cut clean streaks in the dirt on his cheeks. He threw his arms open and hugged David, even as he ran smack into him. David had to take backward steps to keep from falling down.
Jesse squeezed, then stepped back. He scanned David’s face, his body. He reached out and touched his chest. His eyes filled again. “You’re . . . you’re . . . “ He turned to Xander, and a flash of anger narrowed Jesse’s eyes, twisted his lips. His arm shot out, and he shoved Xander hard in the chest. He screamed, “You said he was dead!”
CHAPTER
thirty-seven
“What?” Xander said. “I never said that!” He threw a con-fused look at David, who was too stunned to respond.
“You were just here!” Jesse yelled. “You said—“ He pointed. “You washed your clothes!”
His chest rose and fell—in anger or an attempt to stop the tears, David didn’t know.
“I don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s not funny.”
He looked at David with the saddest expression David had ever seen, as though the idea of David dead was still on his mind.
“Jesse, I . . . “ Xander said, “I would never joke about that, not after all the times he—both of us—almost did die. And the last time I saw you was the other day—with David.”
A man brushed past
Jesse—David hadn’t seen him com-ing— and grabbed Xander’s shoulder. He said, “Xander, what’s going on? Why are you back?” He blinked at David. “Who are you?”
“Uh . . . David King, sir.”
“You’re . . .” The man glanced at Jesse, then back to David. “You’re David? Xander’s brother?”
“Yes, sir.”
The guy looked like an old-time street boxer, tough and no-nonsense. He looked back and forth between David and Xander.
“Dad?” Jesse said. “He—“
“Sir,” Xander interrupted. “I don’t understand. How do you know me? Jesse said—“
The man—Jesse’s dad—raised a big hand, stopping Xander. He said, “Do you remember meeting me, son? Ever?”
“No, I—“
The hand again. He turned to David. “Have you ever been seriously hurt?”
“Oh, yeah,” David said, raising his bandaged arm, then pointing at the big bruise on his cheek. “And my leg—“
“I mean stabbed . . . bad, really bad?”
“Uh . . . no?” It came out as a question. David had no idea what was going on, or even what he was supposed to say.
“Dad,” Jesse protested, “Xander was just here. You saw him. He was all covered in blood. He said it was David’s. He was crying, screaming. . . . “
“That’s why I believe what he said then was true.” He looked Jesse square in the face. “When he was here an hour ago, his brother was dead.”
“Me?” David said, weakly.
“How?” Xander said. “How can that be?”
David knew the answer: on the walk here, he had been thinking about it, how weird it was.
“When you jaunted here before,” Jesse’s dad said, and saw the confusion on the brothers’ faces. “When you . . . came through, traveled through time from the house, you wound up here an hour ago, but you must have left your house later in your time.”
“You mean in the future?” David said.
“Your future, yes. Later than when you came through just now.”
“When?” Xander said. He grabbed a fistful of the man’s shirtsleeve. “You said I told you David was dead. When? When will it happen?”
Jesse’s dad shook his head. “There’s no way to know. It could be any—“ He stopped. He gripped Xander’s jaw and moved his head around. “You had a bad gash on your chin. Bleeding. Probably happened at the same time as . . . David. Otherwise, son, you look exactly the same, hair and all. I’d say soon, real soon.”
Jesse nodded in agreement.
Xander jerked his head away and stepped back. “No,” he said. “David doesn’t die. You’re wrong.”
Jesse’s father pulled a piece of paper from his back pocket and held it out to Xander. “You wrote this while you were here.”
Xander snatched it out of his hand, and David stepped over to see. The paper had been crumpled and then smoothed. Mud clung to the edges. At the top was his name, written in a shaky hand, hardly legible. Under it was a drawing: A stick figure lying on the ground. A knife protruding from its chest. Above that, a heart, the kind girls put on letters to people they love.
Extending up from the bottom right corner of the paper, obscuring the stick figure’s feet, was a bloody handprint. Xander slowly put his hand over it: a perfect match.
Xander looked down at David. If Michelangelo had sculpted a face frozen in the moment of ultimate grief, it could not have been more heartrending than Xander’s.
“What does it mean, Xander?” David said.
“Nothing,” he said, crumpling it in his fist. He glared at Jesse’s father. “We have to do something. Burn down the house.”
“That’s what you said before,” the man said. “It won’t help. You’re here now. You’ve been using the house. You live in it. It gets built, no matter what we do today.”
Xander stomped away, then came back. He laid his hand on David’s shoulder. “Stay here, in Jesse’s world,” he said. “Don’t come back.”
“He can’t stay,” Jesse’s dad said. “Time will pull him back to where—when—he belongs. Soon.**”
Xander spun on him. He raised his fist, still clutching the crumpled paper. “This isn’t going to happen!” he yelled. “If you can’t help, we’ll do it ourselves.” He grabbed David’s wrist. “Come on.” He started pulling him toward the woods.
“Wait,” Jesse said. He walked up to David. He seemed ready to say something, then leaned in and hugged him. He pulled away and said, “I’m your . . . “ He swallowed, fighting back tears. “I’m your great-great uncle, right?”
David nodded.
“So you have to obey me.” He frowned, then whispered, “Stay alive.”
Jesse turned to Xander. “You said Taks—“ He closed his eyes, thinking. “Taksidian did it. He stabbed David.”
“No,” Xander said firmly, “he doesn’t.”
“When you were here,” Jesse said, “you asked me why I didn’t warn you.” He turned sad, troubled eyes on David. “I just did.”
CHAPTER
thirty-eight
“Xander, wait up!” David said.
His brother had stormed away from the partially built house and was now scrambling up a hill, kicking down clumps of pine needles and dirt.
David ran to catch him, but Xander was moving fast, and David’s leg bothered him, forcing him to limp. He slipped over the wet ground. He went down onto his knees, and immedi-ately felt water soaking into his jeans. “Xander! Please!”
His stomach hurt and his head swirled. He didn’t have the energy to chase Xander down. He slumped, sitting back on his heels, and looked down at one of Xander’s footprints. He’d gouged away the needles, leaving a tiny crater of dark soil. It reminded David of a grave, and he rubbed his chest over his heart. He felt it beating. If what Jesse and his dad said were true, it wouldn’t continue to beat for long.
Soon, Jesse’s dad had said. Death would come for David soon.
It was one thing to face danger, to know you were heading to a place where you could die. You always thought you’d get out alive—the chance, any chance of surviving was enough to make think you would. It was something totally different to know you would die, to not have a chance at all.
He wanted to curl up in a ball and just let it happen. Get it over with. More than anything, and more than any time in his life, he wanted to be in Mom’s arms. He wanted her to comfort him until it was his time to go. But he couldn’t even have that. He covered his face and started to cry.
A hand touched his shoulder, and he looked to see Xander kneeling beside him.
“I told you, Dae,” his brother said. “It’s not going to happen.”
“But we know it does,” David said. “You wouldn’t have come back here and written that note if it doesn’t.” He blinked tears away and looked right into Xander’s eyes. “That’s my blood on that note. Where’d it come from, if what you said happens, doesn’t?”
“I never said it happens.”
“But you will.”
Xander rubbed David’s shoulder. “Trust me, Dae. We know things that others don’t. We have a heads-up. We’ll think of something.” He stood up. Conversation over.
David knew what he was trying to get across: it wasn’t going to happen because Xander said it wasn’t, and it was so not going to happen, it wasn’t worth talking about.
David didn’t buy it. The note. The blood. How could it not happen?
Xander stuck his hand in front of David’s face, offering it to him. David gazed up at him, wanted to tell him No thanks, I’ll just sit here until the portal drags me back to the house and my death. But he grabbed his brother’s hand and got to his feet.
Xander slapped him on the back. “Come on,” he said, and headed back up the hill.
“Do you know where you’re going?” David said. “Are the items pulling toward the portal?”
“Not yet, but I have to walk.”
“You mean you have to get away from Jesse and his dad, get away
from them saying there’s nothing you can do.”
Xander didn’t respond; he just kept walking. They slipped a few times, but made it to the top, then started down the other side.
David saw a thick wall of bushes. He said, “I think I know where we are. We just circled around the house.”
They pushed through the bushes and stepped out into the clearing. It was an almost perfect oval, about half the size of a football field. The ground here was grassy, slightly wavy, but otherwise flat. Dense trees grew around it like the walls of an amphitheater; their top branches and leaves arched in, toward the center, forming a domed roof—a canopy—with a wide opening in the center. Dad had shown them the true magic of the place: Here, you could fly. Well, sort of; what you really did was ride invisible currents of air. It amounted to the same thing.
It was here that David had first broken his arm, falling from way up when he saw Taksidian watching from the woods. And it was here that they’d gotten away from Phemus when he came after them—gotten away by riding the current up to the highest branches.
Dad had brought them here for the first time shortly after Mom had been kidnapped, because he knew they needed a break from the sadness. Something about the clearing made you happier, almost giddy. Sailing around, laughing at how the air here made your voice as squeaky as Mickey Mouse’s— how could you not feel better?
Suddenly, David didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to feel better. He didn’t want to pretend he wasn’t going to die soon.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” he said, starting back through the bushes.
Xander grabbed his arm. “Dae, wait,” he said. “Just sit here with me. We don’t have to do anything.” He scowled at the trees beyond the bushes. “I don’t want to go out there. This is the only place that’s different. It’s not gloomy. It’s not like the house.”
David knew what he meant. The house was big and impos-ing and dark—dark in every way, with an absence of light and an absence of heart, of good. The woods around it were the same, as though they were part of the house.
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