Whirlwind

by Liparulo, Robert

  CHAPTER

  nine

  THURSDAY, 6:55 P.M.

  Keal levered the sledgehammer behind him, remembering his days as a slugger in college. His eyes found Toria, back against another wall in the dim basement. She was aiming a flashlight at the wall in front of Keal. “Watch out,” he told her.

  Toria nodded.

  “Ready, David?” he yelled.

  “Hold on!” came the boy’s voice through the wall. It was muted, as though he had spoken into a pillow. “I’m lighting a match. . . . Okay, do it!”

  “Cover your head!” Keal said. He put everything he had into the swing. The hammer struck the gray stone wall with a resounding bam! and an eruption of sparks. The energy of the strike vibrated up the handle into his arms. He kept hold of the handle, but let the hammer’s head drop to the floor. The fuzzy-edged glow of the flashlight illuminated a small gash in the stone, light gray against the surrounding dark gray. The stone he had struck was still perfectly aligned with the others around it.

  Keal called, “Anything on your side, David?”

  “A loud noise!”

  Okay, he thought, sighing. This is going to take awhile.

  He lifted the hammer, pulled it back, swung it hard.

  David smiled. He held a lit match in one hand and pressed the other hand against the wall. He felt the thuds of Keal’s sledgehammer coming through the wall like a heartbeat. They meant more to him than Keal’s and Toria’s voices had. Voices he could hallucinate, but he didn’t think he’d imagine anything as physical as a trembling wall. Not this early anyway; maybe eventually, but it seemed now he’d never know.

  And that’s what made him smile.

  The match’s flame singed his skin. He dropped it and stuck his finger and thumb in his mouth. The fire had left a glowing yellow spot in his vision, fading slowly, leaving only the black air of the chamber.

  Didn’t matter now. He was being rescued.

  He wondered how Mom felt: like she was stuck without hope, or as though she were being rescued? She had to know they were looking for her, had to know they wouldn’t stop until they found her. So, really, even though she had no evidence of it—unless she’d seen the Bob cartoon face, their family symbol, that they’d left in each world—she had to know her rescue was in progress. He hoped she knew that, and that it comforted her.

  Wouldn’t a person lost in the wilderness feel better, keep his hopes up longer, if he saw the helicopter that was looking for him? The Kings were that helicopter for Mom, and they would never run out of fuel, be grounded by bad weather, or say they’d looked too long. They would never give up.

  He stepped back away from the pounding and leaned against the opposite wall. He didn’t bother lighting another match. Hearing was enough.

  Bam! Bam!

  Bam! Bam!

  Like a heart, beating just for him.

  CHAPTER

  ten

  THURSDAY, 6:57 P.M.

  Xander and Dad walked side-by-side along the winding road leading to Pinedale. Their pace had slowed considerably, but it remained a few notches above a leisurely stroll.

  Behind them, the sound of an engine and the low, flat hum of tires on asphalt approached. They stepped off the road into long grass. The dirt here was rutted and uneven, making a chore even out of standing. Trees pressed in so close to the blacktop, Xander had to prop himself against one just to give Dad room to get off the road.

  Dad waited until a white pickup truck appeared around a bend, then he stuck out his thumb. He said, “Don’t ever hitchhike, you hear?”

  “I know,” Xander said. “You already said. Just this once, ’cause it’s an emergency.”

  The truck zoomed by without slowing.

  “Dad,” Xander said, pushing off the tree. “Why is it an emergency?”

  Dad got his feet on the road and reached back to give Xander a hand. “Just what Keal said. He hadn’t seen David, only heard him. And he’d been screaming.”

  “Screaming?” Xander said.

  “I think for help, not in pain.”

  Xander shook his head. Who could tell in that house? The way it manipulated sounds, you couldn’t believe anything you heard. He wouldn’t think David was safe until his brother was standing in front of him. Besides, behind a wall? What was that about? What else might be behind the wall with him? And could whatever put him there, take him back? Where would David go if it did?

  Too many questions—as usual. Since moving in, they’d been dealing with weirdness with a capital W: traveling through space and time, maniacs bent on killing them, history that changed based on what they did in the other worlds. Jesse had said David made the world different when he saved a little girl in World War II. She had grown up to help cure smallpox. Before he’d saved her, the disease had been killing millions of people every year. Then, twenty minutes after Dae jumped through a portal, thinking he’d seen Mom, the whole world was different; the disease was gone, eradicated thirty years before.

  It seemed the more they found out about the house, the more they didn’t know. Every answer led to a dozen more questions. The biggest mystery was how any of them was still sane.

  They started walking again, and Dad put his hand on the back of Xander’s head, pushing his fingers through his hair. Xander flinched, pulling his head away. Dad’s hand came back bloody.

  “Xander?” Dad said, looking from his fingers to Xander’s head.

  Xander touched the spot where the brick had conked him. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Headache’s all. I think it just opened up the cut I got when the wall light landed on my head. You know, when we were trying to stop Phemus from taking Mom. If it’s a new cut, I better not ever go bald. My scars will scare children.”

  Dad eyed him, uncertain. Finally he offered a faint smile. “Shakespeare said, ‘A scar nobly got is honorable.’ ” He shrugged. “Something like that.”

  Xander rubbed his head. “I say, a scar nobly got hurts.”

  CHAPTER

  eleven

  THURSDAY, 6:58 P.M.

  Keal kept pummeling the same square stone. Little chips in the shape of tiny smiles eventually became a fist-sized indent. Finally a crack appeared, running from the hammer’s damage to a corner.

  Keal leaned in. He ran a palm over his eyes, brow, and head, squeegeeing away beads of sweat.

  “It’s giving up,” he said. He had begun to think of the wall as an opponent. It was strong and stubborn, but so was he. He looked back at Toria with a winning grin. “First a crack, then a stone, then the whole wall, right?”

  “It cracked, Dae!” she yelled.

  His muffled voice came back: “Yah!”

  Keal hefted the hammer, reared back, and slammed it into the stone. He did it again and again, without pause. His breathing fell in sync with his efforts: a sharp inhale as he pulled back, a loud grunt on the forward swing. Sweat flew off his head, sparkling in the flashlight’s beam.

  The stone crumbled, dust and chunks spilling to the floor.

  Toria rushed in to light the gap. Eight inches in, another stone showed its flat, resilient face. The wall was at least two blocks thick. She moaned.

  “No, no,” Keal said. “It’ll be easy now. Once you get one block out of a wall like this, the others have room to shift. They’ll start falling away in no time. You’ll see.”

  He was right: the block above its crumbled neighbor chipped, broke, and fell away after only four strikes. When the first layer’s opening was four blocks wide and four blocks tall—a square about the size of a television screen—Keal started pounding on the second layer.

  “Dust!” David said, no longer sounding like he was talking into a pillow. “And that was loud, really loud.”

  “Cover up,” Keal yelled back, taking aim. “For real this time.”

  Three more hits and a block pushed in, three inches from the surface of the blocks on either side of it.

  “I felt it!” David screamed. “It moved.”

  “Back away,
David!”

  The next strike sent it sailing into the darkness behind it.

  “Ow!” David said. Then: “Let there be light!”

  Toria charged up to the wall. The flashlight beam wavered around the square hole and slipped into the blackness beyond.

  David’s face appeared, smiling, squinting against the brightness. He laughed.

  “Dae!” Toria chimed.

  “Where are we?” David said.

  Keal and Toria looked at each other. Keal said, “You’re home, son. In the house.”

  “The basement,” Toria added.

  David closed his eyes. “I should have known.” His lids flipped opened and looked past Toria at the walls and exposed trusses. “I thought I was back in time somewhere—but how could that happen from Taksidian’s house? It’s just that I found the other side first. Like if we’d discovered the locker-linen closet portal from the locker side. It’s still not the locker doing it, it’s the house. It’s always the house.”

  “What are you talking about?” Toria said. “How’d you get in there?”

  “I’ll explain later,” he said. His eyes found Keal. “Just get me out . . . please.”

  “What’s in there?” Keal asked.

  “Nothing. Bones.”

  “Bones?” Toria said.

  “Human bones,” David continued. “Skeletons. But most of them are broken up, ground down to nothing. Gravel.”

  “Eeeew!”

  “I thought for sure,” David said, “that my bones would wind up in here too, lying on top until someone else got trapped and tromped me into dust.”

  Toria touched her fingers to his cheek. He reached his hand out, and she took it.

  “Okay,” Keal said. “Back off. We’ll have your bones out of there in a flash.” He lifted the hammer.

  The kids released their hands, and David’s disappeared into the hole. Toria stuck her face up to it. “Hey, Dae,” she said, “wouldn’t that be funny to find a skeleton with a cast on its arm?”

  “Not if it’s me,” David said.

  Toria giggled, then took her spot behind Keal.

  He hauled back on the sledgehammer and let it fly, enjoying every sweaty blow. He took great satisfaction not only in rescuing David but in destroying the thing that held him captive. It felt like springing an innocent man from his cell, then burning down the jail.

  He pounded on the first layer below and to the sides of the hole, stretching it out so he could get better shots at the second layer. A mound of broken stones formed on the floor.

  He stopped and said, “David, I’m ready to knock the cubes out on your side of the wall. Ready?”

  “Ready to get out of here.”

  “Get in the corner closest to me,” Keal instructed. “The stone will fly back away from you.” He heard crunching from within, pictured the bones David was walking over. Man!

  “Ready,” David said.

  Keal beat the wall down, chunk by chunk, stone by stone.

  He heard the pieces striking a wall inside and only then realized how tight the space was in there. He grunted and yelled, taking his anger out on the blasted wall.

  “Okay . . . okay!” David yelled.

  Keal realized the boy had been calling out for some time.

  He dropped the sledgehammer and leaned over, propping his arms on his knees. He panted and watched sweat drop from his face to the floor.

  David appeared in the opening, Toria’s light gliding over him. Gray dust coated his hair, face, and clothes.

  “Tell me that’s wall dust!” Toria said. “And not people dust.”

  David brushed it off his cheek, coughed, and patted his chest, kicking up another plume. He said, “A little of both, I think.”

  “Let’s get you out of there,” Keal said, reaching out for him.

  As David stepped over the wall, he lost his balance and fell back into the chamber. On his way, he grabbed at the side of the opening, dislodging a stone, which dislodged the one above it. The block above that one gave way as well, then an entire column of blocks came down, one at a time, faster and faster.

  “Look out!” Keal said, pushing Toria with his arm. “David, get back!”

  “I’m—” David started. Any words that followed reached Keal’s ears sounding like a howling wind.

  Toria’s light caught David in the act of lifting himself off the chamber floor . . . or still falling onto it. He seemed to be hovering above it, his arms rotating for balance, one foot kicking in the air. His T-shirt fluttered and rippled, as though wind were billowing under it. Beyond his chest, David’s face was white and wide-eyed. His mouth moved, a silent scream for help. The blackness around him moved in, seeming to flow over him like liquid— Or a hand, Keal thought. He could almost see thick, black fingers slipping around David.

  Then he was gone.

  Toria’s light played on the far wall and floor of the empty chamber. She cried out her brother’s name.

  CHAPTER

  twelve

  THURSDAY, 7:05 P.M.

  David crashed down on a hard surface. The light was dim, seeping into the area he occupied only from around a narrow door on his right. But he could make out shelves above him. They were lined with cans, plastic-wrapped loaves of bread, a bag of chips.

  Taksidian’s pantry! he realized. I came back.

  Still moving, either from the teleportation itself or from his own jostling around as he tried to get his balance, he spun on his tailbone. His foot hit the center of the bifold door. It slid open. Sunlight streamed in. He blinked, squinted . . . and gasped in terror.

  Taksidian was staring at him. Standing in the kitchen, he was bent over a big black trash bag, tying a knot in the top. His face was turned toward the pantry, and he seemed as startled to see David as David was to see him.

  The man said, “Boy!” and sprang for him. His arms reached, his hands stretched out. His nails appeared impossibly long, impossibly sharp.

  David grabbed the edge of the door and pulled it closed— or he would have if his foot wasn’t still positioned dead center with the door, keeping it from popping shut. He pulled his foot back.

  Taksidian’s fingers circled around the edge of the door.

  David felt the door slipping away from his grasp. He tightened his grip and pulled. Before Taksidian could get his other hand on the edge and yank with the power of both arms, David did the first thing that came to his mind. He shifted his legs under him, rose to his knees, and sank his teeth into Taksidian’s fingers.

  The man howled. David opened his mouth, and the fingers flashed away through the opening. He yanked at the door, closing it.

  A warm, scentless breath came up from the floor, down from above, circling around from the sides of the pantry, washing over him. Darkness came with it. The floor under his knees vaporized. For an instant, he felt as though he’d been dropped off a cliff. Then solid ground formed under him. Not so solid, actually: it was the gravelly bones of the chamber. They crunched beneath him.

  “David!” Toria yelled.

  The flashlight beam shined in his face.

  “What just happened?” Keal said.

  David sprang up and reached for the man. “Get me outta here!” he said. “Don’t let me fall back!”

  Keal grabbed him and began hoisting him through the opening.

  Wind swirled behind David, whipping through the hair on the back of his head, fluttering his shirt. He glanced back and saw what he had only imagined earlier: a vampire, its face and hands ghostly white drifting out of the darkness toward him.

  But it wasn’t a vampire— “Taksidian!” David screamed, scrambling to get his legs over the wall, clawing at Keal’s shoulders to pull himself out.

  Hands clasped over his ankles, yanking him back a few inches.

  “Hey!” Keal yelled. Squeezing David tighter, he threw himself backward.

  David felt like the rope in a tug-o’-war. Then his feet slipped through Taksidian’s grip, and he flew through the opening. He
felt long, bony fingers on his calves, squirming over them, trying to sink into them. David pulled his legs up, felt the fingers slide over his ankles and heels, snag the top of his sneaker, and slip away. He fell on top of Keal, who landed hard on his back.

  Keal tossed him aside. David rolled, looking back to see Taksidian half out of the opening, his body bent over the remaining wall. He was still reaching, clawing for David. The man snapped his twisted face toward Keal. Taksidian’s eyes flashed wide, then narrowed into a squinty glare. He looked between David and Keal, as though figuring out whether he could still get David, determined to do it regardless of anything else.