Whirlwind

by Liparulo, Robert

David heard Phemus’s footsteps—going through the space between the walls.

  Xander turned. “We’re going to have to move fast,” he said, his voice low. “We have to get through the door after Phemus, but before it closes. Stay with me.” He swung around the corner.

  David grabbed his arm. “What happens on the other side?” he said. “We’re going to run right into him.”

  “We get away from him,” Xander said.

  As far as David was concerned, he might as well have said, Don’t let the grenade go off in your hands. Except Phemus was scarier than a grenade.

  Xander rushed to the doorless secret passage through the wall, then slipped through.

  David realized he was still holding the bottle of shampoo. He shoved it into his back pocket and hurried to the space between the walls. Xander was peering around the edge of the second door. Phemus’s footsteps echoed near the top of the stairs.

  Don’t take Keal, David thought. Don’t take him, don’t hurt him anymore. If Phemus tried either, they would have to stop him— somehow. He had an image of them stepping into the third-floor hallway with Phemus standing there, expecting them, holding Keal high over his head, ready to throw him like a log.

  Without looking, Xander patted David’s arm and stepped through the doorway. He went up, planting only the toes of his sneakers on each tread. David moved right behind him. His arm throbbed, a dull pulse followed by a sharp knife-stab. He tried not to think about what it felt like: the edge of his broken bone slipping up into his muscles.

  At the landing, Xander looked into the crooked hallway. He duckwalked into it. David followed, then stopped. Phemus was in the hallway, plodding toward the far end.

  If he looks back . . .

  Xander kept going, passing Keal and actually closing in on the brute. David supposed they couldn’t wait until Phemus was completely in the antechamber, but this seemed . . . the word careless came to mind, but he wasn’t sure it expressed what he thought, that they were jabbing a stick at a mean and hungry lion.

  Oh, right: stupid—that’s the word he was looking for.

  Staying low, David waddled past Keal, snagged his leg on something, and fell forward. He landed on his palms, locking his arms to keep from going all the way to the floor, which certainly would have made enough noise to draw Phemus’s attention. He turned to find Keal’s hand around his ankle.

  The man was lifting his head, looking at him with groggy eyes. He moved his lips to say something.

  David reached back and covered Keal’s mouth. He leaned in close. “Shhh,” he said and glanced down the hall. Phemus stepped into an antechamber. Xander was five feet behind. “We’re following him,” David whispered. “Phemus. Back to his world.”

  Keal’s eyes sprung wide. He mumbled through David’s hand and shook his head.

  “Shhh,” David repeated. “We have to.”

  Xander slipped into the antechamber. His shadow cut a trembling black hole in the bright light coming out of the room and splashing on the opposite wall.

  David spun away from Keal, pulling his ankle free. Behind him, Keal wheezed, “Wait . . . David . . . no.”

  At the antechamber door, David looked back. Keal was staring at him, pushing himself up, shaking his head. Weakly, the man called his name.

  David stepped in. Xander was in front of the portal door, which radiated with chilly air. Beyond, light swirled through blackness, like cream hitting the surface of a cup of coffee.

  “Hurry,” Xander said. He held something out for David to take. It was a long stick with what looked like the pointed tine of a deer antler strapped to one end: a spear. “Just in case we need it to get back.”

  David noticed the other items in the room: a chunk of rock that might have been a blunt arrowhead; a cluster of straw, tied at one end; and a leather pouch with something inside. They were different items from the ones in the antechamber when Mom was taken. Then, there had been a fur-lined parka, goggles, gloves . . . and snow had blown in. But they had always thought Phemus had taken Mom someplace else, that the antechamber items had nothing to do with where she had ended up, because somehow Phemus didn’t need the items to open the door.

  David grabbed his brother’s shirt, and they fell through. The door swung shut, banging into David’s butt, giving them a fierce shove.

  CHAPTER

  fifty - three

  Shadows churned around David, forming into a cave. A long, rock-lined tunnel came into view, lit by the portal itself. David braced himself to touch down . . . but he never did. He felt a great force jerking him back, flipping him sideways.

  As frightened as he had been before, a new level of fear clutched him. The portals had never been like this: violent and . . . unsure. That’s what it felt like, that it was unsure where it was taking them.

  He spilled down onto Xander. Sunlight cut into his eyes, as though someone had yanked away thick curtains just as he was waking from a deep sleep. He slipped off Xander onto a hard floor. He pulled in a deep breath to gasp or scream or cry out.

  His brother clutched his head, put his face right into David’s, said, “Shh.” The sound was fast, sharp, and quiet. Coupled with Xander’s panicked eyes, he knew: they were someplace where any noise at all would be very, very bad.

  He remembered: they’d come through just seconds after Phemus.

  Xander swiveled his head around quickly. David looked past him to see Phemus across a room, heading for a door. The big man stopped, tilted his head, as though he’d caught a sound.

  Xander shoved David and rolled away. They were in a sort of cubby or alcove off the room. A large pillar rose from the floor on either side of the alcove’s opening. David got it: he rolled behind one, pulling his legs up, as Phemus started to turn around. Xander did the same behind the other pillar.

  Seconds passed, then the door opened and closed. Xander looked around the pillar. He leaned his head back and let out a long breath.

  David stretched out, covered his eyes with his hand. “What just happened?” he said.

  “David, move!” Xander said.

  The wall beside David, a huge slab of rock, was trembling. He rolled away, toward his brother’s reaching hands. His finger scraped over grooves in the stone floor. They arched from the corner of the trembling wall to the portal they had just come through. He understood, and realized he was still in the way.

  Following the grooves, the rock wall swung toward him like a door. It was going to catch his hip, pinning him between it and the portal. If it carried the same force as the portal doors in the antechambers, it would crush him, cut him in half. He yelled.

  Xander grabbed his arm and pulled. The wall struck David’s foot, like the bumper of a speeding car. His legs flipped out of the way, and the wall completed its quarter-circle movement. It rumbled against the portal, completely covering it.

  David pulled his foot up and rubbed it through the sneaker.

  He hissed at the tenderness of it.

  Xander stared, biting his lip.

  “It’s all right,” David assured him, easing his foot to the floor. “I’ve taken worse in soccer games.”

  Xander turned to the slab of wall. “It’s like at home,” he said. “A door over a portal.”

  “What opens it?” David said, because wasn’t that the most important thing they needed to know? If that was the portal home, how did they get to it?

  Xander stood. He tugged at the rock door. It didn’t budge.

  “Xander,” David said, pointing at items mounted to the stone wall above and around the door: a plank of wood, a strip of the same wallpaper that decorated the upstairs hallway, a dirty doorknob, other things—all arranged around the door like the symbols he’d seen etched in the doorframes of ancient temples.

  “Stuff from our house,” Xander said, eyeing each one carefully. “That must be how they’re doing it. Somehow they locked the portal in place, keeping it linked to the house, with these things.”

  “And this area,” David said, loo
king around the alcove. “It’s like a stone version of an antechamber.”

  Xander brushed past him, out of the alcove. David pushed off the floor, then remembered: he scanned the area around him, feeling his pulse pick up speed. “Xander . . . the spear. I lost it.”

  Xander turned back. “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” David said, feeling panicky. “It must have been when we were in that cave. The pull tugged us away. I must have dropped it then.”

  Xander said, “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Don’t—? How are we going to get home?”

  His brother nodded toward the big stone door. “The portal’s right there. I bet Phemus just strolls right into our house whenever he wants to.”

  “But it’s huge. What if we can’t open it?”

  Xander smiled. He pulled something out of his pocket and held it up. It was a woven tassel, like something people attached car keys to or girls put in their hair.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s from the antechamber,” Xander said.

  “I got it before you came in. One way or another, we’ll get home.” He tied the tassel to a belt loop. “There. Now we can see when the pull starts.”

  “If it starts,” David said. “We’re not in that cave the portal sent us to. Somehow, Phemus opened another portal on top of that one—and brought us here.”

  Xander frowned and looked at the tassel. “We’ll see, I guess. I got this from the antechamber too.” He dug a stone out of his pocket. It was shiny silver, like a gold nugget’s poor cousin. He returned it to his pocket and said, “It’s the best we can do, Dae. We’ve never been stuck in a world . . . yet.”

  Yet, David thought. Did he have to say that?

  The room beyond the antechamber was about the size of a two-car garage. A table and chairs occupied the area to the right of the alcove. Behind them, a bed squatted against the wall. Its frame was rough wood, showing hack marks from whatever tool had shaped it. Layers of woven blankets made it look comfortable. Light came in from glassless slits in the wall, like the ones David had seen in pictures of castles.

  Xander walked over to what looked like a towel hanging on the wall. He took it down and tossed it to David. “Try this on.”

  It was a short tunic, dingy white and soft. David slipped it over his head and cinched a braided rope around his waist. The belt and skirtlike hem disguised the fact that it was too big for him—except that it had no sleeves, and the armholes came to his bottom ribs. He adjusted Xander’s belt, which looped over his chest, and put his left arm through it. “Much better,” he said. “I don’t feel so naked.”

  “You look like you belong,” Xander said. “Better than me.”

  “I guess that depends on where we are. Any idea?”

  “One way to find out.” Xander cracked the door open a few inches. He stuck his face to the opening, then threw back the door. He and David stepped out onto a stone terrace. Hedges framed the area, and beyond them, lush green grass rode a long, sloping hill down to what appeared to be docks and a river that must have been at least a half mile wide. Dense forests grew on either side of the hill.

  David swept his vision beyond the river and gasped.

  CHAPTER

  fifty - four

  FRIDAY, 11:07

  Keal felt half asleep. He shook his head and grimaced at the pain he felt, as though a cannonball were banging around inside his skull. He kept his eyes on the open doorway David had gone through, the way he’d been taught to lock his gaze on the place a drowning man went under, while swimming for it. He crawled down the hallway.

  Those kids are following Phemus! Are they nuts?

  Phemus was a machine made out of muscle. And when he had to, the guy knew how to move. Keal had learned that the hard way. He had been working on the walls at the base of the stairs when he’d heard a noise. He’d stepped into the hall to investigate, and Phemus had pounced. Keal thought he’d given as good as he got, but in the end, it was Keal who’d wound up unconscious on the floor.

  Now Xander and David were going after him, like poodles taking on a dragon.

  Keal arrived at the antechamber, pulled himself up by the frame, and stumbled in. The portal door was shut, locked. He tugged on it anyway, then spun to the items. He reached for a pouch hanging from a hook. A wave of dizziness washed over him, and the cannonball bumped into the inside of his forehead. He dropped a knee onto the bench, pressed a palm against the wall.

  Come on, come on, he thought.

  The image of the boys trying to duck away from Phemus’s swinging fists forced his eyes open. He snatched the pouch down from the hook, grabbed the two other items—a small bundle of hay and a rock—and yanked the portal door open.

  CHAPTER

  fifty - five

  FRIDAY, 11:12 A.M.

  “Okay,” Mike Peterson said. “It’s scanning the databases now.”

  Ed leaned forward to get a better view of the monitor.

  Flickering letters and words faded to black. A small dot appeared in the middle and expanded until a globe filled the screen. Ed recognized the American continents, hosting the countries of Canada, the US, all the way down to Chile and Argentina. The globe began a slow rotation toward Europe.

  Words flashed in the top left corner: Indo-European . . . Celtic . . . Germanic . . . Greek . . . The top right corner showed years counting backward by century: AD 2000 . . . AD 1900 . . . AD 1800 . . . As the words and years changed, geopolitical boundaries shrank and expanded, appeared and disappeared over the image of land masses. The globe rotated one way, then the other. It zoomed in, back out, zoomed in again. The program isolated certain areas, appeared to change its mind, and zipped to another location.

  Back and back the years went: AD 100 . . . AD 1 . . . 100 BC . . . At 600 BC, the location hovered over the Greek islands, then began moving west. It settled over the Atlantic Ocean, zooming in on the Azores Islands.

  Mike nodded. “I thought so.”

  On the screen, the small group of nine islands melted into one large island and continued to expand, as if rising out of the ocean.

  When the computer let out a musical chime, Ed jumped. Nothing more on the screen moved. Then a label appeared over the new landmass.

  Ed stared at it for at least ten seconds. He looked at Mike out of the corner of his eye. He said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  CHAPTER

  fifty - six

  David stared in awe.

  The land on the other side of the river was a huge mountain that climbed high above them. At the peak was a castle or fortress many times larger than any he had ever seen. The shape, as well, was peculiar: every wall was straight, but they jutted one way and then another, as though the builders had followed the shape of the mountaintop in order to make the structure as large as the plateau would allow. At every juncture where the walls took a turn, towers rose above the level of the parapets. Spaced evenly along the top perimeter were flags of every color, shape, and design, hundreds of them fluttering in the wind. But the most striking aspect of the castle—for David had decided it was definitely a king’s castle—was its color: the entire thing appeared to be covered in or made out of gold. Sunlight glinted from it in a thousand places.

  Below the castle, cliffs dropped a short distance to smaller buildings. These structures appeared to have been constructed of polished rock: black, silver, and red, all glistening as though wet. Some were checkered, others striped, and a few cobbled together with no discernable pattern. They seemed to follow an avenue—about the width of a football field—that gently spiraled around the mountain, climbing toward the top. Two levels down from the castle, a bridge spanned a broad crevasse, allowing the avenue to continue. Tall pillars and arches supported the bridge. They were so ornately carved, David thought Michelangelo must have had a hand in their design. The bridge, arches, and pillars were made out of the same blood-red stone, polished to mirror perfection.

  The buildings flanked th
e bridge, but did not encroach on it. Rather, the bridge’s surface had been turned into a park: except for a strip of road on its inside edge, grass covered it. Big trees grew straight up from it. The space below was too shadowy for David to see where the root systems went.

  People were enjoying it as they would any park. Some were picnicking, others strolling hand in hand. Children rolled and tussled. One boy flew a kite, a dragon-shaped collection of colorful fabric that rose higher than the rooftops of the buildings on the next level up. Roving musicians danced as they played their instruments, which David could almost hear in the movements of the musicians’ bodies.

  A ribbon of water, as wide as a street, fell from an arched opening at the base of the castle. It disappeared behind the buildings on the highest level, then emerged from beneath another structure and fell to the level below. It did that two more times before reaching the foot of the mountain. There it became a stream that ran through a large garden of trimmed hedges and topiary, where more people strolled, musicians played, and gymnasts and jesters performed. Eventually the stream drained into the large river that separated David from the spectacular mountain-city.