by Henry Clark
I thought furiously. What would River Man do? Channel energy. That was about all he was good for. Sometimes, though, he used his brain. I yanked off my hoodie and yelped when I felt the heat of Hellsboro through only the thinness of my T-shirt. But I leaned forward and dangled the hoodie into the pit.
Fiona clambered up Freak again, caught one of the sweatshirt’s arms, and twined her hands into it. I pulled with all my might. I was too close to the edge to have enough leverage, and I felt myself sliding forward. Just before I went over, the hoodie’s arm ripped and Fiona fell back again. I saved myself just in time and wiggled backward.
“Wait! Wait!” said Fiona. “This is my summer-camp backpack!”
She ripped the backpack open. Freak grabbed the water bottles and doused himself and Fiona with the contents. I was pretty sure steam rose off their skin as the water hit them. Fiona yanked a Camp Monongahela T-shirt out of the pack, then three origami swans, and then, finally, a jump rope.
She tossed the rope to me. I wound one end around my hand, braced myself as well as I could against the buried log, and threw the rope’s free end back into the pit.
After a moment, I felt Fiona’s weight on it. I pulled with all my might, digging my feet in deeper and deeper against the log, and just when I thought I couldn’t hold on any longer, Fiona came clambering up over the edge. She grabbed the log and hauled herself to safety.
“Well done!” said the same voice that had said “Bravo” back on the school bus. I ignored it. Fiona and I both scrambled back to the edge.
Freak was looking up at us, dancing from foot to foot. Behind him, all three origami swans had burst into flames. I threw the rope back down. Fiona grabbed me by the waist. The rope dangled inches out of Freak’s reach. Even when he jumped, he couldn’t grasp it. Without someone’s shoulders to stand on, Freak wasn’t going to make it.
I pulled the rope back up and twisted the chain with my father’s compass onto the end, adding two feet to the length. I threw the rope back down to Freak. He caught it, twisted his hands into the chain, and Fiona and I threw our weight into hauling him up. I wondered if the chain would hold. It was a lot thinner than the rope.
Fiona and I staggered backward and then fell over each other as the rope went alarmingly slack. It occurred to me Freak might have passed out from the heat. But after a heart-stopping moment, Freak’s arm swung over the lip of the pit and he pulled himself onto the log.
Then the log broke in half and all three of us fell.
The log dropped about a foot, then lurched and didn’t fall any farther. We scrambled away from it as fast as we could. We all would have thrown ourselves on the ground to catch our breath, but in Hellsboro that would have meant frying like eggs in a skillet. We kept to our feet, weaving back and forth a little as we recovered from the narrow escape we had just had.
“Are you sure there isn’t a team?” I gasped, thinking we had all worked pretty well together.
“Take us back!” Fiona yelled at Freak, wiping soot from her face.
“We’re a lot closer to Rodmore than we are to home,” said Freak, breathing heavily and gesturing back the way we came. It looked like it was already raining there. “Trust me. If there’s no fooling around, I can get us to Rodmore safely. Before it rains.”
“And just who was it who started the fooling around?” asked Fiona. She looked like she was trying not to cry. I didn’t blame her. I was pretty shaken myself after almost losing my two best friends. But we couldn’t turn back now.
“We’ve come this far,” I said, making it two against one.
Thunder rolled over us. Fiona looked at the sky, took a few shaky breaths, and said, “All right. Rodmore. It had better be worth it. Because I’m never coming in here again after this.”
Freak took his role as our guide seriously for the remainder of our trek. He found us a route where we only had to double back twice. After we had all calmed down, he asked me, “Are you aware your dad’s compass is broken?”
“It’s not. It was working fine before I left the house.”
I looked at it. Freak was right. I knew where north was, and the compass wasn’t pointing to it. The compass was pointing to Rodmore.
The first drops of light rain started to hit us as we stepped onto the concrete apron surrounding the chemical plant. Freak raced us around the perimeter fence until he got to a gap in it, then we all squeezed through. The chemical works spread out before us.
“It’s like a small city,” Fiona announced.
Freak ran down the alley between two warehouses.
“There are six main buildings,” he told us when we caught up with him at an intersection. “And eight storage tanks. The biggest building is three stories high. That’s the one I think we saw the doghat go into. That’s the door I want to try. It’s around this way.”
Five of the storage tanks were huge cylinders and three were giant spheres. They towered over most of the buildings, with stairways spiraling around the outside and catwalks about thirty feet up connecting them to one another.
I noticed we were leaving footprints. A thin layer of soot clung to everything. Most of it was undisturbed. We passed a wide stretch of concrete with a very large circle imprinted on it. It was clean, like a huge fan had blown the soot away.
“I can picture a big, black helicopter landing there,” said Freak. “Maybe bringing in supplies. Maybe dropping somebody off.”
“Whumpa-whumpa,” I agreed.
“Are you sure that isn’t the portal?” Fiona asked.
Freak paused. He bent down, picked up a piece of broken brick, and tossed it into the center of the circle. It bounced twice and stopped. Nothing else happened.
“Pretty sure,” he replied.
A few moments later, Fiona nudged me and pointed to a set of tracks belonging to shoes with tread unlike anything the three of us were wearing. We followed them to the largest building. They went up a set of concrete steps.
As we started up the steps, the rain, which had been making small dimples in the soot, suddenly started coming down more heavily. It started to erase our tracks and the tracks we were following. Before it did, though, we all saw the neat arc the door had made when it had been opened by the doghat. There on the landing in front of the door, the soot had been swept aside in a perfect quarter circle.
The quarter circle disappeared as the rain started coming down in sheets. I threw my arms over my head. Fiona held her backpack up like an umbrella. A lightning flash was followed almost immediately by one of the loudest thunderclaps I had ever heard.
The door was slightly ajar. Freak yanked on the door handle and it swung open easily when he pulled on it. From the look on his face, I could tell he hadn’t expected it to. The rain gusted at our backs. We piled in through the door and the wind slammed it shut behind us.
CHAPTER
13
A Shortcut to Restrooms
We stood inside the door and dripped. Freak shook himself like a dog, and spray went everywhere.
“Hey!” said Fiona, and she moved away from us, grabbing handfuls of her hair and wringing it out. The rain, at least, had washed some of the ash off of us.
“I’ve tried some of the doors every time I’ve been here,” said Freak. “That’s the first time any of them have opened.”
“The doghat didn’t close it properly,” I said. I tried the door. The handle wouldn’t budge.
“It’s locked now,” I reported.
Freak and Fiona both tried the door themselves.
“Are we trapped in here?” asked Fiona.
“We can always get out through one of the windows,” Freak said. He didn’t sound entirely confident.
We looked around. The room had two small windows with chicken wire embedded in them, so even if we managed to break the glass, we would still need wire cutters to get out. I had a feeling none of us had thought to bring wire cutters.
The room was small, with a couple of overturned metal chairs in the middle and a pu
nch clock hanging on one wall, with an empty rack where Rodmore employees would have placed their time cards after they punched in. The punch clock said it was nine seventeen. I looked at my watch. It was three twenty-six.
“How long is the rain going to last?” Freak asked. He was looking at Fiona when he said it, and she pulled out her cell phone and massaged it a bit. She scowled.
“There’s no reception here,” she said.
“We can’t phone out?” I asked.
“No,” said Fiona.
Freak was already investigating the place. Two of the nearby walls had clothes pegs where Rodmore employees would have hung up coats and caps. Freak pointed to a peg near the punch clock, which appeared to have a coyote skin hanging from it.
The skin turned out to be a hat with an extended brim. Seen from the top, the hat resembled an aerial view of a large dog. Freak put the hat on. Seen from floor level, it made him look like he was wearing a small canoe.
“Coyote is still in the building,” said Fiona.
We thought about that. Being wet, maybe one or two of us shivered. Freak hung the hat back on its peg.
I looked at my dad’s compass. The needle was spinning wildly. I held the compass vertically, and after a moment the needle stopped spinning and pointed straight down.
“According to this, the north pole is in the basement!” I announced.
Science Girl scowled at the compass. “That’s just gravity,” she informed me. “Any compass needle points straight down if you hold it like that.”
“Maybe it’s the portal!” I said decisively, brushing her aside.
I eagerly crossed the room to its only other door. A tattered poster taped to the door’s center reminded us, SAFETY BEGINS WITH YOU! I yanked on the door’s handle. It refused to budge.
“There’s no keyhole,” I reported.
Freak and Fiona came up on either side of me.
“Which means,” said Freak, “Coyote had to have opened it with the keypad.”
A grimy keypad was mounted on the wall next to the door.
“Which means,” said Fiona, “we’re stuck in here.”
“This would not be a good place to spend the night,” I observed.
I punched random buttons on the keypad. The pad showed no signs of life. I punched in the letters for “Rodmore.” I punched in “Disin.” I punched in my birthday. Nothing.
“How long before anybody notices we’re missing?” asked Fiona.
“It’s the weekend,” said Freak. “My father could easily be unaware until Monday.”
He picked up one of the overturned chairs and slammed it as hard as he could against one of the windows. It bounced out of his grip and skidded across the room. The window didn’t crack.
“My aunt should be home around eight,” I said.
“My parents will be trying to call me before that,” said Fiona. “But they won’t get through.”
She glanced at her phone again and frowned. She looked lost without it.
“Did anybody think to bring snacks?” I asked.
“This wasn’t supposed to take more than an hour or two,” said Freak.
Fiona, who had been pacing back and forth, stopped in front of the door with the keypad. She put her hands on her hips and stared at the door thoughtfully.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said to the door’s poster. Then she said quietly to herself, “ ‘Speak, friend, and enter.’ ”
“What?” I asked, not sure if I had heard her correctly.
She shook her head, as if clearing it. “Nothing. Just something I read once.” She looked at me with an odd sort of light in her eye. “What does safety begin with?” she asked.
I looked at the poster. “You?”
“But it doesn’t, does it? It begins with S.”
She stepped up to the keypad. She tapped six of the keys. A faint buzzing came from the door and it popped open an inch. Fiona grabbed it by the handle and swung it all the way out. It opened on a descending stairwell.
“How did you do that?” Freak asked, too surprised to keep the admiration out of his voice.
“It’s right there on the poster,” said Fiona. “I spelled safety with a U. I punched in U, A, F, E, T, Y. That was the password. Pretty obvious, really.”
I looked down the stairwell. A single dim lightbulb burned on the far landing. I consulted my compass.
“The portal is down there,” I said. “I’m sure of it!”
“Coyote is down there, too,” said Fiona, with considerably less enthusiasm.
“Whatever’s down there, it’s the way we have to go if we’re going to get out of here,” said Freak, nudging me into taking the first step.
“Keep an eye out for a ladies’ room,” Fiona whispered as we started down.
“You should have gone before we left,” said Freak.
“I did. But I’ve been rained on and I’m cold. I have to go again.”
“Shhh!” I hissed.
We reached the landing. I pushed the release bar on the door there and peeked out. It was an empty corridor, with doors on either side, faintly illuminated by low-wattage overhead bulbs. Closing the door behind us as quietly as we could, we tiptoed down the corridor.
The doors were clearly labeled with nameplates: MAINTENANCE. CUSTODIAL. STORAGE 1. STORAGE 2.
“Are we looking for a door marked PORTAL?” Freak asked. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. I still wasn’t sure if he was as convinced of the portal’s existence as I was. He hadn’t had the advantage of falling asleep on the sofa. Or having my so-called overactive imagination.
“For all you know,” replied Fiona, “one of these doors is the portal.”
We tried each of the doors in turn. Most of them were locked. One of them, labeled J. ATHERTON, turned out to be an office. The furniture was covered in dust; the floor was fuzzy with cobwebs. The sofa could have grazed there for days.
The corridor ended with a door into another stairwell.
“Up,” said Fiona.
I looked at the compass. “Down,” I said. “Whatever it is, we’re still above it.”
“That’s because ‘it’ is the Earth’s core,” said Fiona, still hung up on her gravity thing.
I ignored her. “Here we are,” I said, “in the basement of a building surrounded by eight hundred acres of underground coal fire. And the temperature is what?”
“Chilly?” Fiona answered warily. I knew she couldn’t argue; she had goose bumps.
“Yeah. Chilly. It should be like an oven in here. Basements in some of the Sunnyside houses crumbled from the heat.” I gestured down the stairwell. “There’s a cold draft coming from down there.”
“You think the draft is coming from the portal?”
“The portal is supposed to be closed,” said Freak.
“We’re here to investigate,” I said. “The three of us nearly got killed getting here. We shouldn’t waste the trip. Let’s investigate.”
I hadn’t won an argument with either of them in a long time. But they both nodded begrudgingly and followed me down. The stairway zigzagged back and forth four times before Fiona announced, “One more flight! If we haven’t found anything by then, I’m going back. We’re getting way too deep.”
“If I were a portal, I would be deeper,” Freak said.
The final flight brought us to a door. It was propped open with a fire extinguisher, and the air flowing through it was frigid. This time it was Freak who leaned out for a first peek.
“Holy cow,” he said. He stepped out of our way. Fiona and I slipped by him.
We were on a balcony about thirty feet above the floor of a room big enough to hold a small ocean liner. It was a huge cavern of a room, much longer than it was wide, and the balcony ran all the way along one side of it. The balcony was about ten feet across. Lights suspended from the ceiling bathed the place in a harsh blue light. We went to the balcony’s railing and looked down.
The floor was the size of a football field. Stretch
ed across the end of the room to our left, from floor to ceiling and from side to side, was what appeared to be an enormous spiderweb made of braided metal cable. To our left, at the remote end of the room, the far wall glistened as though it were covered with diamonds.
“Are we in, like, some sort of storage tank?” wondered Freak.
“For a storage tank, there are a lot of doors here,” I said, pointing to a series of doors that ran the length of the balcony to our right. The one that was closest to us bore the nameplate CARBOYS.
“We’re very exposed here,” said Fiona, hugging herself. “It’s way too easy to see us.”
“Said the girl in the bright yellow jacket,” Freak muttered.
I crossed over to the railing, stepped up on the lower rail, and leaned out. I wanted to see what was under the balcony. I discovered the area was largely empty, except for two unoccupied golf carts.
Suddenly the upper rail that was holding my weight gave way. It detached at one end and swung out over the drop. I went with it, gripping it fiercely with both hands. It was like swinging on a gate thirty feet in the air.
As I felt my feet leave the bottom rail, I also felt hands grabbing the back of my shirt. Freak had hold of me. He swung me back to the balcony.
Even when my feet were safely back on the floor, I had a hard time convincing my hands to let go of the upper rail. Fiona gently massaged my fingers until I opened my grip. She averted her eyes from the thirty-foot drop next to her. “Calm down,” she said soothingly. “It’s okay.”
“Th-thanks, g-guys,” I was finally able to sputter.
“Now we’re even,” said Freak, sounding pleased. He adjusted the loose end of the railing so it didn’t look broken.
I recovered enough to remember our mission and consulted my compass. It no longer spun crazily when I held it horizontally. It pointed in one clear direction.
“That way!” I said, and raced off down the balcony toward the glistening wall. It took my friends a few seconds to catch up. I wasn’t accustomed to leading the way.
