Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  Down World

  Rebecca Phelps

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Preface

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Three

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  DEDICATION

  For my brother, who was lost, and then found.

  PREFACE

  So we’ve decided to leave. All of us, tonight. We’ll go as far as the train will take us. John says we have enough money left to buy a place out there, start fresh. And I want to believe him, believe we can put it all behind us. But I’m not so sure. The things we’ve seen in that dark world, and the things we did there . . .

  I would follow John anywhere, and I know that now. And I’ll follow him again tonight. I know that too. But the world down below has changed him. Sometimes when I look in his eyes now, when he kisses me, it’s like he’s not there. He’s thinking, and he’s planning. He’s dark and then he’s light. And my deepest fear, if I’m being honest, is that one day he’ll just disappear. One day he’ll go down and he won’t come back. Because I think I know now, I know the truth. Whatever world we found down there, whatever power we discovered, he loves it more than he loves me. More than he loves any of us. He is our leader and our friend, and my only love. And when he goes—because he will go—I know that I will die.

  —S

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  If Robbie were alive, he’d be a senior at this school. That was the thought that struck me when I entered East Township High on that August morning, the first of my sophomore year. I had never set foot in the school before, and I was scared out of my mind. I missed my friends at St. Joe’s, the Catholic school the next town over, where I had spent seventh through ninth grades. I missed Robbie. After three years, I still missed him. All the time.

  And then there was that stupid little map.

  The school had included the map in an orientation packet they’d sent me the week before, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. East Township, my father had warned me, had originally been built as an army base in the 1940s, and they had intentionally designed it to be confusing. (I guess so Nazis couldn’t sneak in and find the top-secret paperwork?) It was full of bricked-up doors, oddly sized rooms, and long twisting hallways that led to nothing.

  And the map might as well have been written in hieroglyphics. Everything was color coded, without any indication of what the colors might represent, and not one damn “You are here” in the mix.

  The first-period bell rang, and I found myself alone in the hallway next to my empty locker, turning the map in useless circles like a dyslexic juggler, tears stinging behind my eyes.

  Pull it together, Marina, I reprimanded myself. Lost is embarrassing enough. Lost and crying is pathetic.

  I laid the map out on the floor, desperately scanning for some indication of where my math lab might be, when a boy appeared over my head. He and a friend were strolling down the hall like they owned the place, not the least bit concerned that they, too, were apparently late for class.

  I didn’t notice how cute he was at first: how only one cheek dimpled, or how his shoulder bones made a perfect T with his Adam’s apple. I didn’t notice that he smelled like lemon-scented laundry detergent and powdered sugar from the doughnut he was eating for breakfast. I was so wrapped up in being lost, and being angry that I was lost, that I didn’t notice him at all.

  “Where you goin’?” he asked in his low voice, hovering above me. I barely even looked up.

  “Nowhere, apparently,” I said in frustration, crumpling up the map and throwing it in my locker.

  He chuckled, which finally made me look at him. I was shocked to feel my hands go clammy, and I wiped them on my jeans. The boy turned to the friend he had been walking with. “I’ll catch you later, man. I gotta help this one out before she burns the place down.”

  “Later,” his friend said.

  The boy dipped his head into my locker, so casually it might as well have been his own. “Let’s see what we got here, shall we?” He handed me the other half of his doughnut, like we were old friends. Something about him—his voice, maybe, or the flip of his hair—made me feel very safe all of a sudden. Like nothing was a big deal. He uncrumpled the map and spread it out, laughing and shaking his head.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  “This map. It makes absolutely zero sense. You can eat that doughnut, by the way. It’s my second one today.”

  I laughed and took a bite. It was weirdly delicious, and I wolfed it down like I’d never had a doughnut before.

  “Okay, so first off,” he said, conspiring with me over the map, “this makes it look like the math rooms are downstairs. They’re upstairs.”

  “Okay.”

  “Second, this whole wing over here? It’s, like, never used for anything anymore. You don’t need that part. So we’ll just . . .” He ripped off half the map, balled it up, and threw it on the floor. I smiled, wiping powdered sugar off my mouth as I chewed the last of the doughnut.

  “See, now it’s manageable.”

  “Right, of course,” I said, like this was our shorthand. Something we had previously agreed on. How is it possible that I felt like I had known this boy my whole life?

  He pointed to the number one on the map. “This your first class?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “Math lab.”

  “You don’t have Fitz, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, because I couldn’t remember. “Would that be good or bad?”

  “Bad. Very bad.”

  “I think I have White.”

  “Oh, you’re fine, then.”

  Just then, a very short boy in beige pants and heavy shoes came stomping up to us. “The bell has rung,” he said.

  “Sorry, dude. Just helping this girl find her class.”

  “Well, the bell has rung, so she needs a pass. I’ll take her to the office.”

  The doughnut suddenly felt heavy in my stomach. I had no idea who this officious little kid was, but he was ripping me away from my new friend, and getting me in trouble.

  “That’s okay, dude, we got it covered.”

  And with that, my new partner in crime grabbed my hand and ran with me down the hall, away from the intruder, who continued to protest even as we turned a corner and started running up a stairwell.

  Before I knew it, we were in a sunlit corridor, the walls painted a soothing shade of forest green, and Dimple Cheek pointed to an open door. “Just sneak in quietly and take the first available seat,” he said. “You won’t get in trouble. People do it all the time.”

  He handed me the map and started to walk away, turning back to whisper, “Oh, and to get to number two on your map, just head back down these stairs and make a left. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks. What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Brady. Picelli
.”

  “Marina O’Connell,” I told him, lingering a moment longer just to watch him leave, and realizing that I was already half in love with Brady Picelli.

  Math lab, as it turns out, is a class dedicated to working on what you’ve learned in math class. But as this was the first period of the first day, and nobody had actually sat through a math class yet, it was instead a period where everybody broke up into small cliques of friends and gossiped about what they’d done that summer.

  I, of course, had no friends at East Township. At least, I didn’t think I did. Before my three years at St. Joe’s—that is to say, before Robbie’s accident made my mother decide to transfer me—I had gone to an elementary school just down the street from here. So at one point, I had probably known a bunch of these kids. But three years is a long time, and I hadn’t really kept in touch with anyone.

  Across the room, I saw a girl who I was fairly sure was Macy Traper. She had been a willowy little blond thing in the fourth grade, but had now apparently gone Goth. I tried to wave in her direction, but she gave a curt nod and turned back to her friends.

  And so I sat alone, doodling in my notebook, my mind wandering to happier times at St. Joe’s, where I would often start the day reading under a large elm tree with my friend Lana before first bell. My old school was nestled into a hillside, just outside of town, over where the old estates on “Money Row,” as my mother called it, sat rotting into their hundred-year-old foundations. My mother, who had some sort of obsession with anything that she deemed to be wasteful, loved to talk about how, long before the military arrived in the ’40s, the town had been formed by a bunch of rich bankers who had made millions by “speculating.”

  “That’s a fancy way of saying ‘gambling,’” she had told me.

  Gambling was one of my mother’s chief deadly sins, especially gambling with other people’s hard-earned money, which apparently is a key component to speculating. They used the money to build these hillside estates, sprawling mansions with fifty or sixty or seventy rooms. Every time one banker built a house, his neighbor would have to outdo him. “You have a swimming pool shaped like an egg? I’ll build one shaped like the whole hen.”

  My brother, Robbie, and I snuck into one of them once, the one shaped like a pyramid. It was on a dare from his best friend, Kieren, who had bet us twenty dollars we would be too chicken to spend the night there, since it was haunted by some Egyptian pharaoh whose gold had been stolen from his tomb to make the bricks that lined the gazebo. Or so Kieren said, anyway. You had to take everything Kieren said back then with a large grain of salt, as Kieren was the biggest liar in town and everybody knew it.

  But still, a dare was a dare, and my brother—at that time a tall and lanky ten-year-old—could never stand to be called chicken. And though I was only eight and scared to spend even one night at a friend’s house, I couldn’t let the boys think there was anything they could do that I couldn’t. If my brother was going, that was good enough for me.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Robbie whispered to me after we’d snuck under a weak spot in the chain-link fence leading to the massive front lawn of the place. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. Kieren’s full of it.” And I laughed to show him I wasn’t scared. But I was. All I could think about was how to get out of it, how to convince him we had to go home, arguing that Mom and Dad might check on us and find us missing, which would terrify them.

  Robbie could always read my mind. I didn’t even have to say it. “We’ll just go into one of the bedrooms and I’ll take a picture of you sleeping on the floor. That’ll be enough. Then we can go home.” I must have gasped with relief, because Robbie just laughed at me. He rubbed my head and we crawled in through a broken window into the massive cone-shaped living room of the place. At least, I think it was a living room. My memory’s a bit fuzzy, and the building was abandoned. It all looked alien to me.

  Whatever the room was, we decided it was good enough. I lay down on the empty floor, closing my eyes to a squint, afraid to let Robbie out of my sight. He took the picture with an old camera phone.

  “One more to be safe,” he said, and snapped another shot with the flash on. I was blinded for a moment, blinking furiously, suddenly overcome with fear.

  “Robbie,” I called out. “Robbie?”

  And then I felt Robbie’s hand take mine. “It’s okay,” he said. “We got it.” He pulled me up and guided me back to the window. We ran all the way home. Robbie never let go of my hand.

  My breathing intensified even now, as I sat in that first-period math lab, remembering that night. The cool air hitting our faces as we ran, the feel of Robbie’s hand in mine. Running and running for our lives.

  Kieren never paid us that twenty dollars. We knew he wouldn’t, of course. None of us had any money. Our parents couldn’t afford allowances. But that was never the point. We had done it, Robbie and I. We had done it together. We were a good team then. It was a great night.

  But nothing lasts forever.

  The piercing shriek of the bell jolted me out of my seat. I dropped my pencil case, and as I squatted down to pick it up, I could hear Macy and her friends laughing at me. I offered them a weak smile, but they had already dismissed me and were on their way out the door.

  I spent the rest of the day looking for Brady. Just hoping to see a friendly face, I guess. And if I’m being totally honest, a cute friendly face. But I didn’t see him. I did see a couple more kids that I vaguely remembered from the sixth grade, before St. Joe’s, when I was still at Sanderson Middle School, but by the time I remembered their names (Jonathan and Casey), it was too late to say hi. It was jarring to see them here, in these strange surroundings and in totally different bodies. It was as though someone had borrowed some faces from a dream I had once and transplanted them onto the necks of complete strangers. I wondered if I looked the same way to them.

  When school ended, I headed out front to where the buses waited, but I just couldn’t bring myself to get on. I needed some time to think, to be on my own and to feel a breeze in my face.

  It was a nice day, the kind of crisp fall weather that used to make me wake up early, excited to get out and see where the day would take me. I crossed the street to start my walk home, and that’s when I saw Kieren. I hadn’t seen him in years, either, of course, and just like the kids in the hallway, it was like his face was sitting on the wrong body—a tall, broad-shouldered body that bore no resemblance to the skinny kid Robbie and I used to play Super Mario Kart with. He looked like his father, who had always scared me just a little bit, with his military haircut and quiet demeanor that often seemed on the verge of exploding.

  Kieren just stared at me, and I suppose I just stared back. No one ever told us that we weren’t allowed to talk to each other after what happened to Robbie; I think we both just assumed it. There was almost an unspoken rule in our house: we needed an enemy and Kieren was all we had to work with. Kieren, who had been like a second brother to Robbie and me. Who once gave me a penny flattened by a passing train. A penny that I kept in a pocket sewn into my diary, just so my mother wouldn’t mistake it for garbage and throw it away.

  Kieren blinked twice, as though trying to make out my face in the sunlight. He was holding a skateboard, which he now threw on the sidewalk and hopped onto. He rode away so fast I wondered for a second if I had really seen him. Kieren must be seventeen now, I realized. A senior, like Robbie would have been. So in a year he would be gone for good, and I could go back to thinking of him as a ghost.

  The walk home took longer than I had anticipated, the late summer sun still high in the sky. Talk radio wafted from the houses as I passed, with men’s and women’s voices, tightly wound after too long in each other’s company, arguing about unpaid electrical bills or unkempt living rooms.

  When I was a kid, most parents were never home during the day. But that was before Proxit Tech closed. Before the hospital lost a key grant, cu
tting back my father’s hours and making him decide it was “a good time” for me to go back to public school. My mother wasn’t happy about that, of course. I always knew she had transferred me to St. Joe’s to keep me away from Kieren, and he was still around. But even she couldn’t ignore the numbers in the bank account.

  I walked faster, just wanting to get back to my kitchen and make myself a cup of hot cocoa, watch some cartoons in the TV room, and let my mind turn off for a bit.

  As soon as I reached the house, though, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I entered the kitchen through the garage and could tell by the first sight of my mother that she was in one of her moods. I watched her for a solid minute, furiously scrubbing the kitchen tile on her hands and knees, before she paused and looked up, acknowledging my presence.

  “Hey,” she said, and returned to her work.

  It was my cue to keep myself quiet and helpful, to grab a rag and start cleaning with her, so she could know that someone was on her side. That her life wasn’t just doing for others, wasn’t all a chore. The fifteenth birthday card from my aunt Amalia that had been sitting on the windowsill since January peeked out from under the lid of the garbage can beside her.

  I put my backpack down by the door and grabbed a bottle of cleaning solution from beneath the sink. “Here, Mom, let me help you.”

  “You don’t have to. I can do it.” This meant it was my turn to say, “I don’t mind,” or something along those lines. I had made the mistake in the past of taking her words at face value and going up to my room, only to find her eyes red-rimmed and her mouth set in a rigid pout all through dinner. I didn’t make that mistake anymore.

  I got to work on dusting the windowsills and rubbing down the counters until they shone. I tried to think of something funny and light to say to her—the kind of thing that rolled off Robbie’s tongue so easily, that would always make her laugh—but nothing came to mind.

  “Where’s Dad?”