Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  I needed a moment to think. Well, my decision was clear, wasn’t it? I mean, I had to tell Piper’s parents. They were terrified. They didn’t know where their daughter was, or if she was even alive. I knew all too well that fear, that moment between knowing something is wrong and knowing just how wrong it is. That endless gulf of pain before the words confirm your worst fear—gone forever. He is gone forever.

  What was I thinking about?

  Piper McMahon.

  I was going to tell Piper McMahon’s parents that she got on a train. I was going to betray Brady, and he would hate me for it. But so what? What allegiance did I have to Brady, anyway? Did I owe him loyalty? Friendship? No, it was the hope of more than that which had made me feel a devotion to him. A silly little crush on an older boy who would graduate in a few months and be gone forever.

  Gone forever.

  Could I sacrifice Piper McMahon for a crush?

  I suddenly hated Piper McMahon. I hated her for getting on that stupid train. I hated her suede jacket. I hated her parents, crying on the news, and the cheerleaders who missed her so much.

  Why did she get on the train?

  I shuffled over to the tables that held the various baths for the photographic negatives. They all sat empty, their slightly tinted liquids reflecting my image in the red light that hung above them. Without warning, the pools started to undulate, ever so slightly, and the obscure girl reflected in their waters lost all form, her outline blurring into nothing. Swallowed by the dark water.

  Dark water. “DW I’ll never tell,” I said to no one. “This is about DW.”

  The baths had been disturbed by footsteps on the stairwell leading up to the door. Someone was coming for me.

  I looked quickly for a place to hide, but it was too late. That was just as well. The time for hiding was over. I turned to face the door.

  Brady came in, out of breath. He had clearly been searching everywhere he could think of since the assembly let out, and when he saw me, the look of fear was quickly replaced with relief. But then a darkness came over his eyes. He closed the door behind him.

  “You need to tell me what DW is. Now. Or I’ll go to the principal.” I couldn’t believe the assertiveness of my own voice. I sounded so confident, so grown-up. I wondered if he could see that my hands were trembling.

  Brady nodded and came closer, and I immediately felt my stomach betray that newfound confidence by tensing up with his proximity. I willed my cheeks not to blush. And yet, there he was, not two feet away from me. And my face got hot, and I could only hope that in the darkness he didn’t see it.

  “I mean it.” But this time it didn’t sound as strong as before. And I realized, hearing the waver in my voice, that it wasn’t just his nearness that was making me nervous. I was terrified of DW, a force so powerful it had made a girl disappear.

  “I was trying,” Brady began, his body slumping next to me against the table, “to keep you out of it.”

  I stood next to him, his warm flannel shirt so close I could feel it brush my arm. And I knew that whatever it was he was going to tell me would change everything.

  “I don’t know why,” he continued. “There was something about you, in the hallway that first day. You reminded me of . . . someone.”

  “Piper.” And he nodded. Despite myself, I couldn’t help but be flattered. I reminded him of beautiful, missing Piper McMahon.

  “She used to get lost every day in this school. I drew her a map, but she couldn’t understand it. So I would just take her to class and tell her to wait for me after. One day she didn’t wait.”

  I nodded.

  “We were freshmen then. A little younger than you, I guess. Feels like a million years ago.”

  “You’re not that much older than me.” I realized immediately that it was a stupid thing to say. Brady swallowed and took a deep breath. He hadn’t seemed to hear me.

  “It was Piper who found it,” he went on. “She didn’t wait for me. And she got lost. And then she found it.”

  “DW?”

  Brady looked at me a long moment. As my eyes adjusted to the faint light, I could just make out the intensity of his gaze.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Before it was a high school, as my father had told me, East Township High was an army base called Fort Pryman Shard. Dad’s grandfather, like all men back in the early ’40s when it was built, had been a young kid from a nearby farm, recruited to go and fight in World War II.

  The fort was considered a great thing for the town, and for the whole county, really. Ever since the prospectors from the fancy houses on the other side of town, or “Money Row,” as my mother called it, had abandoned the place during the Great Depression, times had been tough. Now there was industry, manufacturing, all kinds of jobs for men and women, and all for the most noble reason of all—to defeat the Nazis. The way my father told it, the fate of humanity rested on the shoulders of our forefathers. And they had been very successful.

  But nothing lasts forever.

  When the war ended, the army sealed up the parts of the complex that were intended for top-secret purposes and connected the rest of the scattered buildings with a twisted network of hallways, forming a makeshift high school for all the screaming babies who had been left behind by the departing soldiers. The result was a building that was not quite useful for any one purpose, and which gave the overall effect of a web spun by a disoriented spider. But as far as the army was concerned, it was good enough.

  The women found ways to pay their mounting bills. It was well known that beneath the fading paint of Groussman’s Pharmacy, across the street from the train station, was a sign advertising DANCE HALL GIRLS. Robbie was the one who’d shown me that. I can’t remember when. I was probably about seven. I laughed, because I could tell it was supposed to be funny or shocking. But I had no idea what a dance hall girl was.

  The basement of Fort Pryman Shard became a boiler room for East Township High School. And it was one of the darkest, eeriest, and quietest places I had ever seen. If I hadn’t had Brady’s hand to hold, I never would have made it down the stairs.

  It took a moment to adjust to the lack of sound. I couldn’t remember when I had experienced quiet like that before. It hurt my ears. I could feel my eardrums straining for some vibration to latch on to, and finding none, they seemed to beat against my ear canals in protest.

  Brady kept holding my hand. “Just let yourself adjust to it for a second.”

  As my pupils grew accustomed to the light, or rather the lack of it, I began to make out some figures. The enormous shell of what must have been the old boiler sat in the corner, clearly having been abandoned years ago with the invention of gas-powered heat. Nearby, worktables were covered with all sorts of objects, from hammers and wrenches to old textbooks.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “It’s just where they store stuff.”

  “What does this have to do with Piper?” There was no other way to put it—this room was creepy. I shivered, although I didn’t feel cold. But rather, there was some feeling worse than cold seeping down my back. This place was wrong. And I knew deep in my gut that I wasn’t supposed to be in here. I couldn’t help but think about how Piper McMahon had come down here alone.

  Brady clutched my hand a little tighter. “You can go back if you want.”

  The way he softened his voice as he said it made me realize that he meant the words not as a challenge, but as a gentle reminder that it wasn’t too late for me to forget about all this and go back to my life upstairs. My life without Brady.

  I shook my head, although I doubted he could see it. “No.”

  After all, if I went back upstairs, nothing would be any different. I’d still have the dilemma of what to do about Piper. I’d still have that haunting image of her on the train. I’d still have the voices of her parents on the new
s each night, begging me—me—to tell them where she was.

  “I’m not leaving until you tell me why we’re here.”

  “Okay,” he said, his body seeming to tense up and collapse a bit all at once. “It’s through here.”

  We walked farther into the room, past the machinery. In front of us lay a dark, heavy door. Brady walked with the familiarity of someone traversing his own living room, and I wondered how many times he had been down here in the three years since Piper had found it.

  Brady reached for a key hidden on top of the door frame and jammed it into the lock of the door. He jiggled it a bit and twisted it left and right until we heard a click.

  “Someone made this in woodshop,” he explained. “It doesn’t fit perfectly.” I looked down and saw that the key was made out of wood. Then Brady pushed his full body weight into the door until it finally budged with a reluctant creak.

  I held my breath as the door moved aside, clearing my view of . . . a hallway. Of course. What else would there be in this twisted place but yet another hallway? The long corridor was only slightly illuminated by some high-up storm windows that seemed to be caked in decades’ worth of leaves and dirt. But the light that remained was enough to show that this was a typical East Township walkway, changing course midpath, twisting one way and then the other as though it had been built to avoid hitting the trees in some imaginary forest. Only one thing set it apart. Along the wall on the right side, somebody had scrawled in black magic marker: Down down down.

  Doorways along the hallway had long since been stripped of their doors, revealing that behind them lay nothing but brick walls. This was a common sight around the school. The story was that either the doorways had been intended to lead to rooms that never got built, or else Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory was back there somewhere. In either event, the brick walls were probably a good thing.

  Finally, we reached one last doorway at the end of the hall. But this one had a door—a very common-looking door with a metal handle. When Brady pushed it open and flipped a switch on the wall, the view that greeted us immediately struck me as absurd. The room could have been my science lab.

  It was clean and tidy with very little dust on anything. The tables had workstations, complete with microscopes and Bunsen burners. Lab coats hung neatly on little pegs along one wall, next to a giant blackboard covered with various equations and diagrams in faded white chalk, which spanned its length. It was all gibberish to me—lots of little circles and numbers. The only thing that seemed clear was a drawing near the middle of the board which showed a small circle being bombarded from all sides by long arrows; it looked like the sun being attacked by its own rays.

  The room was timeless. It had no computers, but other than that, there was nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the schoolrooms. Yet there was one thing in it that made no sense to me, because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was doing there.

  It was a tent. A very small army-green tent that almost looked like a mock-up of what a real tent would be. It was maybe three square feet, but taller than Brady.

  Brady motioned to it.

  I got angry then. “Brady, what is this? Is this a game or something? I’m not going to keep going in circles . . .”

  “Just go in. I promise, that’s the end of it.”

  I looked down at our hands, still entwined. He let go of me then, and I felt like a sinking ship whose life raft had just come untethered. One thought made my legs move—Piper McMahon was not afraid.

  I walked over to the tent, took a deep breath, and pulled back the flaps.

  Inside was a hole in the ground, nothing more. And a closer inspection of that hole revealed a spiral staircase, twisting its way even farther into the earth.

  My heart was thumping. How much farther down could I go? Where would it end? Down, down, down—into the world below. And suddenly I knew. I knew what DW stood for. It was Down World. How many kids knew about this? How many had been through this science lab, into this tent?

  I descended until my feet hit solid ground, and a slight purplish light emanated around me, almost magically. I took a few steps forward, gulping back a bitter taste in my mouth. And then I saw the doors.

  There were three of them, all standing equally before me. And they each had a wooden sign hanging on them, letters burned into the wood, the words taunting me with their innocent simplicity: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow.

  I became aware that Brady was standing on the spiral stairway behind me.

  “Only the middle one works,” he said, referring to the door marked Today.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The others are just brick walls.”

  I looked to Brady to see if he was teasing me, but he was staring with a deadly seriousness at the doors. So I decided to check for myself.

  I opened the door marked Yesterday, and found, sure enough, that only a solid brick wall lay behind it.

  “I told you. Kids have tried to pry the bricks out before, see if there’s anything behind them. But there’s nothing. Just more brick wall.”

  The wall had a tiny little slit on the upper right corner that looked like an eyehole. I lurched up onto my tiptoes to peer into it, but could only see darkness beyond.

  “The one marked Tomorrow is the same thing,” Brady explained.

  I stepped back, closed the door to Yesterday, and turned to face Brady.

  “Okay, so what about this one?” I asked, nodding my head towards Today and trying to sound less freaked out than I was actually feeling.

  For all I knew, this was some sort of new-kid hazing. I had heard about these things. A roomful of cheerleaders was probably waiting behind the middle door to steal my backpack or spray paint loser on my forehead. I became acutely aware that this was a test. And Brady must be in on it.

  “It’s okay. I didn’t believe it either. Nobody does. That’s why we all went through the door. Deep down, you don’t think anything’s really going to happen.”

  “There’s nothing behind that door,” I insisted. “This is a stupid joke. It’s not funny.”

  “It’s not a joke, Marina. But if you want, I’ll take you back upstairs. You don’t have to go in.” His voice shifted as he started to get more and more excited. “Come on, take my hand. Let me take you back up. This was a mistake. Come on.”

  The urgency in his voice only made me more curious. And before I could form another thought, I walked straight ahead and opened up the door marked Today. But then Brady was gone. I held my breath and was momentarily blinded by a bright yellow light, accompanied by an intense heat. Then that quickly went away. As the light faded, I became aware of a wonderful smell. I would know this smell anywhere, because there’s nothing like it in the world. It was bacon frying in my mother’s kitchen.

  And before I knew what was happening, my mother appeared before me, standing in front of the grill, turning the bacon with her red-handled tongs. I walked up to her, and with every step, more of my kitchen appeared before me, behind me, all around me. It was like walking into a painting that was still being created. One moment, there was nothing to my left—just light. But slowly, the longer I stood there, the details appeared and became cemented in reality.

  A laugh came booming from the kitchen table, suddenly sitting in its usual place by the window. The laugh belonged to my father. He was reading the Sunday paper, complete with colorful comic strips. I looked down and saw that I was in my pajamas, my bare feet pressed against the brown laminate tile that my father had laid when we moved into this house.

  Soon all the puzzle pieces came into stark light, the whole house embracing me with an aura of warmth and security. But there was something wrong. There was a feeling in this room that I hadn’t felt in my house for years. My mother’s shoulders seemed too relaxed. My father’s laugh a bit too sincere.

  I realized I hadn’t seen them this
way since—well, not for years.

  They were happy.

  And then I knew. I knew what this room was. My head turned slowly back towards the kitchen table. A knot formed in my mouth, and I started hyperventilating with excitement. Because I knew what I would find there. And for a moment, everything seemed right in the world.

  There he was. There was Robbie. He was at the table next to my father. He looked about seventeen years old, the age that he would have been. He was tall, his head several inches higher than my dad’s. He was eating an enormous plateful of eggs. He always had such an appetite. My parents used to joke that he’d eat them out of house and home.

  House and home. Robbie was at our table. Robbie was alive and eating eggs at the table.

  “Have a seat,” said my mother, and her voice was simple and buoyant in a way I hadn’t heard in ages. “You better grab some eggs before they’re gone!”

  My father laughed, but my brother just grunted. He started piling more eggs onto his plate—a game we used to play. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Grab it before it’s gone.

  And I wanted so badly to go sit at that table. To fight my brother for the last bit of eggs. To eat that delicious bacon. To hear my father laugh.

  No. It’s a lie, I reminded myself. Robbie is dead. This is a lie. It’s a trap.

  I reached out and grabbed the first thing my hands could feel, an egg timer my mom kept on the counter. It felt real enough. I twisted the dial and could hear it ticking. Tick tick tick. The sound was real, the knob turning in my hand like in real life. But I knew it was a lie. And the knowledge made it ugly. The knowledge made it all seem ridiculous.

  I pushed the images away from me, and like a painting left out in the rain, the colors and the shapes began to melt and swirl. My brother’s face blurred around the edges, and soon I couldn’t make it out anymore. I stepped backwards. I kept going farther and farther from my kitchen, the sight melting away and being replaced once again by that yellow light. Soon I backed into a wall. No, it wasn’t a wall. It was a door. I turned around, twisted the knob in my hand, and walked through it.