Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  “I’ll be fine. Sage and Caryn will take me back, and my father is waiting for me.”

  “No, I’ll take you back to the lake first.”

  “Brady,” I said, stopping him. “You and I both know that if you make it all the way to the lake, you’re not going to get back out again.”

  Brady got up and started walking very slowly away from me, pacing to let his energy come back to him. “I don’t have any money to buy a ticket.”

  “Wait,” I said, checking the stairwell to make sure no one was listening. I went over to the cash register and started pressing buttons until the drawer opened. But when it did, the drawer was empty. I was about to close it again when I picked up the cash tray to be sure. And that’s when I found a hundred-dollar bill hiding under some papers.

  “We can’t take that, Marina. She probably needs it.”

  “We’ll pay her back,” I said, knowing it was probably a lie. “I promise.”

  I handed the bill to Brady, whose hand lingered on mine for a moment.

  “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

  “I’m a big girl,” I told him, knowing the confidence I was feigning was probably not convincing anyone. But at the same time, I knew I was doing the right thing. If Brady stayed with me, he would always wonder about Piper. Wonder if he could have done more to find her. He would resent me in the end.

  “I feel like I’m never going to see you again,” Brady told me then, not moving towards the door yet.

  “I will see you,” I declared, the words filling my heart as they escaped my lips, “when you and Piper come home.”

  Brady nodded, and there was nothing more to say. He leaned over and kissed my cheek, and I closed my eyes to feel the warmth of his lips on me, knowing that it was a memory that would probably return to me in the middle of the night for a very long time.

  “Go,” I whispered. And I watched him walk out the door. He didn’t slow down, and he didn’t look back at me. He walked out of the diner, turned the corner, and disappeared past the window.

  And then he was gone.

  It was a cold and silent walk back to the hotel. Only Sage, Caryn, and Milo came with me, and none of them had seemed too surprised when I told them that Brady had gone to the train station. “One less problem to worry about,” Milo had said.

  We walked normally and quite calmly until we reached the perimeter of the nicer part of town. It was a noticeable difference, with everything from the buildings to the sidewalks taking on a polish and style that was completely lacking back in the poorer quarters. Everything turned green, and little boxes with doggy waste bags were even set up every several feet so the rich society matrons could clean up after their Labradors and poodles.

  Sage whispered to me. “Do what we do.”

  She and the others bowed their heads, sticking out their hands slightly and shuffling past the pedestrians—of which there were many, despite the late hour—with a subservient air about them.

  Every now and then, Sage would speak to a passerby in a low tone that I could barely make out. “Donation, citizen?”

  The well-heeled people would invariably say no, or shake their heads and keep walking. As we got closer to the hotel, Sage stopped asking, and soon I realized people were avoiding us altogether. There was one couple, decked out for the evening in the most beautifully ornate clothes, who actually crossed the street when they saw us coming. That’s when I realized that Sage didn’t actually want donations. It was a ploy to scare people away from us.

  And it seemed to be working. We were all but invisible as we approached the hotel. “Walk past it,” Sage whispered, and we all did.

  Once we’d gone several feet beyond the main gate, Sage and the others, as part of some secret plan that they seemed to have already worked out, slowly turned and started walking back again. Soon, just as Sage had said, all the perimeter lights surrounding the hotel, which had been illuminating the sidewalk and all the nearby foliage, turned off.

  “Now,” Milo whispered with urgency, and he grabbed my wrist and led me around the corner, down what had once been the alley that Brady and I had traversed to find the side door. But here, there was a fence that ran the length of the walkway. We continued down alongside it until we reached a different chain-link fence straight ahead with a row of thick trees behind it. I couldn’t see anything past the trees, but I knew from where we were standing that we were probably near the lap pool I had seen earlier.

  “Stand watch,” said Sage, commanding Milo and Caryn, who both assumed sentinel-like positions facing outward. I quickly followed suit, relieved that I didn’t see anyone coming. Sage got down on her knees and started feeling along the base of the chain-link. “Got it.”

  There was a very slight rip running up and down the intertwining links. Sage took a pair of pliers out of her bag and used them to peel the fence open along the slit, creating an opening just big enough for a person to worm through, lying flat on the ground. I immediately threw myself down to give it a shot.

  “Wait,” said Milo. “Do you want to cut yourself?”

  “Boy, she is anxious,” said Sage.

  “Can you blame her?” asked Caryn, who had lost a bit of her earlier energy, ever since hearing that Brady wouldn’t be joining us.

  “Wrap yourself in this,” instructed Sage, who took a thick wool blanket out of her bag. “Or you’ll cut yourself on the edges.”

  I wrapped the blanket around myself tightly, then got down on my stomach and shuffled my way, quite awkwardly, through the opening, managing to snag the blanket only a couple of times. Once I was through, I handed the blanket to Milo, and he did the same, followed by Caryn, and lastly Sage.

  Once on the other side, I wanted to run immediately.

  “Wait,” Sage whispered again, clearly losing patience with me. She took her pliers and carefully folded the fence back into place behind us. “They send someone to check the grounds every thirty minutes. If they find this, it’s over.”

  I nodded, again feeling guilty that I was being such an imposition to them. But I couldn’t help myself. We were so close to the lake, I was bubbling over inside. Just knowing that my father was there waiting for me, that soon I could throw myself into his arms and truly feel safe again, was enough to make me stop thinking clearly.

  Still, I followed my three guides as quietly as possible, and tried to always stay a step behind as we made the long and silent journey down the winding path to the lake.

  “Almost there,” Sage said, and once again, she reached into her bag. Holding out one hand, she motioned for all of us to stop behind her. She pulled something out that looked like a small piece of metal, and soon she held it to her lips and blew out a perfect imitation of an owl call.

  A moment later, another owl call responded from the woods by the lake. Sage blew hers one more time, and within seconds the other one echoed back. I realized, peering through the darkness in the direction of the water, that it was probably coming from George’s cabin.

  “We’re clear,” Sage whispered, and we all started walking towards the source of the other call. Something that George had said earlier came back to me then. He stayed by the lake to make sure the men in the uniforms never found out about the portal. He must have been the one who’d cut the slit in the fence so Sage and her friends could get through. And for that, I owed him a lot.

  But as we approached his cabin, I thought of the pictures he kept of my mother in the closet. What if he had been in love with her, and not Sage? What if he still loved her, even the dark, twisted version of her that lived on this plane? Would he still be devoted to her?

  My questions were answered before we reached the lip of the woods. A slight click came from nowhere, and suddenly the entire woods around us were drowned in a sea of bright lights, which had been rigged to the tops of dozens of trees, flooding the ground below like a football stadium. We were caught,
and the four of us froze.

  “Hide her, hide her,” Sage hissed to Milo, who grabbed me by the waist and all but carried me off into the thickest part of the foliage to one side of the path. We ran only a few feet before I could hear the familiar dinging of a bicycle bell coming from the direction of George’s cabin.

  “This’ll have to do,” Milo whispered, practically hurling me to the ground and burying me in a pile of leaves. He quickly grabbed a handful of mud and smeared it over my face, then covered all but my nose in the leaves as well. “Stay still,” I heard him add before he disappeared. I was lying under a fairly bright light from a nearby tree, and I could only hope the camouflage would hold.

  I heard the little bell from the bicycle come to a chirping stop near the others on the path. “Found them,” the man in the uniform called. And soon other footsteps approached, maybe three or four separate sets of feet. I kept my eyes closed and focused on their voices, trying not to even breathe.

  “George, how could you?” Caryn said.

  “I didn’t . . . ,” George began, his voice small and defeated.

  “He’s in love with her,” Milo replied, rejoining the others. “I told you this would happen.”

  “Where were you just now?” the soldier on the bike asked Milo.

  “Taking a leak,” Milo replied, as casually as possible.

  “Search the woods,” the soldier called, and I heard two sets of footsteps start in my direction. I sealed my mouth and did everything I could not to move, but I knew it was a matter of seconds before I was discovered.

  “She’s not in the woods, Rain. She went to the hotel,” said Sage, using the nickname that only people who went to high school with my mother seemed to know. So this version of Sage must have grown up with my mother, too, but in this reality.

  Had they been friends? And if so, when did my mother change?

  “Stop,” my mother’s voice responded, cutting off my thoughts. Miraculously, the footsteps stopped just short of me. I could feel my heart pounding in my rib cage, and wished I knew some magic trick to make it stop. “Why would she go to the hotel?”

  “You didn’t recognize her?” Sage continued. “She’s your daughter.”

  The man with the bicycle laughed. “Ana doesn’t have a daughter,” he said. “Only a son.”

  I could feel the impulse to gasp hit my throat. What son? Did he mean Robbie? Was there a version of Robbie here in this plane? But not of me? Or was this some other son that only existed here? There were too many questions flooding my brain. I couldn’t process them. And my shallow breathing was starting to make me dizzy.

  The two men with the bicycles were chatting softly in Russian and clearly finding each other very amusing.

  “Back to the hotel,” my mother snapped. And like that, all the other chatter stopped. “George, you too.”

  “It’s late, Rain. I’d like to get to bed.”

  My mother must have given him a sharp look, because after a second’s pause, George corrected himself: “Sorry. Ana.”

  “We’d all prefer to be in bed, George. But you keep letting these vagrants into the woods.”

  “They just want to go swimming is all, Ana. What’s wrong with that?”

  “They’ll spread their disease into the lake,” my mother retorted, a tone of disgust in her voice I had grown all too familiar with during her long and declining depression in our house.

  “Enough,” said the guard with the bicycle. “They’ll get away.”

  “The young man who came in with her?” my mother asked.

  “He took off,” I heard Caryn respond. “He didn’t say where.”

  “Fine,” my mother said. And the whole caravan started to walk away from me, back towards the hotel. I found my body paralyzed by fear. Was one of them lingering, waiting to catch me? I tried to count the number of different footfalls I heard receding, but it was impossible. Several minutes went by, and I lay there, listening to the slight rustling of leaves as animals paced by and bugs chirped their late-night songs. Rather than ebbing, the fear began to increase. My bones grew stiff with the anxiety of not moving. I thought I would scream from the tension of it.

  And then the lights turned off.

  I was alone in the dark. I could hear my breath coming out in rasps as I struggled to contain my nerves. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t care if anyone caught me—I just couldn’t stay there like that for one more second. I launched my body up off the ground, not daring to look in any direction but the lake.

  Like a child trying to outrun a nightmare, I all but flew through the rest of the woods, not looking once at George’s cabin, and dove headfirst into the water. Afraid that someone might hear me paddling, I instead gulped in a large mouthful of air and swam underwater in the direction of the box with the portal in it. I couldn’t see anything in the bleak darkness, of course. So I swam as far as I could before coming up for air. When I did, I turned quickly to judge my location based on the shoreline, and found that I was probably over the box. George’s cabin was to my left, its dark silhouette stark against the lightly glowing night air behind the woods.

  I took a deep breath, and just before my eyes went under, I saw the lights in George’s cabin snap on. This was it. Somebody was back at the cabin. I didn’t know if they had seen me, but I knew that no matter what, I couldn’t come up to the surface again. I either found the box, or I would be stuck here, possibly forever.

  In the darkness at the bottom of the lake, I desperately felt along for the outline of wood. And all I felt was sand. I could feel my chest straining under the lack of air, and knew I had maybe half a minute left before I wouldn’t be able to hold my breath anymore.

  My fingers desperately groped the ground, my eyes straining to make out any form in the pitch-darkness. I was on the brink of giving up hope when I felt something. It was hard and metal, and I realized it was the clasp of the box.

  My breath was all but gone, but it was now or never. With all my strength, I flung open the lid of the box and pulled myself through. The flash of light passed, followed by an even more profound darkness.

  As with before, I had no idea which direction I was facing, and it was too dark to follow my air bubbles. I picked a direction and started swimming against the thick, murky water, only to bump my head against the lake floor.

  I was upside-down. And I was out of breath.

  Quickly, and with my last might, I pushed myself off the sandy wall beneath me and propelled my body upwards, opening my mouth and letting the last of my air escape. It seemed like an eternity of water around me, and for a moment I wondered if this time I really was going to drown.

  But then the light started to seep into my vision, and soon the water’s surface appeared before my eyes. My head burst through, and I gulped in a mouthful of air. For a moment, all I could do was breathe and be grateful. I had never been a religious person, despite the efforts of St. Joe’s to make me one, but I found myself thanking God that I was alive and that air was filling my lungs.

  Before me, I saw only the water and the far edge of the lake, and I realized I was facing away from the shore.

  That’s when I turned around, in the bright light of day, and saw them standing there waiting for me.

  Sage and John looked like they had been standing vigil for hours, and both sighed deeply upon seeing me. And after a moment, I saw Kieren come to join them. I felt like I must be seeing things, and my brain couldn’t reconcile the image of him on the shore with what I had been expecting to see. I searched left and right for my father, feeling I would burst if I didn’t see him. But he wasn’t there. Kieren bent over at the waist, as if catching his breath after a long run.

  And somehow I knew, looking at Kieren, that my father wasn’t coming.

  CHAPTER 16

  Back at the hotel, Sage was treating me like a wounded bird she had pulled in from
the forest. A cup of tea. A warm blanket. And the smell of something savory she was cooking in the kitchen. We were all sitting in her apartment, on the throw pillows where Brady and I had been offered tea before.

  The information was coming at me faster than I could comprehend it. My father had been taken into “detention,” whatever that meant, at a processing center in town. Something had happened at the high school, something big that had changed everything.

  “Slow down,” I told Kieren, feeling more frustrated than ever. “Tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “The police were at your house,” Kieren began, clearly trying to check his pace and use phrases that would be clear to me. “They had become suspicious about your mom’s disappearance. Like, maybe your dad had something to do with it.”

  “What?”

  “I know it’s insane. But I guess they wanted to interview you, see if you knew more than you were saying.”

  “Oh God.”

  “So your dad called the camp, from the number on their website.”

  “And let me guess. They had never heard of me.”

  Kieren gave me a moment to process this before going on. “Your dad called your friend Christy, and asked if she knew where you were. And Christy told him everything.”

  I buried my face in my hands, imagining poor Christy on the phone with my father, panicking. I felt terrible for having put her in that position. It hadn’t even occurred to me how selfish it was of me to ask such a big favor of her. And I couldn’t wait to talk to her again so I could apologize.

  “Don’t be mad at her,” Kieren said.

  “No, no, I’m not,” I insisted. “I just feel guilty. I should have never asked her to lie for me.”

  “Christy came to find me and asked if I could help. So I went to your house . . .”

  “You what?” I asked. “Are you crazy? My dad could have seen you. He would have killed you.”

  “I didn’t care about that anymore. I wanted to tell him that you were okay.”

  “What did he say when he saw you?”