Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  I woke because I heard the engine start. My eyes flickered open to that cold, gray first-morning light, and once again I was alone. I rolled over, rubbing a crick out of my neck, and walked through the house looking for Kieren. I suppose I knew, however, that I wouldn’t find him.

  I looked out of the front window in time to see him driving off in Scott’s car, and my gut twisted up inside of me. Somehow I knew immediately where he was going.

  I grabbed my bike from the garage and pedaled standing up, going as fast as I possibly could.

  My legs woke up quickly as they pedaled, and the early-morning air was like a splash of cold water to my face. My mind was racing, replaying last night’s conversation and hoping, despite myself, that Kieren wasn’t doing what I thought he was doing.

  But when I pulled into the parking lot at the train station, I saw the car. I pedaled to the building and threw the bike down onto the sidewalk. Running up to the platform, I flicked my head from left to right, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. He wasn’t there, or inside the station either. Before my mind caught up with my feet, I was running down the bike path towards the place where he had made me the penny.

  I made out his figure on the track just around a slight bend, and I became aware of the rumbling from the train at the same time. It was only a few hundred feet away, and Kieren was standing to meet it, dead center on the tracks.

  “Kieren!” I screamed, the shrill voice escaping from deep within me with such intensity that I almost didn’t recognize it.

  He was facing the train, and he didn’t turn to look at me. “Go home, M!” he shouted.

  I ran up beside him, waves of fear pulsing through my legs and almost making me trip. The train horn wailed so loudly that I couldn’t hear myself think. I tried to shout his name again, but everything was drowned out by that desperate shriek from the train.

  Kieren continued to look straight ahead as I stood by the side of the track, and I knew that it was too late to simply walk up and pull him out of danger. The train was almost upon us.

  I heard, somewhere deep inside me, a voice screaming, “No, no, no,” and I wasn’t sure if it was actually coming out of my body or if it was just the echo of my mind. But nothing could make it stop as the train grew closer and closer.

  I didn’t think. I didn’t decide. I didn’t even breathe. My legs leaped on their own, onto the track, towards Kieren, and I remember using all my might to push him out of the way. The train came.

  And the last thing I heard was the silence as my own screaming came to an end.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 17

  I didn’t notice the flash of light, though I’m sure it must have happened. All I noticed was the blackness. And the quiet. And slowly, very slowly, the rumbling. It was the train, humming its way down the track.

  When I stood up, I saw that I was indeed on a train, but not the one I had taken west with Brady. The floor of the car I stood in was patched up and well worn, in some places nothing more than a few wooden boards hammered together haphazardly, the passing track visible below. Several of the windows were broken, or missing altogether, and the wind that blew in through them as the train rambled along stirred the few things that still existed inside—papers dancing in circles over the ripped-up seats; old train ticket stubs flipping over on their sides before eventually finding their way through the slits in the wood and disappearing onto the track.

  It was a train car out of time and out of place, and for more than a moment, I was sure that I was dead. It made perfect sense to me, I suppose, that this would be my purgatory. A train. An empty train that I would inevitably ride forever.

  But out the window, I recognized a few landmarks that told me perhaps I wasn’t as far away as that. We weren’t in my town, but the curve of the land, the feel of the trees, the architecture of the small passing houses, all conspired to assure me that we were close. It might just be that whatever dimension I had landed in wasn’t too different from my own.

  I walked the length of the car, and I reached for the door at the far end of it. I was relieved to see that it opened with very little effort, making a bit of a whooshing sound as the chilled air rushed in through the newly formed void. I stepped gingerly over the small platforms that connected this car to the next, completely exposed to the outside and with only a chain dangling along the sides to keep me from falling. Maybe this dimension wasn’t so similar to my own, after all. I couldn’t imagine a train in our world that would still let people cross from car to car by actually stepping outside while in motion.

  The door to the next car opened easily as well, but I was disappointed to find that the car itself looked just like that last one. Was this whole train abandoned? Where was it going? And when would it stop?

  The third car offered up some signs of life, at least. It was a sleeping car, with bunks lined up against both sides. It didn’t look like anyone had slept in them for a while, but at least the mattresses and turned-down sheets gave the appearance that someone once had, and maybe not even that long ago.

  I continued to make my way through the train, car to car. It looked like every car had once served a purpose—the dining car, the ladies’ lounge car, even a library car. It was as if at one point, in some world long ago, this had been the luxury liner of train travel, the Titanic of railroads. But now, like the Titanic itself, it was nothing but a carved-out shadow, a bleak reminder of the destructiveness of time. The books in the library car were scattered and ripped, their pages torn out and blowing like oversized snowflakes in and out of the windows.

  The train moved on, passing through tunnels and dark, towering woods. And it didn’t stop. Time moved on, too, and I began to realize the sad truth that it probably never would. Maybe I was right the first time. Maybe I had died.

  I thought of Catholic school. My teachers had never been the superstrict cliché of Catholic nuns, but they were true believers. My seventh grade math teacher, Sister Linda, had stopped class once when a group of boys was being too rowdy and reminded us that hell held a special place for bad children. I thought she was crazy. And I remember thinking that it was a perverted and warped thing to say to a group of twelve-year-olds.

  Now I wondered if she was right. I thought back on the things I had done. I’d lied to my father. I’d tried to lure Brady away from his girlfriend. And I’d spent the night with Kieren. We hadn’t done much. Just kissed. But was that enough? Was I condemned to ride this train for all eternity as a result? Could God really be that cruel?

  Suddenly, I heard giggling. I didn’t recognize it at first. It seemed like such an impossible thing on this train. But when it came again, riding a wave of sound from somewhere several cars away, I was sure that I hadn’t been mistaken.

  I made my way to the next car, and as I took the first step, I gasped. In this car, whole boards were missing from the floor, and the track passing beneath was only inches from my feet. One more step and that would have been the end of me. I caught my breath and walked more carefully, tiptoeing my way on the firmer boards to the other end.

  The car after that was something I never would have expected. It had been carefully boarded up, from floor to ceiling, by someone who had taken great care to cover every opening. And in the absence of natural light, it had overhead bulbs hanging from electrical cords and buzzing with a soft glow. It hadn’t occurred to me that this train would have electricity. The car was dedicated to one purpose: it seemed to be a large walk-in pantry. Piles of food were stacked, very carefully, in neat rows up and down the length of the car. Cans of soup on one side. Boxes of ramen on another. And even baskets of fresh fruit, arranged by size. Apples and nectarines in one basket. Grapes, berries, and walnuts in another. Bananas on their own, so as not to rot the neighboring fruit. Someone had given this car a lot of thought. Or else they just had a lot of time on their hands.

  And then I heard another giggle.

  The nex
t car was an actual living area, complete with floral wallpaper and curtains made from a patchwork of dark fabrics hanging by the windows, tied back with ribbons. A plush-looking couch was half covered in what appeared to be books from the library car, some clearly taped together with whatever tape was available, and in some cases tied together with string like Christmas presents waiting to be unwrapped.

  The giggling came from the next car up. I tried to think of how many doors I had already passed through. Maybe a dozen? So was I nearing the front of the train, then? Or did this train have no front?

  I tentatively pushed open the door at the end of the car and stepped onto the platform, seeing that I no longer recognized any of the scenery around me. I wasn’t sure if I should push open the next door, as it seemed that someone was probably living in there. In the end, I decided to knock, not wanting to be rude.

  The giggling stopped. I stood in the chill of the wind blowing between the cars, starting to feel a sense of vertigo at the passing of the track beneath me and grasping the flimsy chain that kept me from falling out. I started to feel that if the door didn’t open soon, I would have to push it open and let myself in, because I couldn’t stand to remain there on that exposed platform for too much longer.

  Then the door opened. The girl who stood before me, a look of complete shock and even fear in her eyes, was at once a total stranger to me and at the same time had a face that had been haunting me for months.

  It was Piper McMahon. Beautiful, lost, and tortured Piper McMahon was living on this train. And an awkward glance at her feet and back up revealed that she wasn’t wearing very much, but was instead covering herself with some sort of tapestry. She looked like a movie star, as though her hair had been styled to fall over her shoulders just so.

  “Baby, who is it?” came a man’s voice behind her.

  “I don’t know,” she called over her shoulder. “It’s a girl.”

  I started to wobble, and for one horrific moment, I thought I might actually fall. I grabbed for the chain to my right, but its swinging motion hardly helped to steady me.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Piper said, tucking the tapestry into itself like a towel after a shower and putting her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t fall off now. You just got here.” She helped guide me into the car and closed the door behind us.

  Inside was a quaint little bedroom, complete with a small kitchenette. Standing in front of the little makeshift stovetop, a large wooden cooking spoon in his hand, was a young man with a beard, wearing an old tattered pair of sweatpants that cut off at his shins. And I almost didn’t recognize him until I looked into his eyes, and saw that they hadn’t changed a bit in four years.

  My brother looked at me, and it took him a moment to process what he was seeing. When he did, the look that came over his handsome new face was probably somewhat akin to my expression when I heard that he had died.

  “No,” was all he said. His shoulders slumped and he turned away from me, throwing the spoon down on the floor.

  “Baby?” Piper asked, her voice tentative, obviously aware that something was very wrong.

  Robbie seemed to go a bit crazy then, and all Piper and I could do was stand and watch as he began to kick the wall of the train car with all his might. He kicked and kicked until he managed to splinter the wood by his side. And when he was done, he collapsed down into a heap on the ground. I watched as he buried his head against the wall and began to mutter. For a horrible moment, I wondered if his years on this train had made him completely lose his mind.

  “Robbie?” I asked, hearing the crack in my own voice.

  He turned and pressed his back against the wall, looking at me and flinching from what I imagine was the splintered wood scraping his back. Then he suddenly laughed.

  “Sorry,” he said. “That was dramatic, huh?”

  Piper laughed a bit, covering her mouth immediately.

  “It’s just this damn train. It claims another.”

  Piper offered me a half smile. She reached out her hand, urging me to come and meet her in the middle of the car. “It’s okay,” she said. “He’s better now.”

  I approached Piper slowly, my eyes on my brother, who had yet to actually say anything to me.

  When I reached her by the bed, she put her arm around my shoulder. She had a warmer and more generous energy about her than I had expected, and I understood at once what Brady must have missed about her, aside from her obvious beauty.

  Brady. He went home to find Piper. But he wouldn’t find her there.

  “Sorry,” Robbie said, still sitting on the floor. “How rude. Piper, this is my sister, Marina. M, this is Piper. Or do you two already know each other?”

  Piper looked at me and shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  I shook my head as well. We had never met.

  “Robbie?” I asked again, waiting for him to acknowledge me.

  Robbie stared dead-eyed for a moment, still processing that I was there on the train with him, I imagine. And most likely thinking—as I was, of course—that now our parents had lost two children.

  He held out his hands to me at last, and it was only a flash before I threw myself down to the floor and into his arms. Before I knew it, I felt Piper next to us, wrapping us both up into what had become a big group hug.

  “This is beautiful,” she said. “I always wanted a sister.”

  When Robbie and I were very little, our parents took us to explore a coal mine. It was part of some tourist trap on the road to something else, a novelty my father had read about in the back of a magazine. He had always been a scientist at heart, and I suspect he thought it would be one of those fabulously educational pit stops that peppered our childhood. Children, this is where coal comes from. This is how we power the oven.

  I was probably about six at the time, which would have made Robbie eight. I don’t remember much about it, of course—part of the seamless blur of childhood. But I remember how it felt.

  It was dark, naturally. Very dark. And the company that led the tours had purposely kept it that way in an apparent effort to recreate the experience of the first miners who had ventured into it. Only a few lamps hanging from chains lit the way down, down, down, into the depths of the place.

  People giggled, and people talked. And their voices echoed, and reverberated, and eventually died down, swallowed by the giant darkness around us. And I remember thinking, even then, that they were only talking to cover the void. Because the silence as we went deeper and deeper started to make the skin crawl.

  It grew cold, and the air grew still. But we kept going down. I held my father’s hand, and he rattled on at first about stalactites and stalagmites and the process of mining coal and converting it to energy. But after a while, even he grew silent.

  I stopped to watch some water trickle over the black rock. In the dim light, it was only visible as an occasional flash of yellow, pulsating its way downward. And when I looked up, somehow and in some way, I was alone.

  The group had moved on and I hadn’t noticed. I guess my father, wrapped up in the experience, playing explorer, had assumed I was still by his side. And my mother, who I’m sure had only taken the trip to humor my father, was obliviously walking, probably swirling in a sea of thoughts.

  The silence was deafening. The quiet of it, the hum of nothing, made the eardrums ache. It was a feeling I wouldn’t experience again until almost a decade later, following Brady into the boiler room.

  Silence creates a void. Silence begs to be filled.

  I stood in the dark, feeling the great chill of solitude take over my bones, letting the silence claim me. I was scared, of course. I was terrified. But I was fascinated too. It was the first time I felt the enormity of how very alone we are in the universe. In that darkness, I was suspended, as if floating in space. I held my breath and listened to the absence of sound, aching to run and yet unable to move.r />
  And then I felt my brother’s hand. Robbie had been sent back by my father to find me. They must not have been far, just around the next bend, but in the absorbency of the walls, all sound had been wiped out. And yet Robbie had found me, and he led me back.

  Robbie always found me. Even in my dreams. Even after he died.

  I had been alone in a cave for four years. And now Robbie had come back to me. Any thoughts I had that someday I would come into DW and find him, take him, save him, they vanished now that we were actually together. Because as always, it was the other way around. I was the one who felt saved.

  I would not push my brother back through the portal. I would not lose him again. We would find another way, or we would stay here forever. That was the deal.

  Piper McMahon was not much of a cook. Her great addition to the ramen Robbie had prepared was to add a handful of raw walnuts to it.

  “Now it has protein,” she said.

  Robbie smiled, and I could see that he was in love with her. I wondered if he would have loved her in the real world, or if his great affection was more a result of the years he had spent on this train alone before she showed up. But when I saw her laugh, her perfect teeth almost reflexively biting her lower lip, I knew that girls like Piper would always have men falling in love with them, no matter where they were.

  “I’m a little confused, Piper,” I had to say. “How did you get here? What happened?”

  “Oh, it’s a crazy story,” she began, stirring her ramen. She turned to Robbie. “Isn’t it crazy, baby?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  The “baby” stuff was starting to get under my skin, and I felt like I had to say something. I couldn’t stop thinking of everything Brady had done to find her, how heartbroken he was about her disappearing. Had she been here on this train calling my brother “baby” the whole time?

  “Because Brady and I went to find you, you know,” I said.