Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  If you and your other self diverge too much from each other, it can be too late to go back. That’s what George had said. He had been right—it was too late.

  “So the other Robbie,” I continued. “The one I saw last night at the pyramid house . . .”

  I let the sentence trail off, and I could tell the others were staring at me. Robbie and Piper hadn’t been looking in the window the night before; they had never seen the other Robbie.

  “He’s the only one who’s supposed to exist now,” explained Sage. “Your brother no longer has a place. That is why the planes were able to cross. Robbie’s defying the laws of physics by existing here, and these are the consequences.”

  I felt the whole room turn and look at my brother, standing by my side. His face was stone, as it so often was lately. He didn’t even seem sad, just lost.

  “What if I die?” Robbie asked. I fiercely shook my head, refusing to even hear it. But Robbie simply pulled me into his chest. I stood there, trembling. “If I die, will that make everything go back to the way it was?”

  John shrugged. “If you weren’t here, it might make the planes uncross. Make this dimension go back to the way it was.”

  “No, no,” was all I could say. I broke away from Robbie, glaring at the empty faces of the people before us, casually discussing his death as though it meant nothing to them. But it meant everything to me.

  I turned to run, knowing I had to get far away from all these people, but having no idea where I was supposed to go next.

  I stepped onto the rotating cylinder, which began to spin as soon as my foot was on it. I was thrown to the ground and struggled to right myself as carnival music started up, pumping through the speakers all around me. Its warped and tinny notes seemed to mock me as I found my footing, wobbled my way out of the spinning wheel, and ran across the grounds. All the rides started to move of their own volition, as though they were on a timer.

  It wasn’t long before others began to appear—the well-heeled children of the new rulers of the town, hands clutching shiny new balloons or powdered pieces of funnel cake while harried nannies chased not far behind. I had no idea what time it was, or even what day it was. But since none of the children were in school, I had to assume it was a weekend. Christy said I had been gone for four months. When I left, it was June. So it must be October by now. That explained the chill in the air, the lingering gray of the morning.

  Kieren came up behind me, not saying anything. I guess he realized I needed a moment to process. But I had run out of answers.

  Think, Marina, I scolded myself. There’s always a solution.

  Kieren, clearly struggling with all the information as well, stood silently beside me. Nobody seemed to be watching us. The children were too preoccupied with their rides and their candies. There were goldfish to be won, roller coasters to ride.

  “Are the others still in the fun house?” I asked.

  “No. They snuck out the back when the carnival started up.”

  I nodded, not sure why I had asked. I didn’t really care if they got caught, sipping their coffees in the glow of their own warped reflections.

  Mirrors. They do it with mirrors.

  “Kieren, what is DW?” I asked, the pieces of the puzzle all floating before me—my first trip down; the stolen egg timer; Piper McMahon, who got on Robbie’s train at the station; the train with its ghastly conductor, his eyes piercing through mine, seeing through me. My mother’s eyes in the hotel. She didn’t know me. Or did she?

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “It’s like a shadow, I guess. Like the echo of somebody screaming. But there’s no way to stop hearing it.”

  I shook my head. “There must be a way.”

  The planes intersected like a network, like a web. We had taken a wrong turn on our way home, and we had ended up on the wrong string. That was all. It was like a computer. Like a motherboard, the circuits wired together just so.

  “And if we rewire it?” I asked of nobody, although Kieren was still there listening. “If we break down the pieces, put them back together?”

  “What are you talking about, M?”

  Robbie and Piper had come up next to us, with Scott trailing behind, but I wasn’t looking at them.

  “Yesterday, Kieren,” I said, feeling a flood of adrenaline overtake me. The great high of solving a mystery, of being so close to a goal that you can smell it. “We go into Yesterday. We change the past.”

  “You can’t go into Yesterday,” he reminded me. “It’s bricked up.”

  Something John had said was stuck in my mind. It was about the coin made on the tracks, the one that I used to pay the conductor. He had already known about it. They all had. Which means my mother knew about it too.

  And she was on the tracks the night she disappeared.

  “She made a key,” I realized. “That’s why she was on the tracks that night.” I turned back to the others. “We assumed she was trying to go through the train portal—to find you, Robbie. But if she did that, she would have been trapped on that train with you. No, she wasn’t there for the train portal. She was there to make a key.”

  “You mean, like the coin I made you?” asked Kieren.

  “Yes. You made it on the tracks where the portal is. And somehow, for some reason, maybe some of that energy got trapped in that coin. Because it has a special power. You can use it to control DW—to go wherever you want to go. That’s how we got here,” I explained, nodding to Robbie and Piper.

  “Marina handed the coin to the conductor,” Piper explained. “And he took us home. Or wherever we are.”

  “And you think that coin could also open the Yesterday door?” Kieren asked, following my reasoning.

  “I do,” I explained, my thoughts returning to those doors under the school, the brick walls, the little peepholes with nothing but blackness inside. “They aren’t peepholes,” I realized. “They’re coin slots.”

  Kieren exhaled and cradled his head in his hands. We all fell silent for a moment, letting the ideas settle over us. The more I thought about it, the surer I was that I was right. All the pieces seemed to fit—why Mom was on the tracks that night, why she then went into the high school.

  She must have realized it was too late to get Robbie off the train, too late to prevent what was inevitably going to happen as a result of him being there—namely, that the world she had built under the lake and ours would cross.

  But what if the world under the lake had never existed in the first place?

  What if Robbie had never been hit by that train?

  A guard walked by then, wearing that same uniform that the man driving the fire truck and the one at the jail had been wearing. He eyed us unevenly for a moment, making me realize how suspicious we must have seemed, standing in a cluster, wearing shoes, which no one who wasn’t part of the town’s elite was still allowed to do.

  We bowed our heads and started walking, pretending to take an interest in a carnival game where you shoot water pistols into a clown’s mouth, trying to blow up the balloon on top. We all picked up a water gun, and Kieren handed the barker some money.

  The guard finally moved on, convinced, I suppose, that we were the teenage children of some important colonel or general, and that we were enjoying the carnival like everyone else.

  “She went into Yesterday,” I concluded, knowing now that it must have been true. “But whatever she tried to do didn’t work. If it had, the world wouldn’t be like this now. We have to follow her . . . and find out what went wrong.”

  Piper took aim at the clown’s mouth, waiting for the game to start. “How do you know you’ll go to the same place as her, though?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I mean,” she began, “the door to Today leads to all sorts of places. I usually end up in town, by the drugstore.”

  It was Kieren who spoke up this
time. “And I used to land in my bedroom, holding the wrench I use to fix my skateboard wheels when they come loose.”

  I looked down at my hand, gripping the water gun. I was wearing the ruby ring my parents had given me for my tenth birthday. They’d handed it to me in the kitchen, while we were eating breakfast.

  “Where did you get those earrings?” I asked, turning to Piper.

  She touched the fake diamond studs in her ears, smiling at me. “Groussman’s, I think. Years ago.”

  The man behind the counter rang a small bell, and the water guns began to vibrate. We shot the water into the clowns’ mouths, and Piper’s balloon popped first.

  “I win,” she squealed.

  Kieren turned to me. “I had my skateboard in my backpack the first time I went through.”

  I smiled. We had solved another part of the mystery: whatever token you had on you at the time you crossed determined where you ended up.

  I thought of my mother’s little dangling blue earrings from the night I’d last seen her. They were the same ones she was wearing in the old photos in her closet, from the beach in Portland.

  The night she built the portal under the lake.

  “None of that matters if we don’t have the coins,” Robbie said, coming back to the conversation after being distracted by the carnival game.

  He was right, of course.

  “I’ll go to the track and make another coin,” Kieren offered, as Piper gleefully collected her stuffed bear. “I’ll meet you back at my house tonight.”

  “Make two,” I said. “In case we need it to come back after.”

  “I’ll help you, man,” Scott offered, and the two of them ran off.

  I watched them go for a minute, until they disappeared into the crowd, and then Robbie and Piper and I left in the other direction.

  CHAPTER 21

  I thought I would lose my mind sitting on the couch in Kieren’s rec room, waiting for him to come back with the flattened pennies.

  “What do you think it is?” Piper asked, sitting next to Robbie on the floor. “The thing that your mother changed?”

  “Well, we know what she did in real life—our real life, anyway,” I said, nodding to Robbie. “About ten years ago, she went to Portland to visit her old friends, the Mystics. She brought me with her but, Robbie, you stayed home with Dad.” Robbie looked confused by this, as though straining to remember it, but he said nothing. “While she was there, she gave John a key, and he used it to build the lake portal. It’s not like the doors under the school, though. It leads to only one place: the world we saw, Robbie, the one where Mom was in the paper.”

  “It’s awful,” Piper said.

  “The world from that train station.” Robbie nodded.

  “I think what she’s done now is gone back to that day, at the beach in Portland, ten years ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the lake portal. Maybe—I don’t know, maybe she figured if she didn’t build the portal, there would be no dark world to mix with ours.”

  Robbie nodded.

  “Except . . . except that wouldn’t save you. Her whole plan was to save you from being hit by the train. She must have changed something else too. But what?” I wracked my brain, trying to remember details from that beach. But suddenly it was like every image I had retained from that trip all those years ago started to fade. One second I could vividly recall the white billowing curtains, the red bathroom, then suddenly the memories were gone. I shook my head. More of the pictures disappeared. It was almost like they were being . . . erased.

  “I loved that trip,” Robbie said wistfully. “That woman Sage gave me chocolate ice cream every day while we were there.”

  Piper smiled at Robbie’s memory, but I felt a chill run down my spine. “No, Robbie, you weren’t there, remember? You stayed home. You had Little League or something.”

  “No, you stayed home, M. I was there with Mom, but you stayed with Dad.”

  I got up and started pacing. “Oh my God,” I mumbled to myself, my breaths coming faster as I walked. “She brought you instead.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She brought you to Portland. Instead of me. Because you’d be safe there.”

  “What do you mean, safe?” Robbie asked. “It was years before the accident.”

  “She wasn’t planning on bringing you back,” I explained gently.

  “You mean, keep me in Portland? Raise me there?”

  “It would keep you away from the train track.” I nodded. “And that way you’d never have had your accident.”

  Suddenly all those images in my brain of the trip to the hotel were replaced with new ones: Dad and I playing with puzzles; Dad tucking me in, my heart beating too fast. The house feeling too empty with just the two of us left behind.

  Robbie nodded slightly, weighing the repercussions of what I was saying. “If I was raised in Portland, I wouldn’t have grown up with you.”

  “And we never would have met,” Piper added, her hand clutching Robbie’s.

  “But I do remember growing up with you,” Robbie continued. “Mom and I came back from that trip.”

  “That’s how I remember it too,” I said. “So then she must not have gone through with raising you there. If she had, we’d both remember it that way. Something must have gone wrong with her plan.”

  “What?” Piper asked.

  I looked towards the window, to the world that was now overrun with the deranged reality from under the lake. “I don’t know.”

  “So what can we do?” Piper asked.

  “We’ll follow her, all of us. We’ll stop her from building the lake portal. And we’ll make sure that . . .”

  “Marina?” Robbie asked, his voice timid.

  “That she does raise you there, Robbie. That you are kept away from the train tracks.”

  “No.”

  “The world we come back to should look just like our old one, but with Robbie alive in Portland.”

  “I said no. Not if I won’t remember you,” Robbie insisted.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said. “We’ll all go in together. When you leave DW, you always remember everything from before, right? As long as we’re together, we’ll remember each other.”

  Piper and Robbie sat with my words for a moment. Piper smiled, but her bottom lip was trembling.

  “When we get back, you two can go. You can live wherever you want.”

  Robbie looked at me, a question lingering on his face. “Wherever we want?”

  I smiled. “Piper said you wanted to live by the beach.”

  “We’ll get a little place with an extra room,” Piper said with a nod, the plan all set in her mind. “Marina will live with us.”

  “Yes,” Robbie agreed. “When she finishes high school.”

  “Hold up,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Don’t plan my whole life for me. I’d like to do a few things first. I’m still learning how to drive.”

  “I’ll teach you,” Piper said. “I guess I’d better teach you both, huh?” she added, turning to Robbie. “I don’t want to be the chauffeur for you two forever.”

  Robbie laughed, always seeming a bit lighter when Piper tried to cheer him up.

  Kieren and Scott returned a moment later, their faces flushed red and their hair windblown. They had clearly biked back at full speed, still a bit out of breath.

  “Did you get them?” I asked.

  Kieren opened his hand and showed me two flattened pennies, which I tucked securely into my pocket. “Don’t lose those now,” he joked.

  “Promise.”

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I just need to run to my house and get something.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Kieren immediately offered.

  �
��Stay,” I insisted. “I’ll be fine. Why don’t you help your dad upstairs? I get the feeling he wants to talk to you.”

  Robbie looked up from the floor where he had been whispering with Piper. “You sure you’re okay on your own?”

  I smiled. “I promise to look both ways before crossing the street,” I said, and I finally got a bit of a smile out of Robbie. “I’ll be right back.”

  Outside I hopped on a bike and started pedaling for home. It was close to noon. Scott had explained to us that the front part of the school was still being used for lessons during the week, and sports events were still being hosted in the auditorium on weekends, though the place would be heavily guarded. They always ended by 4:30 so that everyone could be home by the curfew of 5 p.m. There was a basketball game that afternoon, in fact.

  Of course, the boiler room was in the military part of the building.

  The plan was to go to the basketball game with everyone else. As it was a Saturday and most of the military staff were off for the weekend, we figured this was our best bet to sneak down the hall towards the boiler room. There was a locked door in place now between the school part of the building and the military section, but Scott knew where they hid the keys.

  We had to be careful, Scott had warned. Instead of a hall monitor asking to see a pass, if you got caught in the wrong hallway, the MPs simply took you away. Nobody really knew where they brought you, but it was somewhere you didn’t want to go.

  I got to my house and pulled the bike around the back, entering the quiet, empty kitchen like it belonged to someone else. Nothing about it felt normal anymore. Not even a scent of my mother’s fragrance, or a stray wire or memory stick from my father’s constant fiddling with computers remained. The house was clean and empty, a musky smell having taken over the rooms. The smell of abandonment, of isolation. I felt my palms sweating, the anticipation of tonight’s plan making me shake.

  Upstairs, on a shelf in my parents’ room, I found the album I was looking for. I quickly flipped through until I found my mother’s copies of those photos from the lake that George had kept in his closet. I hadn’t looked at them in years.