At the door, though, he sensed the vastness of the world aboveground, and he felt a surge of new strength. He inserted his Lift into the solid granite wall, turned, and pulled. The night sky greeted him; the fresh air filled his weary lungs. He felt proud, and he smiled. He felt the pride and wore the smile of someone who has done a lot in one day—there is no greater pride a human can feel than when you’ve filled a few days with the sights and deeds of a year. It’s like beating time. It’s like slowing the turning of the globe.
Gran’s pleasure, though, was short-lived.
He had to go home. And he knew there would be trouble at home. But he had to face it, and he had to hurry.
He ran toward his house, and as he did, he imagined what his mother would say to him, and what he could possibly say to appease her. Could he say he had been caught in a bear trap? That he’d been kidnapped by rogue scientists forcing him to test jetpack technology?
When he saw his house in the distance, he paused.
All excuses involving bear traps and rogue scientists fell away. He knew he had to tell his mother the truth—or some version of the truth that she’d believe. He knew he couldn’t tell her about the Lifters, and about plunging to the center of the Earth. That would probably worry her, he thought.
He would tell her that he was with a friend, and they were helping the town. And all of a sudden it all came together for him. He did have a plan to help the town.
I’m sorry, he would say.
It was wrong to be gone without telling you.
But it will all be better soon. So much better.
Let me tell you my idea…
His plan in place, he strode to the house on confident feet. Then, when he was just across the street, he stopped.
He forgot to breathe.
Something was moving. Everything was moving. The mailbox jerked as if struck by an invisible bat. Then the hedge next to it shook. Then the tree next to the hedge vibrated. Gran looked at the ground and saw the grass shivering. The path of all the activity was moving steadily around the house in concentric circles and getting closer.
It was the Hollows.
He didn’t know what to do. Could he use his Lift to get underearth and distract them? He wished Catalina were with him.
Why would they be here? Gran wondered.
Then the circle became a straight line. The Hollows cut inward and struck the corner of the house. The porch buckled.
A shriek came from inside. His mother. Then another: Maisie.
The Hollows must have cut through the corner post of the porch.
Gran’s house was under attack.
Gran ran across the street, leapt over the mounds created by the Hollows, and flew up the steps and into the house.
“Mom?” he yelled.
“Gran?” she said. “In here.”
He found them in the kitchen, hiding in the broom closet. His mother’s wheelchair had been abandoned and she was curled up beside the vacuum cleaner, with Maisie under her folded legs. He’d never seen the two of them look so small and so scared.
The house shook. Glasses poured out of the cabinets and shattered on the floor.
“Where have you been?” she asked over the noise. “What’s happening here? Is it another sinkhole?”
Gran had never heard his mother so afraid, so uncertain.
“Get under here with us!” she insisted.
Gran stood above them. He was a Lifter now, and had just been to the inner mantle of the Earth. He couldn’t cower in a closet. “There’s no room for me,” he said calmly. “Mom, I think we need to leave.”
“No,” she hissed. “Too dangerous. Get in here!” Now her voice was fierce. It reminded him that he was his mother’s son. He could not defy her.
He crawled into the closet, and they were soon stuffed together like three hot dogs in a jewelry box.
She held him against her chest and kissed the crown of his head.
“Where were you?” she asked, her voice kinder now.
“Long story,” he said. “But I’m fine.”
“I was so worried,” she said. “The police were here. And your father’s almost home. He’s been driving for eight hours. We’ve been talking all the while. I was crying, and finally he was crying, and we both thought something terrible had happened to you.”
“Mama was so sad,” Maisie said. “That’s when the earthquake happened.”
From below, they heard a sudden rumble. It grew louder, as if the Hollows were directly beneath them, trying to plow up from below and take Gran’s family under.
“It’s not an earthquake,” Gran said. “You have to trust me. We need to get out of this closet.”
“Why?” his mother asked.
“I can’t explain,” he said.
“Then we’re not leaving,” she said.
The rumble grew louder, closer and more concentrated, as if there were only a few feet separating the floor they were sitting on from the swirling Hollows below.
They stayed in the closet, but Gran knew they needed to leave. He knew he couldn’t tell his mother and Maisie what was really happening. His mother wouldn’t believe it and Maisie would be terrified.
But he knew the Hollows were drawn by despair, and his house was full of it.
“Hey, Maisie,” he said, and he tried to tickle her.
She slapped his hand and pretended he’d hurt her. The rumbling from the Hollows grew louder, closer.
The house was shaking wildly now. Plates crashed on the kitchen floor. Above, there was a thump and the sound of shattering glass.
“Picture frame,” Maisie said. “I’m scared!”
Gran was desperate. “Smile, Mom,” he said. “Got to stay positive!”
“What are you talking about? How can we stay positive?” There were tears in her eyes.
The front door crashed open, wailing on its hinges, and a wind gusted in. Gran had a horrible vision that the Hollows had found a way to survive aboveground and had entered the house. He pulled the closet door shut, threw himself over his mother and Maisie, and waited for the worst.
A thumping came from the porch. Now Gran was sure the Hollows were coming for them.
Thump. Thump.
The thumping seemed to be determined but confused.
“Where is everyone?” a voice yelled. It was a voice Gran hadn’t heard in a month: Gran’s father.
The thumping had been his heavy boots.
“We’re in here!” his mother said.
The broom closet door swung open and there he was.
He was home.
He looked both tired and alarmed. His eyes were ringed with sleeplessness, but there was worry there, and relief, and a sadness that spoke of his regret that he was away while his family was in danger.
“You all right?” he asked. He fell to his knees and took them all into his arms. They huddled there in the closet, with Maisie squatting in the middle, smiling to see her father back, to have her mother and father and brother encircle her. They stayed like that for only a few minutes, but it seemed far longer. Gran could smell the stale sweat of his father, who had been cooped up in the car so long, racing home. Tears left his father’s eyes, then his mother’s. Soon the three of them were crying—everyone but Maisie, who wasn’t sure exactly what was happening. “The house was shaking,” she said to her father.
And when she said that, it dawned on Gran that the shaking had ended. The house was no longer under attack. He went to the front of the house, where he looked out the window. By the mailbox he could see the slightest vibration in the grass. It was as if the Hollows were waiting out there, assessing Gran’s family for signs of vulnerability.
“What are you looking for, Granite?” his father asked.
Gran felt something tighten around his hand, and he realized it was his father’s big mitt of a hand. They hadn’t held hands in years, and Gran had forgotten how it felt. His father’s fingers were large and his palm was callused; his skin felt like the fabric on
their couch. But his father’s hand was warm, too, and having his own hand held like that gave Gran a feeling of indescribable comfort and strength.
Gran turned to find his mother wheeling through the front door, with Maisie sitting on her lap.
“Is it over?” his mother asked.
“Is what over?” his father asked. He pointed to the crooked porch, which was listing heavily to the right. “Someone please tell me what happened.”
Gran knew he had to tell his family the whole story. With the Hollows gone, they settled into the family room and Gran began from the beginning.
He told his family about meeting Catalina. About following her through the hills and valleys. About her disappearing into the Earth. About finding his own Lift and following her into the tunnels. About being attacked by the Hollows. About the implosion of the home of Therése and Theresa. About helping Catalina prop up the tunnels with hockey sticks and car fenders. About meeting the Duke. About the sinkhole in the school. About saving City Hall. About being invited to the Hemispheric Conference, which required falling into the inner mantle of the Earth. About the Duke turning out to be the Hemispheric Commissioner. And about returning from the conference to find his own house under attack. About how Gran’s great-great-grandfather was a blacksmith who made horseshoes not for real horses but for carousel animals.
Once he explained it all, Gran looked at his parents, and at Maisie, and he realized that his story sounded nuts. He was pretty sure they didn’t believe anything he’d just said.
And he was correct.
“That’s some story, Granite,” his father said. “I always knew you were creative, but that’s a doozy. Well done.”
His father didn’t believe it. Neither did his mom or Maisie. And it was just as well. If he was to continue to be a Lifter, his parents couldn’t know. They wouldn’t let him run through the tunnels, risking his own life to save the town above.
But he needed to do exactly that.
In the morning, Gran woke to the sounds of activity downstairs. He heard his mother’s exclamations. Something exciting was happening. Something very good.
Gran got dressed, noting through the window that the morning was bright and looked warm for late October. It was Sunday, he remembered—the most welcome of days. He needed a rest.
He found his mother in the kitchen, sitting on a new wheelchair. It was far more modern and elaborate than her old one. “Dad got it used and fixed it,” Maisie said.
“Easier to get up and down the hills with this one,” he said.
“Look,” Gran’s mother said, grinning, and she moved a lever on the armrest, causing the chair to lurch forward. “It’s automatic, see?” she said. Just then, Maisie’s face emerged from behind Gran’s mother. Seeing the two of them together, Gran’s mother and Maisie, Gran thought for a moment how young they both looked. For a moment they looked like twins.
They had work to do (to repair the porch), and they had cleaning to do (to collect the broken dishes scattered all over the kitchen), but it was nothing. Work like that, with your family on a sunny Sunday—it’s nothing.
Gran’s mom put on the radio, and while they worked and cleaned, she shimmied in her new chair, and Maisie jumped on the couch, and was told to stop jumping on the couch, and she did, and then she threw up.
But it was nothing.
They cleaned up Maisie’s mess together, and after the house was tidy and Gran’s father had propped up the porch with two-by-fours—more permanent repairs would follow—they went for a walk around the neighborhood, to test out the new motorized wheelchair.
Maisie rode on their mother’s lap, her face aglow. As they walked, she turned around, again and again, to make sure their father was still with them.
They walked all over.
They walked past the old Catalan Carousel factory, and Gran told Maisie and his parents what he knew about it. They walked past the grocery store and the flea market, and then they passed City Hall, which looked pristine, totally undisturbed.
Then he remembered his idea.
It had been at the forefront of Gran’s mind until the Hollows had circled, when his father’s return had taken precedence in Gran’s world. Now, though, seeing City Hall again brought it all back.
He had devised a plan.
Now was the time to set the plan in motion.
After the family walk, when they were all home again and sitting in the backyard, enjoying the last hour of daylight through the dappling trees, Gran asked his mother if he could run a quick errand.
“Sure,” she said.
“And I’ll need your old wheelchair,” he said.
Normally she might be skeptical, and would probably say no, but she was so bursting with the day’s warmth, and having her family together and around her, that she only said, “Don’t scuff it up again, please. And be back by dinner.”
Gran took his Lift, and a shovel—he didn’t bother telling anyone he was borrowing it, because who would care about a borrowed shovel?—and he raced the chair down the hill and over to City Hall. There, when no one was looking, he created a door where there had been no door, and pushed the chair in, and then followed.
“What are you doing here?” Catalina asked. Or rather, Catalina’s voice asked. Gran couldn’t see her at first.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Over here,” she said. “Give me a hand.”
He wound his way through the tunnel matrix, most of its paths still jammed by Gran’s Earth-ball blockade, until he found her.
She was doing exactly what he’d planned to do himself.
She was digging out the carousel horse they’d seen under City Hall. The horse’s face was exposed, but the rest of its body was lodged in the tunnel wall.
“Great minds,” she said.
“What?” Gran said.
“Great minds think alike. You know that expression?”
Gran had not heard the expression, but chose not to reveal this to Catalina. As always when she was engaged in a task, she got a little bossy.
“You need help?” he asked.
“I just said I did,” she said. “Careful, though. There’s already enough damage. Don’t be a klutz.”
That was enough. Gran was a Lifter now, too, and the idea of digging out the horse, and bringing it to the Duke, had been his idea too. He didn’t have to be Catalina’s assistant.
“I’ll help if you stop acting like my boss, okay?” he said. “I brought my mom’s chair so we could carry it to the Duke. Bet you didn’t think of that.”
Catalina paused, looked Gran square in the face, and laughed. “Fine. Sorry. You’re right. Let’s get this sucker out and to the Duke. I can’t wait to see his face.”
With the two of them working steadily, the job only took an hour. When they were done, the horse lay on the tunnel floor looking like it had run a mile through the mud. It was brown and black with dirt, and there were chunks missing from its mane and chest.
“And it lost a leg,” Catalina noted.
Gran hadn’t seen that until she pointed it out. But the horse was indeed lacking a rear hind leg, at least below the hock. In all, there was more damage than Gran had expected, but it didn’t seem to be more than the Duke could handle.
They loaded the horse—which was far heavier than either of them had thought possible—onto the wheelchair and pushed it out of the tunnel.
“You sure he’s back?” Gran asked.
“I know he is,” Catalina said. “We took the elevator up together.”
Gran was dumbfounded. “What elevator? I climbed thirty thousand steps.”
“I know. Sorry about that. They finished the elevator the day after you left.”
“Duke?” Gran said.
The door had been open, and, wanting to surprise the Duke, Gran and Catalina had wheeled in the chair bearing the horse.
When the Duke emerged from the rear of the room, his face cycled through a series of expressions before he managed to speak.
/> First, he seemed alarmed that a large new object was in his storage space. Gran knew the Duke always flinched when someone brought something new in and expected him to find room for it.
Then there was the slow process of discerning just what this new object was.
Next, he recognized it as a horse.
Then, surprise again overtook his expression, as he seemed to wonder why a wooden carousel horse would be in his domain.
Finally, his face registered that this was not just any horse. That he knew this horse.
“I know this horse,” he said.
He walked slowly to it and touched its filthy head.
“Where did you get it?”
As Gran and Catalina explained how they’d encountered it underground during their battle with the Hollows, the Duke pulled a framed photo off the wall—the one of the carousel in front of City Hall.
He brought it to the horse before him, and then pointed to a horse in the black-and-white photo. The horse was on the outer ring, a mare rearing with its two front legs in the air. The two horses were one and the same.
“This is Gussie,” the Duke said. “I haven’t seen her in forty years. I can’t believe it. When that carousel collapsed, we all assumed all the animals were gone. Grant, let me see your Lift again.”
Gran handed him the Lift. The Duke put it onto the hoof of the wooden horse. It fit perfectly. “See? It would have gone here. Your great-great-grandfather put incredible care into something that few people would even notice. Beautifully etched brass horseshoes for carousel horses.” The Duke’s eyes welled up.