“Felt real to me. And . . .” Dad poked Xander’s arm.
Xander flinched away. “Ahhh.”
A long swath of skin had been flayed from his bicep. It was glistening red. Blood had trickled down to his elbow.
“Ow!” David said for him.
Dad said, “Talk about a close call. You almost lost your arm.” “Arms,” Xander corrected. “And legs and head.”
“What?” David squealed. “How? What happened?”
“I’ll tell you later, okay?”
David had moved beyond the terrible panic he must have felt at Xander’s disappearance. Now he was fired up. But out of respect for his brother’s condition, he nodded. He could wait . . . barely.
Dad untied the pelt and hung it from a hook. He slipped the sword and scabbard off his shoulder, hung it on the next hook. “These things,” he said. “I’m not sure how, but I think they helped us get back.” He studied them, hanging on the hooks, swinging gently back and forth. “When I got to your side of the Colosseum, they got . . . I don’t know, heavier. I realized they hadn’t gained pounds, but they were pulling away from me, like they were trying to go somewhere. When I grabbed you, I kind of went with them, let them tug me where they wanted to.”
“Tug?” David said. “That pelt and sword were tugging you?” Dad nodded. “That’s what it was, a tug. When I gave into it, we fell back and landed here.”
“So the items are what get you there and bring you back?” Xander said.
“I don’t know if they bring you back or simply show you the way. Maybe we were close to the portal anyway, and they led us to it.” He eyed Xander funny. “David said you had chain mail.”
“And a helmet,” Xander said. “I left them back in the arena. Now that you say it, the chain mail did get heavy; that’s why I dropped it. Maybe it was tugging me toward the portal.” His face paled. “If I needed them to get back . . . and I lost them . . . I could have been stuck there.”
His eyes welled with tears again. “If you hadn’t come for me . . .”
Dad gripped his shoulder. “It’s okay. We’re here now, that’s all that matters.”
“Except for not helping me get back,” Xander said, “is it bad I lost them? Nothing bad will happen because I didn’t bring them back, will it?”
Dad shook his head. “No more questions, Xander.” He lifted his foot onto the bench, leaned an arm over his knee.
“I have a question for the two of you, though.”
Here it comes, Xander thought. The lecture, the scolding. He and David exchanged a look.
Their dad said, “Chocolate or vanilla?”
If he had suddenly slapped David, he could not have elicited a more stunned expression on the boy’s face.
Xander stumbled over his words. “But . . . what . . . uh . . .
Don’t you want to talk to us about . . . all of this?” He swept his hands in a wide arc trying to encompass this room, all the rooms, the hidden stairway and corridor.
Dad scrunched his brow. “We’ll get to that. But let’s get some sleep first. And, of course, ice cream.”
“Since you put it that way,” Xander said, “chocolate.”
CHAPTER
thirty
SATURDAY, 10:13 A.M.
It was only a dream, Xander thought. He blinked against the sun coming through the bedroom windows.
Then he rolled over, and the wound on his arm flared with white-hot pain.
“Aaahhh!”
David stirred under his covers. He turned to face Xander.
“Hurt?”
“No, I always wake up screaming.” He turned the clock radio toward him. 10:13. Yow. Dad must have asked Mom to let them sleep in. She was usually all over them if they weren’t up “before the sun got hot.” He said, “I thought I’d dreamed the whole thing, fighting a gladiator in the Roman Colosseum.”
David shook his head. “It wasn’t a dream. I was there when you went . . . and when Dad brought you back.”
Xander closed his eyes. Thinking about it made his stomach sour. All those bodies. His own close shave with death.
Even the simple fact that life’s rules—especially the ones dealing with time and space, little things like these—were not carved in stone, as he had been taught. All of it made him feel disoriented, like a kite broken from its string, whipping around in the wind. He’d just woken up, and already he was getting a headache.
“Xander, what happened over there? You said Dad got there just in time.”
He didn’t open his eyes.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“David, it wasn’t good. Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
“I want to try it.”
Xander’s lids flipped open. “It?”
“Going someplace. Through the door.”
“No, you don’t want to try it. Don’t say that.”
“Dad did it and came right back. He wasn’t in any danger.”
“David, I almost died.”
“But you didn’t.” His eyes sparkled with excitement.
“I didn’t know you were so stupid.”
David’s smile faltered. Xander reminded himself that Dae had saved his life last night. If he hadn’t fetched their father, Xander would have been slaughtered by that barbarian. In fact, he would have been in his grave for about two thousand years by now. That was something to think about.
Xander blinked slowly. “Sorry. I’m just saying I don’t know why you would even be thinking this way, when you saw what happened to me.”
“I didn’t see. That’s just it.”
“Well, I’m telling you, okay? I almost died, and it was the most horrible experience of my life.”
David considered this. After a time, he said, “I’m not talking about going where you went. Just somewhere.”
Xander threw his legs out from under the covers and sat up. He thought of David and the situation he had been in, under the shield as the sword came down on it. He wouldn’t have had the physical strength to survive. Nothing against him, just his age. And all those bodies . . . Xander wasn’t sure how well he was going to handle it over time. He got up and sat on David’s bed. “I know it sounds exciting; I would think that too. But it’s not worth it.”
David looked like he had been told Christmas had been called off. He said, “You and Dad got to do it.”
“If we’d been in a car accident, would you want to do that too?”
“That’s different.”
“It’s not different, David. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.
It’s just as scary and potentially deadly. When Dad brought me back, the first thing I thought of was a friend who’d been in a car accident. I’m telling you, that’s what it was like.”
David’s face reflected his disappointment. Xander could tell he wasn’t totally convinced.
Xander said, “Promise me you won’t sneak off and do it.”
David said nothing.
“Promise me.”
David’s lips grew tight. The bottom one rolled out a little.
His stubborn face.
“If you don’t promise, I’m gonna follow you every second of every day. Even to the bathroom. I’ll be like a bad smell you can’t wash away.”
Slowly, a smile found David’s face. He said, “I promise.”
“Okay.” Xander pushed him playfully on the chest. He stood. He snatched his jeans off a post at the foot of the bed and pulled them on. He had showered the night before, which was really earlier that morning. He could not believe how much grime and dirt and blood the water had sluiced off him to swirl down the drain. His father had stayed with him, leaning against the sink, talking quietly. Xander knew Dad was worried about him. He had seen some of what Xander had gone through. He had also commented that he hoped the jaunt itself, to another time and place, did not have lasting consequences on their physical bodies or mental state. Xander should have reminded David of that, but he had gotten him to promise and that was all that
mattered right then. Dad had said they would decide what to do about the rooms upstairs another time. For now, they were off-limits. He had also asked the boys to not tell Mom or Toria. He was afraid they would panic and want to leave without carefully considering the situation, and since the corridor was behind a secret wall, there was no need to stir up trouble.
“Let sleeping dogs lie,” Dad had said.
It bothered Xander that in the short time since their move, the number of secrets in their family had skyrocketed.
“What are you going to tell Mom?” David asked, seeming to know Xander’s thoughts. This was one of the topics he and Dad had discussed while he let the hot shower strip centuries-old dirt off his body. When he’d come to bed after that, David had already been asleep.
He looked at the gauze and tape Dad had applied. “Just an accident while investigating the house.”
David sat up in bed. “You’re going to flat-out lie?”
Xander pulled on a T-shirt. His movements made his arm throb. “It’s not really lying. We were investigating the house, and it was an accident.” He registered David’s expression and sighed. “I know, I know. If it’s not a lie, it’s darn close. Dad said sometimes lies told to keep people safe are okay.”
“Hmm. Do you think Dad has lied to us?”
Xander pulled a pair of socks from his drawer and picked up his sneakers. He’d put them on outside, on the front porch steps. He wanted to spend more time outside today. He shook his head. “I think Dad’s as straight as they come.”
David smiled.
As he left the room, Xander thought, What’s one more lie?
CHAPTER
thirty - one
SATURDAY, 11:30 A.M.
After breakfast, Xander decided he needed fresh air and sunshine. He and David set off to explore their property.
Every few minutes Xander found himself looking back through the trees at the house. He kept expecting to see something not right: an angle or addition that wasn’t true; or, as before, a whole chunk of house just up and gone. If the house played tricks, it wasn’t doing it today. The irregular squeak-squeak of the weathervane on top of the tower continually reminded him of its looming presence.
They’d been out awhile, and his hunger told him it was close to lunchtime. Some time ago David had wandered off toward the back while Xander explored the dense forest on one side of the house. Bushes and trees had gone unpruned for decades. Even at midday the area was cloaked in shadow. Enough sunlight seeped through to render flashlights unnecessary, but no one would mistake Xander’s trek through the bush for a cheery walk in the park. Most interesting to him were the fallen trees. They lay here and there in various stages of decomposition. Rolling them over, when they were small enough or decayed enough, revealed swarming worlds of beetles and centipedes, spiders and worms. He always tried to find the stump of a fallen tree. Sometimes it was nearby. Other times he’d have to walk around to find it, usually up an embankment. He’d make up stories about how the trees fell: lightning, beavers, some dudes fooling around with an ax. Probably most had simply died and fallen over. But that was boring.
He had his camera out now and was filming a black beetle crawl over one of Toria’s dolls in macro-lens mode when he heard David calling him. He kept the camera rolling and brought the camera up to capture his brother’s progress through the woods.
David moved toward him, stepping into and out of shafts of light, into and out of view. Then he veered away, still calling.
Xander considered letting him wander completely out of sight and out of earshot. That would make a funny short film, if a bit abstract. Deciding against being mean today, he yelled, “Over here!”
“Come see something,” David said, leaping over bushes and deadfalls to reach him.
“What is it?” Xander asked.
David puzzled at the overturned log and Toria’s Barbie. Ants were swarming over her face, through her hair. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Xander smiled. “The doll represents Average Man—or Woman. The bugs are all the little problems that plague him. See?”
“I think I liked it better when you were making movies about skateboarders wiping out.”
“I am now le artiste,” Xander said, trying to sound as French as François Truffaut. He raised his fingers to the sky, in a flourish, thinking he looked flamboyant and artsy. He was enjoying the dual distractions of the outdoors and his cinematic aspirations. His brother thought about that. He said, “Whatever. Come see what I found.”
“Is it cool?”
“It’s weird.”
Xander paused. He wasn’t so sure he could take any more weirdness.
“Not like last night,” David assured him. “Kind of . . . just weird. It won’t make you think you’re crazy or anything.” Then: “I don’t think it will.”
“Lead the way,” Xander said.
They pushed deeper into the woods, behind the house. At times, the bushes and brambles, trees and branches were so thick they had to walk around as surely as they would a mountain. Xander watched the house recede, becoming less distinct through all the foliage. After a time, he could see it no more. The shadows were even darker here. It made Xander think of the Hansel and Gretel woods, how they got lost in them. More accurately, it resembled the woods in every werewolf movie he’d ever seen.
“How much farther?” he asked.
“Just up here.”
“How’d you get this far away from the house?” David had ventured at least three times the distance Xander had.
“I thought I heard something.”
“Like what?”
“Footsteps. You know, breaking branches and crunching.”
“Footsteps? Out here?”
“And then laughing.”
Xander stopped. “David, with everything we’ve gone through, you followed footsteps and laughter into the creepiest woods we’ve ever seen?”
David shrugged. “I didn’t think anything would happen outside the house. It wasn’t spooky laughter. More like . . .” He thought about it. “A kid on a playground.”
“You haven’t seen enough movies. Children are a vital part of ghost stories. They lure you in, then wham!” He punched his fist into his palm.
David shook his head. He turned and kept going. Xander hesitated, then followed.
“See there?” David said.
Through the trees ahead, sunlight broke through. It wasn’t a mere shaft but a radiant glow covering a wide area. A clearing. Xander thought if David had found a stone altar, he was going back to the motel, with or without everybody else.
But when he stepped out of what had become an impossibly dense forest, he was both fascinated and puzzled. Fascinated because out of untamed wilderness was a meadow half the size of a football field. The ground was mostly flat and covered in a thick, green grass. No rocks, bushes, or trees marred its parklike perfection. It was shaped like an egg, its boundaries well-defined by the dark, imposing forest that completely surrounded it. Overhead, the canopy of the treetops leaned way in, forming a natural dome. At the center, an opening revealed blue sky, white clouds.
The strangest aspect of this area could not be seen, only felt. It was as though Xander had instantly ascended to the top of a high mountain. The air was cooler and felt thinner. It rushed into his lungs with ease, giving him a mild jolt of energy. When Xander was David’s age, oxygen bars were all the rage. Dad was curious and took him to one. They held masks over their mouths and noses and breathed from a canister of oxygen, like you see in hospitals. Both of them had decided the gimmick was a rip-off. However, the purchased air did somehow taste better than regular air and had made them morning-perky. The air in the meadow felt— tasted—like that.
“What is this?” Xander asked.
David shook his head. “Can’t be natural, can it?”
At first, Xander had thought the same thing. Now he saw imperfections humans wouldn’t leave—the ground under the grass was bumpy, wavy; the trees encr
oached into the area just enough to give the perimeter a slightly shabby appearance. Despite the unmistakable dome of the leafy canopy, there was no evidence any pruning had occurred. If someone had carved the clearing from the forest, it had not been tended to in a long time.
As Xander’s eyes scanned upward, David said, “But that’s not all.”
Xander laughed. His brother had stepped out twenty feet into the meadow. “Say that again,” he said.
“I said, that’s not all.”
“Why are you talking like that?”
“Like what?”
“Your voice. It’s higher pitched.” David’s voice had not yet started changing. When he answered the phone, people still mistook him for their mother and sometimes even Toria.
While not dramatic, his voice was even higher now.
Xander walked toward him. “I’ve listened to you enough to know what you sound—” As he spoke, the pitch of his own voice rose. Not to an unnatural level, but the way it did when he got excited or whiny about something. “Hello? Hello? Hear that?”
“I’m talking right now,” David said. He was listening to his own voice, nodding, an open-mouthed grin widening with each word.
Xander said, “Can you hear it in me?”
“Yeah!” David started howling like a wolf. His pitch rose to ear-splitting, glass-breaking levels.
“All right, all right,” Xander said, covering his ears. “Stop it.” “Now look,” David said, He ran out into the meadow, then back.
“Okay?” Xander said.
“What’d I do?”
Xander looked at him from the corner of his eye. “You . . . ran.”
“How fast?”
“All-out sprint, dude.” And then he noticed David was not out of breath. He said, “Wasn’t it?”
David shook his head. “I was jogging. Now watch this.” He walked away. He ran past Xander at a pretty good clip, but nothing stunning. Then he jumped. A little too high, a little too far. It was nothing most people would probably notice. But this close, and knowing him so well, Xander knew it wasn’t normal. Xander took off across the field. He didn’t feel like Dash, the fast kid in The Incredibles. It simply felt like a good run on a good day. He leaped into the air. From his own perspective, he realized it was the best jump of his life.