“Someone has to!” he yelled, as if it were David who had caused all of this. He knew it wasn’t. The most blame lay on his shoulders. He shouldn’t have let David go through earlier that evening, should have told Dad about David’s intentions so they both could have prevented it. He shouldn’t have let Dad keep watch alone; he should have done a better job helping him block the stairwell and hidden wall. He shouldn’t have gone to sleep, not with all that had already happened. He shouldn’t have let the man take Mom; he should have held on to her, to the death, if necessary.
All the things he had failed to do . . . all the things he had done wrong . . . They washed over him like scalding acid.
“Not like this!” David yelled back into Xander’s face. “You’re beat up! You’re tired! You’re ready to fall over!” David’s head drooped. Everything about him seemed to sag, to lose its vitality. Softly, he said, “If you go over like that, you won’t come back. I know you won’t.” His voice cracked on the second won’t. He shook his head, knuckled away some tears. He plopped onto the bench, bowed his head. “You don’t even have any clothes on. Just your boxers. How stupid is that?”
Xander’s trembling subsided. He could not be mad at David for telling the truth. If he went looking for their mom now, he probably wouldn’t come back. But he was so . . . frustrated. He knew what had to be done. He just did not possess the strength— mentally, intellectually, physically—to do it. It was like seeing a loved one trapped under a burning car that would explode at any second. Everyone has heard stories of adrenaline-fueled feats of inhuman strength, but the reality is: human muscles are no match for two tons of sheet metal.
Loved ones die. Fact of life.
But his mother wasn’t dead, and he was not helpless. He was simply not up to the task at that moment.
“David, we have to get her. We have to rescue her.”
David looked into his face. “I know,” he said. “But we have to do it smart. We can’t die trying, can we? Then who’ll be here to bring her back? We’ll be like that last family. Gone.” Xander’s shoulders slumped—with them, his spirit and whatever had been keeping him going despite injury and exhaustion. He was heartsick and discouraged. It was unimaginable to him that he didn’t simply fall over dead. Were his organs really slipping over one another to pool in a heap at the base of his torso, or did it just feel that way? This must be how people lost in the wilderness felt: At what point do you muster the strength to keep going, against all odds, even after using up every ounce of energy in yourself ? When do you admit defeat and lie down to die?
To Xander, David represented the logical side of the equation. Not that David didn’t love their mother and want her back. He did, maybe even more than Xander did, if that were possible. For some reason, however—maybe his youth or that he had not looked into his mother’s eyes as she was taken away—he was able to set aside the pure gut reaction of rescuing her immediately, at all costs.
Xander looked from David to the remaining items on the hooks. They were the other side of David’s coin. They would allow him to continue the pursuit, to chase until his heart exploded. He would die in some frozen wasteland; or on the deck of a pirate ship three hundred years ago; or—if these rooms allowed it, he did not know—some moon base in the distant future. Perhaps one of those deaths was already written for him.
He knew David’s way—to rest and go again—gave them the best chance of finding Mom, of bringing her back, of all of them growing old here, not there.
On the other hand, he could put on the headscarf and another of these high-seas-faring items. He could open the door—the portal—and plunge through. He could find his mother or die trying. Wasn’t stopping now abandoning her? Live to fight another day was an expression that did not take into account the loved ones who would die because you didn’t continue fighting today.
Feeling every movement in his body—stretching muscles, bending ligaments, the pressure exerted on every bone—Xander stooped to retrieve the scarf. He pulled it over his head and began cinching a knot in the back.
“Xander,” David said, sadly. He shook his head, bowed it.
Xander heard a sniff, saw a tear fall from David’s hidden face to his thigh. He was wearing pajama bottoms that were not his favorite anymore. These depicted characters from Avatar: The Last Airbender. He had abandoned them in favor of a more mature plaid pattern when he’d turned twelve a few months ago. Xander could not believe only one day had passed since they’d lost David’s favorite pjs to the gap under the door. One day from discovering the rooms to losing their mother.
Xander leaned over David and selected a brass spyglass dangling from a hook by a leather thong. He stepped back, saw another tear fall.
“I have to,” he said.
David looked up. “She went into one room, but came out another. We haven’t even found out how to get back to the room we started from. We don’t know enough about this for you to do any good.”
“I have to,” Xander repeated.
“It’s stupid!” David stood up and stepped in front of the portal door. “It’s killing yourself for no reason.”
“Get out of my way, David.”
His brother tightened his lips, scrunched his brow in determination. He widened his stance for more stability. He pressed one palm to the door behind him, the other to the wall beside the door. The doorknob was directly behind him.
“Okay,” Xander said, equally determined. He stepped in to toss his brother aside.
Something banged in the hallway.
David’s eyes flashed wide. “Mom!” he yelled.
Before David could dart past, Xander spun and ran into the hall. His eyes scanned for an open door or evidence of one having just closed. A voice from the other direction turned his head.
Dad was stumbling, touching his fingers to one wall for balance. Behind him, a wall fixture rocked back and forth. Dad must have knocked it as he passed. On his other side, Toria moved with him. She walked sideways, so she could press one hand to his back and grip his arm with her other. He appeared dazed.
“Dad,” David called. He ran for him. The boys reached their father at the same time.
Dad’s eyes stared past them, down the corridor. Xander could tell he was seeing something way beyond. He said something Xander didn’t catch.
“Dad, what is it?” He leaned closer.
“Not again,” Dad said. “Not again.”
Xander squinted at him. “What do you mean, ‘not again’?” “Not again.” Dad’s face reflected something falling apart. His mouth quivered, then his cheeks, his forehead. His eyes grew big and focused on Xander.
Xander saw his father’s attention coming back from that far-off place he had been. Dad’s eyes focused on him, then squeezed shut. He began to moan, his shoulders heaving up and down. He was sobbing. He collapsed into a sitting position on the floor.
David stepped up behind him. His fingers caressed his father’s head. He pulled his hands away. He glared at the blood on them. Then he wiped this fingers on his pajama pants. Xander witnessed his brother pulling himself together, regaining composure that he had not entirely lost. David asked, “Xander, what is it? You know what Dad’s talking about?”
Through his tears, his wrenching sobs, Dad said, “I didn’t mean for this to happen. Not again. Not this time. Not her!”
Glaring at his father, Xander said, “He knew this would happen! It’s happened before and he knew it.” He dropped to his knees before his father. “You knew, didn’t you? You could have stopped her being taken. Was this your secret? Was this your plan?”
Toria began to cry.
“What are you saying, Xander?” David asked, voice trembling.
Xander stood. He didn’t know what to say. Had too many thoughts in his head. He turned and walked slowly down the corridor. He pulled the pirate scarf away. He let it fall from his fingers. He slipped the sword and scabbard off his neck.
It clattered to the floor.
From behind him, someone calle
d out. Dad’s voice stopped him, but he did not turn around. He could not. His father’s first sentence validated what Xander had suspected. It felt like being shot.
“I did know,” his father said. “About this house, about these rooms.”
Xander turned then. He stormed toward his father. “You knew? So when you said I should trust you, this is what you meant? Trust that our mother was going to be kidnapped, that she would be taken into some time- and space-bending place where she’s all but gone forever?”
“No,” their father said. “I meant things would work out. I thought they would.”
Xander reached his father, still sitting on the floor. His anger frightened David and Toria—he knew and he didn’t care. What their father had done was awful and it demanded his fury. They had been betrayed; their mother had been betrayed. She was gone, and his father had orchestrated the whole thing. He wanted to strike out, to punch him. He felt his fists tighten, hardening to stone. He was ready to do it, to pull back and throw his fist into his father’s face.
Dad said, “I thought I could protect you. I thought I could make it different. I locked the door!”
Xander’s anger did not know what to do with this information— his father talking protection, not harm. His putting a lock on the door at the base of the stairs did not jibe with the malicious intent he had ascribed to his father.
Xander said, “What do you mean, ‘this time’? Why did you bring us here?”
Dad lowered his head. He was thinking, considering his words. His faced returned with a tight smile. He turned soft eyes on Xander. Sorrow there, regret. He said, “I thought I would be able to find my mother.”
Xander jabbed a pointing finger at the door where he had last seen his mother. “Find her?” he said. “She just—” He had not really heard what his father had said, but it caught up to him at that moment. He said, “Your mother. What are you saying?”
The pain in his father’s face was obvious. This was an agony he did not want to share. Dad said, “Thirty years ago, I watched my mother get kidnapped by someone who had come out of these rooms. I came back to get her.”
CHAPTER
forty
SUNDAY, 5:48 A.M.
“I was seven at the time,” Dad said. “My father brought us here.”
The four of them were sitting at the dining room table. Toria and David were tending to Dad’s and Xander’s head wounds. David had a nasty black eye and a bruise on his cheek and forehead that approximated the shape of the big man’s fist. Dad had given him Tylenol. When Toria went for the first-aid kit, David had said he felt well enough to help her.
“Grandpa Hank?” Toria asked. She dabbed at the back of Dad’s head with a Bactine-soaked gauze. It came away bright red. She wrinkled her nose at it and frowned. She tossed it in a wastebasket and stepped from behind his chair to the table where the supplies were neatly arranged.
He touched his wound and grimaced. “Yeah, Grandpa Hank,” he confirmed. “We came here when he got a job at the lumber mill. He had come out earlier and found the house for us.” His eyes became unfocused as he remembered. He shook his head. “It was just a house. I didn’t notice anything weird. Not for a long time.”
“The noises?” Xander said, across the table from Dad. His voice was sharp as broken bones. “How sounds here aren’t right? You’re saying there was none of that?”
“It was a year, at least, before I noticed anything weird.”
“But you did . . . eventually.”
Dad agreed. “I—” But Xander didn’t let him finish.
“So you knew!” Xander said. He hissed and pulled his head away as David parted his hair. He was after the laceration caused by the wall light that had fallen on Xander’s head. “Stop!” Xander said, pushing his brother away.
“There’s a lot of blood,” David said.
“Let David clean it, Xander,” Dad told him. “Who knows what kind of bacteria that hallway’s got?”
Xander scowled at him. “Like I should listen to you.”
“I’m still your father.” He stared Xander down unapologetically. He was firm about his role in his family’s lives.
Regardless of mistakes, Xander thought. He said, “Could have fooled me. You lied about coming here for a job . . . and when you were acting like you’d never seen the house before . . . even going to the real estate office! It was all a big scam!”
“Xander!” Toria scolded. Xander would have snapped at her as well, trying to take over for Mom already. But just as quickly, Xander knew that was wrong and unfair. Toria had often been like that, a mini-Mom. If Toria fully understood what had happened the way Xander did, she wouldn’t be playing Nurse Nightingale for their father. She would be too angry and, even more, too distraught over the loss of their mother. Upstairs, Dad had said, “We’ll get her; we will,” and Toria had believed him.
“Wait a minute,” David said. “You’re the little boy in that picture?”
Dad nodded.
“That was your lightsaber I found?”
Dad smiled, more sad than happy. “I was a Star Wars freak.” “My bedroom was your bedroom!” Toria said.
“Whoa,” David said, thinking. “You were that family that disappeared. So the father didn’t kill his wife and kids and then himself.”
“Grandpa Hank couldn’t put down an old dog. After Mom was taken, he tried finding her. Every chance he could, he’d go through one of the doors and come back. Each time he got more depressed and worn down. And the house wasn’t content to have taken my mother. The weird sounds continued, even got worse. When the big man started showing up again, that was it. My dad said he was afraid he was gonna go insane or that your Aunt Beth and I would be kidnapped next.”
Xander noticed his father had been referring to Grandpa Hank as “my dad”—the first time Xander could remember him doing that. Xander believed his dad was back there, seven years old and reliving his experiences in this house.
Dad continued, his voice more strained. “I know it was the hardest decision he ever made, but he took us away. For our sake and his sanity, we left this house and never returned. He made us promise to never come back. I was so young, and as I got older, he kept reinforcing how important it was that we stay away.”
“You should have listened,” Xander said. His words were as cold as the glare he cast on his father.
Dad nodded. “Deep inside, I knew that someday I would come back and look for her, my mother. If there was no finding her, then I would at least discover what had happened and make sure it never happened again. When my dad— Grandpa—died last year, I felt released from the promise I’d made him. I couldn’t stop thinking about this house.”
Xander practically screamed. “So you bring us into it, your family? How stupid is that? Why would you do that?”
Dad gazed at Xander for a long time. At last he said, “I am sorry. I thought I could control it. Keep you guys away from the rooms. Keep them—” He looked up at the ceiling as if seeing “them.” “Keep them out of the house. As I said, when I had lived here before, it was a long time before we realized there was something weird about the house. I thought I would have time to secure everything. I thought even if you kids found the false wall, you couldn’t get up the stairs. I thought finding my mother was something I could do on my own, without anyone finding out.” David squirted ointment onto the top of Xander’s head. He said, “Did you know about the rooms before your mother was taken?” Xander, David, and Toria had been told their paternal grandmother, Grandpa Hank’s wife, had died in a car accident many years before. They had not talked about her much.
Dad said, “We discovered them right before she was taken. When we started hearing noises at night and finding footprints on the floors—around then is when I think my father found the rooms.”
“So your mother gets taken and the rest of you up and leave?” Xander said accusingly.
“I didn’t want to, Xander. I cried and begged to stay. And, for years afterward, to com
e back. I hated my father for a long time. I was an adult before I fully realized why he had given up.”
Xander’s face was pinched. He said, “Oh, sure. Gotta get on with your life. Can’t grieve forever.”
“It wasn’t like that. He feared for all of our lives. And for his sanity. He came very close to losing it: he’d lost his wife, and the things he experienced in those . . .”
Xander stood abruptly. His chair flipped over backward. His head and shoulder knocked into David’s arms. The gauze and tape David had been holding flew out of his hands. Xander said, “Well, we’re not leaving! Do you understand? We’re not going anywhere. I don’t care what excuses Grandpa had, he never should have left his wife, your mother! I’m not leaving my mother here!” Tears erupted from his eyes, instantly wetting his cheeks. “You can talk all you want about saving the rest of the family, about getting away from this house before it makes you go crazy . . . But we’re not leaving without her. We’re not!” He bolted toward the dining room entrance. He shoved David so hard the boy fell, plopping down hard.
Dad stood. “Xander!” he called. “That’s not what I’m saying! I—”
Xander went through the front door and slammed it on his father’s words.
Xander had no idea how long he paced the woods in front of the house. Through the trees, the sky had lightened to steel gray, then caught a bit of the approaching sun’s orange fire.
He dropped onto the front porch steps. Behind Xander, the door opened and closed. His father sat beside him, too close.
When he put his arm across his back to drape his hand over his shoulder, Xander pulled away.
“I’m not saying we have to leave,” Dad said.
“Not yet, you aren’t.”
“Not at all, Xander. Not until we have your mother back. I’ve made some mistakes, some horrible mistakes. I endangered all of you. Your mother, my wife, has suffered, is suffering, because of my . . . stupidity. I just hope—”
The way his voice broke, the wet sounds he made, made Xander look. His father was trying to be tough, resolute. His grief was getting in his way. At that moment, it was impossible to hate the man. As terrible as his actions had been, he was right; he was still Xander’s father. The grief in his face was as clear as the grief in Xander’s heart. His father had not wished this on them.