Keal leapt up, the sledgehammer miraculously in his hands. He hoisted it back.
Taksidian jerked sideways. The hammer struck the blocks beside him, kicking up sparks and dust. Keal pulled the hammer back. As he swung it, Taksidian pushed off the wall, back into the chamber. The hammer cracked against the wall. A block disappeared into the blackness beyond. Keal hefted the hammer back again and waited. He reversed a step.
“Come out of there!” he yelled. “Hands first! Show me your hands.”
Nothing. Not a sound. No movement.
Keal waited. Finally, he said, “David . . . ?”
“I got it,” David said. He rose and took the flashlight from Toria. Shining it into the opening, he stepped closer.
“Careful,” Keal said.
One more step, then up on his tiptoes. He raised the light, moved the beam around through the opening. “He’s gone,”
David said.
“Maybe,” Keal said. “Maybe not.”
David moved closer. “I can see the back wall and the floor.”
“Okay, come here.” Keal held the sledgehammer out to him. “Trade with me.”
The hammer was heavier than it looked, and it looked heavy. David pushed it up over his head, as though it were a barbell. “Okay.”
Keal leaned into the opening, aimed the light at the ground nearest them.
“What?” Toria said.
“Nothing. He’s gone.”
David dropped the hammer. It clattered to the floor, and he fell onto his hands and knees beside it. He spat on the floor. Spat again. He felt Keal’s hand on his back.
“David?” Keal said.
Holding his head low, he raised an index finger: Give me a minute. He could taste Taksidian’s blood on his tongue. He retched, opened his mouth to puke, but nothing came up.
He spat and watched a string of drool dangle from his lip to the floor. He leaned back and sat on his heels. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, saw blood smeared with slobber, and rubbed it off on his jeans.
“I didn’t think going through a portal could make you sick,” Keal said. “Tired, but not sick.”
“I bit him,” David said.
“You what?”
“I had to,” David said. “I went back to his house. He saw me, tried to grab me. I had to bite him to get away.” David spat again. “Tasted like raw steak. Old steak.”
“Gross!” Toria declared.
David looked around Keal at the broken wall. He said, “He might come back.”
Toria backed away.
Keal handed the flashlight to her and scooped up the sledgehammer. He stood in front of the opening, legs apart, hammer cocked over his shoulder, and said, “Let him come.”
CHAPTER
thirteen
THURSDAY, 7:07 P.M.
The circle of light from Toria’s flashlight trembled over the edges of the ragged opening. It slipped into the chamber and wobbled against the far wall. It skimmed over Keal’s back, casting a giant shadow of their protector on the wall.
David pulled his legs out from under him and sat on the floor.
They waited like that for a few minutes. Finally, Keal glanced around the basement, which was lit by weak, yellowish bulbs mounted to ceiling trusses here and there. A labyrinth of walls divided the area into rooms. From any given spot, not much of the basement was visible.
“Anything we can use to block this thing?” he said.
David tried to remember. He’d been down here only once, when he, Xander, and Dad had inspected the basement, looking for ways someone could get into the house. Or for “squatters,” as Dad had referred to people living where they didn’t belong. David had thought it was a funny word and didn’t even want to know what someone would be doing squatting in their basement. Now he wished they had found people living down here, to explain the big bare footprints Mom had seen in the dust on the dining room floor. That would have been much better than the truth, that some bad guy was coming into their house from the past.
“I can’t remember,” he said.
Keal backed away from the opening. He set the head of the sledgehammer on the floor next to David’s knee. Its handle rose straight up.
Keal said, “Toria, wait here with your brother. I need your flashlight for a few minutes.”
She handed it to him and dropped down to her knees beside David. She put an arm around his shoulders.
Keal returned to the chamber and leaned into it again, flashing the light around.
“Don’t,” David said. He felt like a guy who’d been bitten by a lion, only to see his friend stick his head into the beast’s mouth.
Keal threw an anxious look at him and stepped away from the hole. “I’ll be right back. Holler if you hear or see anything, especially in the chamber.”
“You really didn’t have to say that,” David said.
Keal smiled and walked around a corner. “Keep talking,”he called out, “so I know you’re safe.”
“About what?” Toria said.
“Anything. I just want to hear you.”
“La la la la la,” Toria said. She smiled at David, then frowned. “What happened?” She was looking at his knuckles, bloody and bruised.
He rubbed them. “Pounding on the wall.”
“Does it hurt?”
He shook his head.
She called over her shoulder to Keal. “Shouldn’t we call Dad, let him know David’s okay?”
“Good idea,” Keal answered.
Toria crawled across the floor a short distance and returned with the house’s wireless phone. She punched the buttons and said, “We got him. David. He’s okay. Well, he almost threw up, but he’s okay now.”
David shook his head. Sealed up behind a wall. Teleporting away and back again. Taksidian! And it’s his almost barfing that Toria tells Dad about. “Let me talk to him.” He took the phone from her. “Dad?”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m good. But, Dad, listen. There’s another portal. It—”
“Wait,” Dad interrupted. “Xander tells me Taksidian’s been bugging our phones.”
David bit his lip. “I forgot,” he whispered.
“Don’t say something you don’t want him to hear.”
“I don’t want him to hear anything,” David said. He pushed the handle of the sledgehammer. It dipped almost to the floor, then righted itself. He supposed they would have to give up using phones altogether. Strange how their lives were starting to resemble a video game: as soon as you gained one advantage—say, getting Nana back—something happened that cranked up the difficulty level.
“I love you, Dae.”
“Love you, Dad.”
He disconnected and set the phone on the floor.
Toria studied his face. “Were you crying?”
“Not now,” he said. He tapped the hammer’s handle again. It dipped and came back up.
“Before?”
“Like a baby,” he said, an embarrassed smile creasing his lips. “I kind of thought I was getting tougher. You know, getting used to almost dying about once an hour, but . . .” He looked at the opening and finished his sentence in his head:
Man, that was bad. He shook his head, perplexed by how quickly he had crumbled. “I wasn’t even in there that long.”
“The chamber?” Keal said. He was dragging a huge wooden steamer trunk toward the opening. Something in David’s expression made him stop. He set the trunk down and sat on it. He said, “Sensory deprivation. It’s one of the worst forms of torture. Can’t hear, can’t see. No contact at all. It usually takes a couple of days for the full effects to kick in, unless—”
“See?” David said, disgusted with himself. “I was flipping out in two minutes.”
Keal held up his index finger. “I said unless.” He waited until he saw he had David’s attention. “Unless you don’t know how you got there or how long you’ll be there. Most prisoners of war understand the tactic, and they know it won’t last forever.
Mentally, they’re prepared. For them, it’s not a matter of being scared, it’s . . . something else. But you had no idea where you were. The bones told you other people had died in there. You’re a smart kid. You calculated the horror of your situation quickly. Given all that, of course it got to you fast. I think you handled yourself better than most people would have.” He leaned down and slapped David’s knee.
David smiled. “Thanks, Keal.”
Keal got to his feet, then tapped David’s head. “What say you help me cover this up?” he said, pointing his thumb at the chamber.
“A trunk?” David said. “That’s not going to keep anyone out.”
“I’ve got some plywood sheets upstairs,” Keal said. “Some two-by-fours and rebar. Everything we need to button this thing up good. But I’m not going to leave you guys down here alone while I get them, and I’m not going to leave that hole the way it is, unattended. Someone could come through and hide in the basement until we leave again.”
“Yeah, but . . . the trunk?”
“Trust me,” Keal said. “Okay?”
They stood the trunk up on its side. It was taller than David. As they scooted it in front of the opening, David caught the backsplash of Toria’s light skittering around the walls inside the chamber. His stomach flopped over on itself. The room wasn’t a chamber; it was a crypt. For a while, it had been his crypt.
The trunk blocked all but thin gaps on the sides and top of the opening. Keal reached into his pocket and pulled out some coins. “Okay, watch,” he said. He placed a quarter on the top edge of the trunk, barely hanging over. He did the same with a dime and two pennies. “Now if anyone even nudges it, the coins will fall off, and we’ll know someone was here.”
“They’ll hear them hit the floor,” David said. “They’ll know what you did and put them back.”
“Ah,” Keal said. “But I put each one facing a different direction, and only I know exactly how they were placed. Like a combination lock.”
David smiled and nodded. “Smart.”
Keal gave him a little push. “You thought I wasn’t smart?”
As they backed away from the chamber toward the stairs, David thought again how much it resembled a crypt. He wondered how much time he had before it wanted him back.
CHAPTER
fourteen
THURSDAY, 7:31 P.M.
Having reached town—cars driving around, people going about their business—Xander and Dad stopped looking over their shoulders for Taksidian every two seconds. They were about to cross a driveway into a business’s parking lot when Taksidian’s black Mercedes pulled off the main road into the drive and stopped in front of them.
Dad threw his arm across Xander’s chest and took a step back. Their fear was reflected back at them in the car’s black-tinted side windows.
Xander swiveled his head, looking to see if Taksidian’s accomplices, his henchmen, were moving in on them. The sun cast an orange tinge into the western sky, leaving the rest sapped of color; the twilight left too many shadowy places to hide for Xander to be sure of anything.
He imagined a car full of hulking creatures like the ones who had attacked David, Toria, and him the day before. They would spring out like trapdoor spiders and pull them in. The image gave way to another less dramatic but equally lethal scenario: Taksidian with a silenced pistol.
“Dad?” he said.
“Get ready to run,” Dad whispered.
The driver’s window slid down, revealing Taksidian’s gaunt and supremely smug face. His gaze took in Xander, then moved slowly to Dad. Words rolled out of his mouth like swells on an ocean, deep and smooth: “Join me for a piece of pie?” He nodded at something through the windshield. They were in front of the diner the Kings had eaten at on their second day in Pinedale.
“You tried to kill me!” Xander said, straining against Dad’s arm. “And my brother! You stabbed Jesse, took his finger!
You kidnapped my mother!”
Taksidian pursed his lips and swirled his hand in the air, as if to say, I know, I know . . . get it all out, if it makes you feel better.
“Xander,” Dad said. He turned his back to Taksidian and placed a firm hand on Xander’s chest. “Not here.”
Xander snapped his face toward his father, the blazing hatred for Taksidian now directed at him. “What’s with you?” he said. “How can you not want to tear him apart? Who else has to be kidnapped, who has to die before you do something?”
Taksidian watched them with those bored eyes—but Xander knew they were alert eyes. His high forehead and long kinky hair reminded Xander of the creepy undertaker in the movie Phantasm.
Taksidian shook his head. With the precision of a skilled actor, he managed to focus whole soliloquies of contempt and disdain into a single word: “Teenagers.”
Dad’s muscles tightened, but he ignored the man. He hooked his fingers around Xander’s bicep and said, “Come with me.” He led Xander away from the car.
“I don’t get you,” Xander said. “You know what he’s done!”
“I know what our goals are,” Dad said. “Do I want to tear him apart? I do. Is it the best way to get your mother back? I don’t think so. He may be the only person who can bring her back to us.”
“Him?” Xander said. “We can find her!”
“I think we can too,” Dad said. “But let’s find out what he wants. Maybe we’ll learn something that’ll help us.”
Xander glared past Dad at Taksidian’s profile. The man was staring through his windshield, drumming his fingernails against the steering wheel. Xander shook his head. “He wants to have pie with us? Come on!”
Dad whispered, “He wants to make sure we’re not going to the cops. There’s a lot of evidence back at his house. I’ll bet those body parts can be traced back to, I don’t know, missing people . . . murders.”
“Then let’s do it,” Xander said. “Let’s turn him in.”
“Not until we find Mom,” Dad said. “Talking to him might lead to something, a nugget of information we can use.
Xander, I’ll try anything.” He looked directly into Xander’s eyes. “Anything.
”
Xander lowered his eyes to stare at a button on Dad’s shirt.
He said, “I should just go home. You deal with him.”
Dad leaned closer. He whispered, “I need you, son. Help me figure this guy out. Maybe you’ll catch something I miss.”
Xander ground his teeth together. He said, “You can’t trust him. It’s a trick or a trap.”
“So we go into it with our eyes open,” Dad said. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Xander said. “But if he tries anything . . .”
“Then we’ll put him in his place. Together.”
Xander still didn’t like it. Would Abraham Van Helsing have gone out for pie with Dracula? No way. Just a quick stake through the heart, get it done. Then again, if Dracula had Van Helsing’s mom . . .
“Yeah,” Xander agreed. “Let’s see what he wants.”
CHAPTER
fifteen
THURSDAY, 7:37 P.M.
Their booth was in the back, where the neighboring tables were empty. The waitress who seated them kept looking back at Taksidian, as though she sensed something not right about him. The kind of guy you hated to turn your back on.
They took their seats—Dad and Xander on one side, their adversary on the other—and Taksidian waved away the menu the waitress offered. “Slice of pecan, please,” he said.
“What?” Xander said. “No children baked in a pie here?”
Dad poked his leg under the table. Without taking his eyes off Taksidian, Xander said, “Nothing for me.”
Noticing Dad’s forehead, the waitress’s face flashed a grimace of horror. He ordered coffee. When she was gone, he said, “What’s this about?”
Taksidian began tapping his fingernails on the table. Tick-tick-tick . . . tick-tick-tick. Flesh-colored Band-Aids covered the bases of two fingers. Blood had seeped through. A th
read-thin rivulet ran from under one of them and over three knuckles. His eyes, the olive color of army fatigues, turned from Xander to Dad. He said, “Let’s deal.”
Xander leaned forward, pressing his stomach against the table. He said, “How about this? You stop trying to hurt us and give my mother back. Now.”