He stepped up into the cramped space. The metal floor buckled under his feet. He turned to tell his brother he was ready, but Xander was already slamming the door.
It was instantly dark, except for light slicing through gill-like vents in the door. These slits faded, as though someone had turned a dimmer on the school’s overhead fluorescents and the sunlight streaming through the windows. David’s shoulder was touching one of the locker walls; then the wall was gone. He bent his knees and held out his hands for balance as the floor became firmer and straighter. The scent in his nostrils changed from pencil shavings and rust to the sweet outdoorsiness of freshly washed sheets and towels.
The floor, then his sneakers started to glow as light poured in from under the door. When the air around him had stopped . . .
vibrating
was the best word he could think of. When it stopped vibrating, he found the handle and turned it. He stepped into the hallway outside his and Xander’s bedroom.
He shut the door and waited. Sunlight from various windows caught particles of dust floating in the air. He listened—for squeaking hinges, shutting doors, footsteps, voices: any noise inconsistent with an empty house. Something creaked, and he jumped. He decided the sound had been the house groaning against a gusty wind, but his heart settled into a faster-than-normal pace.
Fight or flight
, he thought, a term he’d learned in school. It meant that when you perceived danger or the possibility of danger, your body shifts into self-protection mode: neurons in the part of the brain responsible for physical action start firing faster—not unlike a race car revving its engine at the starting line. Adrenaline production increases, quickening your heart and making you more aware. What your body is preparing for is fight or flight, combat or escape.
David hadn’t thought about it at the time, but he was certain his heart rate had picked up when Dan Rainey first confronted Xander. Then, David had been ready to fight. On the other hand, when the Berserker had attacked, David had made tracks for the portal home: flight.
During the past two weeks, he figured his adrenal glands must have squirted a decade’s worth of adrenaline into his veins. He hoped they didn’t wear out. He had a feeling he wasn’t nearly done fighting-or-flighting.
The closet door opened, and Xander stepped out. He glanced around. “Everything okay?”
“No,” David said. “But I didn’t hear anything weird, if that’s what you mean.”
“Let’s get to it,” Xander said. “I’m guessing we have about an hour before Keal gets here.”
FRIDAY, 7:39 A.M.
They walked to the far end of the second floor’s main hallway, turned left, and stepped up to the wall Keal had constructed the day before. It was unfinished, just wallboards affixed to two-by-four studs with screws. The screw holes and seams where the wallboards touched each other needed plastering and sanding. Then they’d have to try to match the rest of the hall’s wainscoting and wallpaper, so it wouldn’t look like a false wall, but a real one. The door, which would eventually be a “secret door,” was missing altogether.
Xander and David walked through the opening. Keal had also managed to put up the second wall, the one designed for security instead of disguise. For this one, however, he had used one-inch-thick plywood slabs, not flimsy wallboard. David could tell by the placement of the screws that Keal had installed at least double the usual number of studs.
Xander rapped his knuckles against the wood. It made a solid
thunking
sound.
David moved to the opening that serviced the stairs leading to the third floor—no door here yet either. He peered at the other side of the wall. “Plywood on this side too,” he said.
He sandwiched the wall between his hands and tried to wiggle it. His entire body moved, but the wall didn’t budge.
“That’s as sturdy a wall as I’ve ever seen outside of castles,”
Xander said. “I think Keal is out to prove you wrong about these walls not being able to keep Phemus from coming into the main part of the house.”
“You think this will hold him?” David said.
“Not for a second,” Xander said. “But Keal’s
trying
.”
They stomped up the stairs and pushed the old-fashioned button that turned on the lights. The hallway lit up like the portable walkways that connected airport terminals to planes.
David was struck once again by how much it looked like a turn- of-the-century hotel corridor. Six-panel wooden doors lined each side, ten doors on the left and ten on the right. Dark squares of wood lined the bottom third of the walls. Wallpaper, illustrated with vertical vines and leaves, covered the upper portion. The floor was made of polished planks with a narrow, intricately patterned rug running its length. Here and there, small tables stood against the right wall. A wall light glowed between each door.
David approached the first of these lights. It depicted an old bearded man. He wore a tunic and a wreath perched on his head. He pointed into an open book. Light flickered from his eyes and out of the top of the carving.
Xander stepped up beside him. He said, “I remember thinking that guy was Socrates or Plato.”
“A teacher?” David said. “Who’s that supposed to scare?”
“Students,” Xander said. “Maybe they had whole classrooms coming through. Field trips to the future: does everybody have their permission slips?”
“Probably he’s a god,” David suggested. “And that book tells him who’s supposed to die. That’d be scary.”
Xander leaned closer, squinting. “It’s so detailed. Think Jesse carved it?”
“If so, he missed his calling. He’d have made a fortune selling these.”
Xander gave him a nudge. “Let’s get looking. You take the right side.” He peered into the first antechamber and shut the door. “Remember: a hammer, a nail apron, a piece of blueprint . . .”
David interrupted: “A saw, a plumb-bob, a planer thing. I know.”
He went to the first door on the right. Inside, the theme of the items hanging from the hooks and resting on the bench appeared to be
torture
: a whip, a black hood cinched on the open end with a rope, a contraption that resembled a large vise—with a shape and size that made David believe it had been designed to accommodate a human head. He slammed the door, feeling like his eyes were going to pop out of their sockets.
Never
, he thought.
You will never get me through that portal!
He went to the next door. He’d seen the items before: binoculars, a gun belt with bullets, an empty holster, a smooth, round helmet.
He hit three antechambers containing themes he’d never seen before: something to do with a dark place (candles, matches, a coil of rope), animals (a leash, a dart pistol, one of those poles with a loop of wire at one end for ensnaring vicious beasts), and some sport (a leather ball the size of a cantaloupe, what appeared to be wooden shin-guards, a well-used club or bat).
Hmmm . . .
He might like that one.
He continued checking behind the doors until he reached the end of the hall, then started back, opening each door a second time. He wasn’t surprised to see new items in the antechambers he had looked into just minutes before, but that the rooms changed themes—and did it so quickly—never failed to fascinate him. The portals constantly shifted, some worlds vanishing, new ones appearing. Because of this, the twenty doors represented an infinite number of worlds. Well, if not
infinite
, then at least
unknowable
. One thing was certain: there were a lot of them. If there weren’t, finding Mom wouldn’t be nearly the challenge it was.
Xander opened and closed doors on the other side. Occasionally he’d call out what he’d found.
“Hey, here’s that beach one. Remember, the first theme we found?”
“Nothing but weapons in this one, Dae. Knives, spears, swords!”
“Holy cow, I think this one’s all about
pigs
. What could that world be like?”
David moved quietly from door to door until he was halfway through his fourth lap. He cracked the door open and saw the items inside. Pushing the door wide, he turned to his brother.
“Xander,” he said, “come here. We’re going over.”
FRIDAY, 8:00 A.M.
Xander slammed a door and turned. “You’ve got it? Jesse’s world?” He hurried toward David.
“Not Jesse’s,” David said, “but one he talked about.”
Xander looked in. “The Civil War? Dae, we’ve already been there. A couple of times.”
Four times, in fact. Believing that Mom had left a message for them on a tent, they had kept returning. But it had turned out to be Nana, Dad’s mother, who’d left the message. She had been kidnapped from the house thirty years ago. She was the reason Dad had brought the family to the house in the first place. Now, Nana was back and Mom was gone.
So much like a video game
, David thought again. But losing here meant more than hitting a reset button; here, your mom gets stolen, your arm broken, and your life threatened. That one of them wasn’t already playing harps with the angels was a miracle.
“Have you forgotten how many times we almost died over there?” Xander said. “Shut the door. Forget about it.” He walked away.
“Xander,” David pleaded, “Jesse said we were supposed to get the doctor for that injured soldier.”
Xander spun on him, arms out. “Soldiers die in war, Dae! That’s the way it is. Are we supposed to go back to every war in history and save everyone?”
“No, but—”
“But what? It can’t be done. Not by us, not by anyone.”
“I’m not saying everyone, Xander,” David said. “For whatever reason, this house is picking them for us. It’s showing us places in history where we can make a difference. If what happened after I saved Marguerite is any clue, we can change history for the better, maybe save millions.”
“Well,” Xander said, “if that’s what this is all about, let’s start at the beginning. Let’s go back and stop the first act of violence man committed against man. Maybe no one else will get the idea, and there’ll be no wars. Ta-da, job done.”
David thought about it. “Cain and Abel?”
“There you go,” Xander said. “First murder. Let’s go stop it, maybe convince Cain his brother’s not such a bad guy. Arm-wrestle him instead. Imagine how
that
would change history.”
David didn’t think it would, and didn’t believe Xander thought so either. Man’s nature was violent. If it hadn’t been Cain, it would have been someone else. And probably not long afterward. Another of Adam and Eve’s children.
Xander walked to a door on his side of the hall and opened it. He pulled it closed and moved to the next.
David went into the Civil War antechamber. He looked at the items on the hooks: two military coats, a gray one and a blue one; matching military hats—
kepis;
and a sword in a scabbard. On the bench, leaning against the wall, was a Harper’s Ferry rifle. It was a Union soldier who needed a doctor, so David pulled down the blue coat. He slipped his right arm into a sleeve and let the left side hang over his cast.
“What are you doing?” Xander stood in the doorway, fists pressed against his hips.
“Pulling a Xander,” David said. Dad sometimes said that when one of them did something he had been told not to do.
Xander brushed past him, braced himself in front of the portal door, and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t think so.”
David snatched the blue kepi off the hook and threw it down at Xander’s feet. “Cain and Abel is not one of the times in history the house has shown us,” he said. “We can’t choose the times, Xander, but we can decide to do something about the times we
are
shown.”
“You sound like Gandalf,” Xander said.
David decided to take it as a compliment. Gandalf was cool, and
The Fellowship of the Ring
was his brother’s favorite movie. He smiled. “What do you say, in and out?”
Xander’s shoulders slumped. “If only I had a dollar for every time we said
that
, and almost died.”
David sat on the bench. “You
know
I don’t like the Civil War world,” he said. “Both sides took shots at me. General Grant himself did! Some soldiers tried to send
Toria
to the front line. The place—the time—doesn’t
want
us. But Jesse thinks we should have done something there. All I want to do is find the doctor for that guy and get out.” He gave Xander his best puppy dog look, which admittedly worked a lot better on Mom than on anyone else in the family. He said, “That’s all. Please.”
Xander moved away from the door to sit beside him. “The only reason to do it,” he said, “is to make something better, right? How do we know if it works?”
“We’ll ask Jesse,” David said. “He says he ‘remembers’ it.”
“And if nothing comes of it?” Xander said. “What if you get the doctor and nothing changes?”
David nodded. “Okay, if nothing changes, I won’t insist anymore. I’ll admit I don’t know what we’re supposed to do, who we’re supposed to do it to, or how to do it.” He cocked an eye at Xander. “Fair enough?”