Ten years fell away from his father’s face as his expression shifted instantly from worry to joy. “How?” He stumbled toward the windshield opening.
“How?” Xander repeated into the phone. “How’d he get there?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” Keal said. “But what’s weird is—”
“Xander,” Dad said. He was reaching into the car. “Let me talk to him.”
Xander handed him the phone. “It’s Keal.”
“Keal, put David on,” Dad said. “Please.” As he listened, his forehead became more and more wrinkled. The cut, which was starting to scab, drizzled out two fresh threads of blood.
He lifted his coat to dab at them. Finally he said, “He’s all right? You’re sure?”
“What is it?” Xander said. “What happened?”
Dad said into the phone, “Uh . . . there’s a pile of old tools out back, next to the porch steps. There might be a sledgehammer.” “A sledgehammer?” Xander said, pushing himself up out of the car. “Why—”
But Dad turned around and took a step away. He said, “Okay, we’ll get there as soon as we can. Call us if . . . call us
when
you get him out.” He punched a button and dropped the phone into his shirt pocket. He turned around slowly, thinking.
“Well?” Xander said, going nuts. “What happened? Where is he? Why do they need a sledgehammer? Get him out of
where
?”
“David’s in the basement,” Dad said. “Keal heard screaming and followed it. David’s stuck behind a wall. Come on, we have to get back . . . make sure he gets out . . . make sure he’s not hurt.” He slipped outside.
“A wall?” Xander said. “Wait. How?”
Dad was speedwalking out of the yard and onto the drive.
“Hey,” Xander said, “call my phone!”
“Hurry, Xander!” Dad said without looking back.
A Fistful of Dollars
started up. Xander located the phone among the rubble, resting in the palm of one of Taksidian’s trophies. He picked it up, scrubbed it against his jeans, and shoved it into his back pocket. He took a last look around: at the body parts, the demolished wall, the totaled car—the car! Dan, the kid who had lent it to him, was going to kill him.
As he slipped outside and started jogging toward Dad, he reconsidered his choice of words.
Taksidian
was going to kill him, if he had his way. Dan was just going to make Xander
wish
he were dead.
THURSDAY, 6:55 P.M.
Keal levered the sledgehammer behind him, remembering his days as a slugger in college. His eyes found Toria, back against another wall in the dim basement. She was aiming a flashlight at the wall in front of Keal. “Watch out,” he told her.
Toria nodded.
“Ready, David?” he yelled.
“Hold on!” came the boy’s voice through the wall. It was muted, as though he had spoken into a pillow. “I’m lighting a match. . . . Okay, do it!”
“Cover your head!” Keal said. He put everything he had into the swing. The hammer struck the gray stone wall with a resounding
bam!
and an eruption of sparks. The energy of the strike vibrated up the handle into his arms. He kept hold of the handle, but let the hammer’s head drop to the floor. The fuzzy-edged glow of the flashlight illuminated a small gash in the stone, light gray against the surrounding dark gray. The stone he had struck was still perfectly aligned with the others around it.
Keal called, “Anything on your side, David?”
“A loud noise!”
Okay
, he thought, sighing.
This is going to take awhile.
He lifted the hammer, pulled it back, swung it hard.
David smiled. He held a lit match in one hand and pressed the other hand against the wall. He felt the thuds of Keal’s sledgehammer coming through the wall like a heartbeat. They meant more to him than Keal’s and Toria’s voices had. Voices he could hallucinate, but he didn’t think he’d imagine anything as physical as a trembling wall. Not this early anyway; maybe eventually, but it seemed now he’d never know.
And that’s what made him smile.
The match’s flame singed his skin. He dropped it and stuck his finger and thumb in his mouth. The fire had left a glowing yellow spot in his vision, fading slowly, leaving only the black air of the chamber.
Didn’t matter now. He was being rescued.
He wondered how Mom felt: like she was stuck without hope, or as though she were being rescued? She had to know they were looking for her, had to know they wouldn’t stop until they found her. So, really, even though she had no evidence of it—unless she’d seen the Bob cartoon face, their family symbol, that they’d left in each world—she had to know her rescue was in progress. He hoped she knew that, and that it comforted her.
Wouldn’t a person lost in the wilderness feel better, keep his hopes up longer, if he saw the helicopter that was looking for him? The Kings were that helicopter for Mom, and they would never run out of fuel, be grounded by bad weather, or say they’d looked too long. They would never give up.
He stepped back away from the pounding and leaned against the opposite wall. He didn’t bother lighting another match. Hearing was enough.
Bam! Bam!
Bam! Bam!
Like a heart, beating just for him.
THURSDAY, 6:57 P.M.
Xander and Dad walked side-by-side along the winding road leading to Pinedale. Their pace had slowed considerably, but it remained a few notches above a leisurely stroll.
Behind them, the sound of an engine and the low, flat hum of tires on asphalt approached. They stepped off the road into long grass. The dirt here was rutted and uneven, making a chore even out of standing. Trees pressed in so close to the blacktop, Xander had to prop himself against one just to give Dad room to get off the road.
Dad waited until a white pickup truck appeared around a bend, then he stuck out his thumb. He said, “Don’t
ever
hitchhike, you hear?”
“I know,” Xander said. “You already said. Just this once, ’cause it’s an emergency.”
The truck zoomed by without slowing.
“Dad,” Xander said, pushing off the tree. “Why is it an emergency?”
Dad got his feet on the road and reached back to give Xander a hand. “Just what Keal said. He hadn’t seen David, only heard him. And he’d been screaming.”
“Screaming?” Xander said.
“I think for help, not in pain.”
Xander shook his head. Who could tell in
that
house? The way it manipulated sounds, you couldn’t believe anything you heard. He wouldn’t think David was safe until his brother was standing in front of him. Besides,
behind a wall
? What was that about? What else might be behind the wall
with
him? And could whatever put him there, take him back? Where would David go if it did?
Too many questions—as usual. Since moving in, they’d been dealing with weirdness with a capital W: traveling through space and time, maniacs bent on killing them, history that
changed
based on what they did in the other worlds. Jesse had said David made the world different when he saved a little girl in World War II. She had grown up to help cure smallpox. Before he’d saved her, the disease had been killing millions of people every year. Then, twenty minutes after Dae jumped through a portal, thinking he’d seen Mom, the whole world was different; the disease was gone, eradicated thirty years before.
It seemed the more they found out about the house, the more they didn’t know. Every answer led to a dozen more questions. The biggest mystery was how any of them was still sane.
They started walking again, and Dad put his hand on the back of Xander’s head, pushing his fingers through his hair. Xander flinched, pulling his head away. Dad’s hand came back bloody.
“Xander?” Dad said, looking from his fingers to Xander’s head.
Xander touched the spot where the brick had conked him. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Headache’s all. I think it just opened up the cut I got when the wall light landed on my head. You know, when we were trying to stop Phemus from taking Mom. If it’s a new cut, I better not ever go bald. My scars will scare children.”
Dad eyed him, uncertain. Finally he offered a faint smile. “Shakespeare said, ‘A scar nobly got is honorable.’ ” He shrugged. “Something like that.”
Xander rubbed his head. “I say, a scar nobly got
hurts
.”
THURSDAY, 6:58 P.M.
Keal kept pummeling the same square stone. Little chips in the shape of tiny smiles eventually became a fist-sized indent. Finally a crack appeared, running from the hammer’s damage to a corner.
Keal leaned in. He ran a palm over his eyes, brow, and head, squeegeeing away beads of sweat.
“It’s giving up,” he said. He had begun to think of the wall as an opponent. It was strong and stubborn, but so was he. He looked back at Toria with a winning grin. “First a crack, then a stone, then the whole wall, right?”
“It cracked, Dae!” she yelled.
His muffled voice came back: “Yah!”
Keal hefted the hammer, reared back, and slammed it into the stone. He did it again and again, without pause. His breathing fell in sync with his efforts: a sharp inhale as he pulled back, a loud grunt on the forward swing. Sweat flew off his head, sparkling in the flashlight’s beam.
The stone crumbled, dust and chunks spilling to the floor.
Toria rushed in to light the gap. Eight inches in, another stone showed its flat, resilient face. The wall was at least two blocks thick. She moaned.
“No, no,” Keal said. “It’ll be easy now. Once you get one block out of a wall like this, the others have room to shift. They’ll start falling away in no time. You’ll see.”
He was right: the block above its crumbled neighbor chipped, broke, and fell away after only four strikes. When the first layer’s opening was four blocks wide and four blocks tall—a square about the size of a television screen—Keal started pounding on the second layer.
“Dust!” David said, no longer sounding like he was talking into a pillow. “And that was loud, really loud.”
“Cover up,” Keal yelled back, taking aim. “For real this time.”
Three more hits and a block pushed in, three inches from the surface of the blocks on either side of it.
“I felt it!” David screamed. “It moved.”
“Back away, David!”
The next strike sent it sailing into the darkness behind it.
“Ow!” David said. Then: “Let there be light!”
Toria charged up to the wall. The flashlight beam wavered around the square hole and slipped into the blackness beyond.
David’s face appeared, smiling, squinting against the brightness. He laughed.
“Dae!” Toria chimed.
“Where are we?” David said.
Keal and Toria looked at each other. Keal said, “You’re home, son. In the house.”
“The basement,” Toria added.
David closed his eyes. “I should have known.” His lids flipped opened and looked past Toria at the walls and exposed trusses. “I thought I was back in time somewhere—but how could that happen from Taksidian’s house? It’s just that I found the other side first. Like if we’d discovered the locker-linen closet portal from the locker side. It’s still not the locker doing it, it’s the house. It’s always the house.”
“What are you talking about?” Toria said. “How’d you get in there?”
“I’ll explain later,” he said. His eyes found Keal. “Just get me out . . .
please
.”
“What’s in there?” Keal asked.
“Nothing.
Bones
.”
“Bones?” Toria said.
“Human bones,” David continued. “Skeletons. But most of them are broken up, ground down to nothing. Gravel.”
“Eeeew!”
“I thought for sure,” David said, “that my bones would wind up in here too, lying on top until someone else got trapped and tromped me into dust.”
Toria touched her fingers to his cheek. He reached his hand out, and she took it.
“Okay,” Keal said. “Back off. We’ll have your bones out of there in a flash.” He lifted the hammer.
The kids released their hands, and David’s disappeared into the hole. Toria stuck her face up to it. “Hey, Dae,” she said, “wouldn’t that be funny to find a skeleton with a cast on its arm?”
“Not if it’s me,” David said.
Toria giggled, then took her spot behind Keal.
He hauled back on the sledgehammer and let it fly, enjoying every sweaty blow. He took great satisfaction not only in rescuing David but in destroying the thing that held him captive. It felt like springing an innocent man from his cell, then burning down the jail.
He pounded on the first layer below and to the sides of the hole, stretching it out so he could get better shots at the second layer. A mound of broken stones formed on the floor.