Fenzy (16 page)
“Wait, wait!” She ran back to her room.
David went into the bathroom. He was shutting the door when she returned.
“David!”
“What?”
She held up a mobile phone and took his picture. She looked at the screen and laughed.
“What was that for?”
“Your
hair
!”
He shut the door on her giggles.
•••••••••
David sat down on Xander’s bed. He gave his brother a push. Xander groaned and rolled over, and continued snoring. David shook him.
“Whatta you want?” Xander mumbled.
“It’s time to get up,” he said. “It’s morning.”
Xander popped his head up. “It is?”
“Nine o’clock. Want to see if Dad’ll let us look for Mom?”
“You want to look through the portals?” Xander blinked at him. “After what happened yesterday?”
“Like you said, that’s why we’re here.” David shifted. “But Young Jesse’s world, too. I want to go if we find it.”
Xander nodded. “We promised him.” He dropped his head back onto his pillow and groaned again. “Okay, okay,” he said. He sprang up and hopped to the floor. “Let’s go.”
S
ATURDAY
, 10:01
A. M
.
In the third-floor hallway, David opened an antechamber door, peered in, and shut it again. He went to the next door. Xander was doing the same thing on the other side of the hall.
“That was pretty good,” Xander said. “The way you con-vinced Dad not to take you right to the hospital.”
“We don’t need more trouble,” David said.
“Yeah, but letting him poke your arm? Didn’t that hurt?”
“Like he rammed a hot poker into it.”
“You didn’t even flinch.” Xander grinned, admiration all over his face. “Just wish you could have convinced him to let us open the portal doors to look for Mom. I knew he wouldn’t let us.”
“Can’t blame him, not after what happened yesterday. At least he said we can look for Jesse’s world.” David cracked open a door, saw that it didn’t contain the tools that built their house, and closed it.
“But we can’t look through the portals for Mom?” Xander said. “That’s nuts. How are we supposed to find her?” He opened a door and closed it.
“He didn’t say we couldn’t ever,” David said. “He just wants to be here with us.”
He didn’t add that he thought having Dad with them was a good idea. When Xander got it in his head to be mad at Dad, it didn’t matter if Dad was as wise as King Solomon or as cool as Robert Downey Jr., Xander was going to be mad . . . until he wasn’t.
Then
you could tell him something about Dad that would stick.
Dad had been pretty angry himself. All through breakfast, David and Xander endured a lecture about obedience and safety. At the end, though, Dad had hugged them and said he didn’t know what he’d do if he’d lost one of his boys. As he broke from their embrace and hustled toward the kitchen, David had seen him wipe away a tear.
Another door for each of them: open and close, on to the next one.
“You know,” Xander said, “there are kids my age who don’t give a squirt what their parents say. They do what they want, when they want.”
“Those are the kids that end up in jail, Xander.” David looked into an antechamber whose items appeared to have something to do with sharks.
Yeah, I’m going there
, he thought.
When they throw my corpse in
. He shut the door. “Or in the gut-ter with heroin needles in their arms. Or stabbed in some bar fight. Or—“
“All right, already!” Xander said. “I hear you.”
“Or marrying an emu named Daisy and having little bird-children who wind up in a bucket of KFC.”
Xander looked around a door at him. “
What
?”
“Just checking.”
Xander grinned. “An emu named Daisy?”
David shrugged. “A
cute
emu.” 9
•••••••••
An hour later, David headed downstairs to snag something to eat for himself and Xander. Neither boy had eaten much with Dad’s lecture pounding in their ears.
Dad and Keal were working on the walls at the bottom of the third-floor stairs. Dad was steadying one of the doors while Keal drilled screws into a hinge that ran from the top of the door to the bottom. The door itself looked like it belonged on a bank vault.
“A tank’s not getting through that thing,” David observed.
“That’s the idea,” Keal said. “How’s it going up there?”
“Haven’t found Young Jesse’s world yet.”
Dad looked around. “Xander’s upstairs?” He sounded worried.
“Looking for Jesse’s world,” David said. “He promised to come get us if he finds it.”
He watched Keal for a few moments. The guy looked exhausted. He had told them he hadn’t slept last night, that he couldn’t without these doors being up. David said, “How you doing, Keal?”
“On my second wind, Dae,” Keal said. “Thanks.” He leaned into the power driver and sank a screw into the wall. “I’ll feel better when these walls are finished.”
“Can’t Taksidian just come through the locker-to-linen closet portal?” David said.
Keal wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Not when I’m done with it. Until then, the chair’s at least something. I think we’d hear him coming through.”
“You would, anyway,” David said. Keal had been bedding down in a sleeping bag in the second-floor hallway, not ten feet from the closet door. “I’m going to the kitchen. You guys want anything?”
“Coke, if you have one,” Keal said. “ ’Preciate it.”
“I’m fine,” Dad said.
•••••••••
When David returned to the third floor, Xander was just clos-ing a door and moving to the next. “What’d you get?” Xander said.
“Pop-Tarts and Cokes.” David tossed his brother a packet of cinnamon Pop-Tarts and kept the strawberry for himself. He set the Cokes on a small table under a wall light that depicted a splayed-fingered hand with an eye carved into the palm.
“Why do you think Taksidian hasn’t smashed these lights?” David said. “You’d think he would if they’re keeping him from bringing more bad guys through, ones from other worlds.”
Xander already had one of the Pop-Tarts stuffed into his mouth. “Maybe,” he mumbled around the food, “he doesn’t know that it’s the lights keeping people out. Or he doesn’t care because he’s using Phemus and the other slaves from Atlantis. He doesn’t need anyone else.”
David took a bite and thought about it. “Or it’s like Jesse said. People used to come through and cause trouble. Killing people and stuff. And he doesn’t want the house getting that kind of attention . . .
any
attention.”
Xander nodded. “He wants to keep them out, too.”
David took a swig of Coke. “Think we’ll ever know all the answers? About this house, I mean?”
“Not if I can help it,” Xander said. “We won’t be here long enough.” He finished the second Pop-Tart, downed most the Coke, burped, and said, “Let’s get to it.”
They each went to a door, looked in, crossed to the next. Twenty minutes later, David opened and almost closed a door. The latch had not yet clicked when he realized what he’d seen, and he pulled it open again. Inside were Jesse’s items: saw, hammer, plumb bob, planer, and tool belt. The ripped corner of blueprint lay on the bench.
“Xander!” David yelled. “Here it is!”
Typically, going through a portal was like waking up in a wind tunnel. It was disorienting, both physically and mentally. The first thing David noticed was the pull, as though the wind grew hands, grabbed him, and yanked. Whatever he’d seen seconds before stepping through—trees, people, a room—swirled into kaleidoscopic bits and pieces. And there was always a flash of blinding light. For these reasons, David closed his eyes at the moment of going over. But that didn’t stop the feeling of being in an elevator, one that was in a plunging freefall from the high-est floor and spinning and tumbling at the same time. He was sure that an x-ray would show his organs had shifted slightly out of place. The only thing that kept him from barfing every time was that it lasted only seconds; by the time the feeling in his gut reached his brain, it was over.
Then there was the touching down in the new world, as though that wind-hand had tired of him and tossed him to the ground with no concept of “smooth landing.” On top of that, it seemed to have no regard for what he’d be facing on the other side: bullets, explosions, an angry mob . . . hungry tigers! The not-knowing messed with David’s mind the way waking in a different place every day would: if he had to do it, he’d handle whatever he faced; but he wouldn’t like it. And finally, there was the knowledge that he was leaving his home and family with no guarantee of returning. What if someone on the other side detained him? What if the antechamber items stopped showing him the way home, or—as had almost happened several times—he lost them? He’d be in the deepest cavern imaginable with a broken rope.
Despite all of this, David was determined to land—and stay—on his feet this time.
Didn’t happen. As soon as his sneakered toes hit the ground, they slipped backward and he slammed down on wet grass. He was able to lift his broken arm, so it didn’t hit for a change, but the air in his lungs gushed out as from popped balloons. He sucked in, getting a mouthful of dirt, pine needles, and grass.
He coughed, groaned, and rolled over—just as Xander landed in the very spot where David had been lying. His brother copied his actions exactly: his feet slipped back, and he came down hard. He lay splayed there, cheek to the ground, one eye closed, heaving for breath.
The portal hovered beyond David’s sneakers, five feet off the ground. Behind a shimmering, wavy rectangle of air, the empty antechamber seemed like a perfectly good airplane from which he’d just leaped. Then the door slammed, and the portal shattered away like glass.
David turned back to Xander, who was still wheezing in the grass. “You hurt?”
“Nothing major surgery won’t fix.” Xander rolled over and sat up. “Glad I didn’t land on these.” He looked at the items in his hands: the claw hammer and planer.
David got his feet under him, rose, and helped his brother up. While Xander worked the tools into his back pockets, David slapped needles and grass off his chest and legs. He glanced at his surroundings and remembered what Xander had said when they first arrived in Pinedale:
nothing but trees
. Water dripped from tall pines and leafy oaks, sounding like the rain hadn’t stopped. But the sky above them bore the blue tinge of faded jeans. In the distance, dark clouds rolled slowly away.
“Musta rained,” David observed.
“You think?” Xander said. He was holding the front of his wet T-shirt away from his body. He made a sudden worried expression and stuck his hand in the front pocket of his jeans. He pulled out the scrap of blueprint from the antechamber, sighed when he saw it wasn’t wet, and pushed it back in.
“Close to the house,” David said. He pointed to “Bob”—the cartoon face his family used as their special identification— carved in the tree. Jesse said he’d carved it when he was a boy, which meant the face had been in the family longer than Dad and even Grandpa Hank.
“No hammering this time,” Xander said, pointing, “but I think the house is that way.”
They began walking. David said, “It’ll be nice to see Jesse without tubes up his nose and needles in his arm.”
“He’s just a kid here,” Xander said. “Taksidian doesn’t stab him for another eighty years.”
“We gotta tell him,” David said. “Maybe it won’t happen if we tell him.”
Xander stopped. “You think he’d remember?”
“Something like that? I would.”
Xander shook his head and continued approaching a wall of bushes that David recognized: it would take them into the meadow where fourteen-year-old Jesse was carving what would become a wall light in their house in Pinedale.
“I’m not sure it’ll help,” Xander said. “If we tell him now, then he knew it when he came to the house the other day. It still happened.”
David skipped over to him and grabbed Xander’s arm before he could plunge into the thicket. “But wouldn’t that be
cool
?” he said. “We go back, and there’s Jesse, all better . . . never having been hurt?” He laughed at the thought.
Xander smiled back, but all he said was, “We’ll see” and pushed into the bushes.
“I guess we wouldn’t know that he had ever
been
stabbed either, though,” David said, following in his brother’s leafy wake. “It’ll be a history that we changed, and we’d forget that it ever was.”
On the other side, David was bummed to see that Jesse wasn’t sitting on the log. He’d had it in his head that they’d come into this world at the same time they had before and everything would be the same. But that wasn’t the way time travel worked. If you returned to a place, you could be there later than the previous time—which made the most sense to David—or even
earlier
than the time you were there before, which was just plain
weird
.