Out of This World (3 page)

“
PaaLeeese
, Zack,” she pleaded. “I'm eating. If your goal is to
hone
your verbal skills to the point where you can use them to make people puke—trust me, you're already there.”

Zachary smiled and looked at his dad. “See. I rest my case. See how I’ve inspired my lame sister to come up with a halfway decent insult?” He raised his hands in front of him and turned his head in a show of modesty. “But no need to thank me for helping to mold your daughter. Really.”

Mrs. Lane smiled. “Well, we know one thing for sure. If you can't get a real job, you'll always be able to get one as a conman.”

“Or at least as a carnival pitchman,” his father chimed in.

“Or maybe a used car salesman,” added Jenna.

“You'd make a fine lab rat,” continued Mrs. Lane.

“Now I think you’ve gone too far,” said Mr. Lane. “I don’t think he’s furry enough to make a good lab rat.”

“Hey,” complained Zachary. “I'm being ganged up on. I don't have to sit here and take this.”

Zachary’s father pursed his lips. “Well, actually . . . you do. Just think of it as Mom and I working to
hone
you. You know, just like in the animal kingdom. Working to teach you survival skills.”

“Yeah, but with you and Mom, I can't
hone
back or I get grounded.”

“True enough,” agreed Mr. Lane whimsically. “That does tend to give us the upper hand.”

Jenna laughed. The conversation had put her in a much better mood. Her parents had a way of doing that.

“Well that was, ah . . . delicious,” said Mr. Lane, pushing his plate forward. “Thank you so much, Honey.”

Mrs. Lane eyed her husband dubiously and then turned to her children. “Did you hate it too?”

Zachary and Jenna looked at each other helplessly. “No Mom,” replied Jenna finally. “It was . . . it was great.”

Mrs. Lane smiled. “Yeah, just as I thought. I hated it too. Just because I cooked it doesn't mean that I don't have any taste buds. This won't get added to the list of regular meals.”

The Lane family let out a collective sigh of relief.

“Mom, I know that you’re an experimental chemist,” said Zachary wryly, putting on a pained expression. “But do you have to experiment with
dinner?
”

Everyone laughed, including Zachary’s mother. Still smiling, she stood up and moved to where her husband was sitting. The white casserole dish was in front of him, filled with her horrible meal, and she decided it was time to remove it from the table.

The kitchen began shimmering wildly.

Shimmering?

Jenna’s eyes widened in dismay.

Rooms should definitely
not
shimmer. The kitchen seemed to undulate and it was distorted the way things were when you looked at them underwater while you were swimming. Or how the air sometimes looked around a blazing fire: all wavy and quivery. Was she the only one who was experiencing it?

She looked over at her parents to find out.
And they disappeared.

Jenna heard a
Zzzt, Zzzt, Zzzt
sound—like the sound an electric bug-zapper made when it was zapping a bug—and watched in horror as her parents sank into the floor and were gone.

Zzzt, Zzzt, Zzzt.

Her parents had somehow been swallowed by the floor.

They had disappeared right in front of her eyes, as if a trap door had suddenly opened beneath them and plunged them into a bottomless pit.

Jenna gasped as the kitchen lights began to flicker and the room continued its unearthly shimmering.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Portal

Jenna bolted out of her chair in horror. “Mom! Dad!” she yelled frantically. She had been seated closest to her father and rushed forward to where her parents had disappeared. But just before she reached her destination she realized that whatever had swallowed her parents was still there. She froze in place and looked down.

And not an instant too soon. She was teetering at the edge of a huge, shimmering hole. The front halves of her shoes had already disappeared into this vast nothingness. And she was tipping forward. She gasped, swinging her arms in big circles, fighting to regain her balance. But she couldn’t do it. She continued to fall forward into the hole.

In that brief instant she knew she was done for.

From behind her, Zachary’s arms shot out and wrapped around her waist as she fell. Using all of his strength he stopped her momentum and launched the two of them backwards. He landed with a thud on the hardwood floor, sprawled out on his back, and his sister crashed down on top of him, the back of her head whiplashing into his jaw.

It had all happened in the blink of an eye and Jenna was temporarily stunned. While her heart continued to race furiously the rest of her was paralyzed. She slowly came to her senses and realized that Zachary had long since removed his arms from around her waist and she was still on top of him. She quickly rolled off. Her brother was gingerly massaging his sore jaw.

“Sorry,” she said breathlessly. “Are you okay?”

He nodded, sitting up and carefully brushing over her legs and feet with both hands to satisfy himself that she was still in one piece. “Whew,” he said. “I thought you were a goner for a second.”

Jenna sat up. “So did I.” A tear escaped from the corner of her eye and trickled slowly down her face as the enormity of everything that was happening caught up to her. “Zack—” She was at a loss for words. “Thanks.”

“Well I couldn’t have you disappearing on me,” he said awkwardly.

Jenna frowned deeply as her thoughts turned again to her parents.
They were gone
. Just like that.

“Zack, what— ” she croaked, barely managing to hold herself together. “What happened to Mom and Dad?”

The color had drained from Zachary’s face and he looked ill. “I don't know,” he replied gravely, and Jenna could see that his eyes were moist like her own.

Jenna had seen her brother when he had injured himself, and had seen him face any number of difficult situations, and he always stayed cool and focused. She couldn't remember the last time he had shown this depth of emotion. Having just watched his parents disappear into thin air and almost losing his sister to this same fate had shaken him badly.

But as Jenna watched, her brother pulled himself together. He gritted his teeth and his expression hardened. “I don’t know what’s going on. But whatever it is—we’re going to find out.”

Zachary jumped to his feet and motioned for Jenna to join him. They stood at the edge of the hole that had swallowed their parents and looked down. It was a perfect circle, about ten feet in diameter, and it shimmered wildly as if it were a field of energy. When they looked directly at the field their eyes blurred and they couldn’t keep their focus. But if they tried to look
through
it, rather than
at
it, it became as clear as glass.

And somehow, this energy window in their kitchen floor didn’t show their basement below, but rather rolling hills and countryside, as clear as a bell for many miles. There was a road winding through the green hills and a bright red farmhouse in the distance. And even though they were looking down through the portal they viewed the scene sideways, as if from a car window.

Their mouths hung open in fascination and disbelief.
How could this be?

Jenna spotted a small, bright purple bird flying towards her. Bright purple? As it got closer she saw that in addition to its unusual color the bird's body was so plump it formed almost a perfect sphere. It was the most ridiculous looking bird she had ever seen: a feather-covered, stubby-winged, purple softball flying through the air. She followed it in fascination as it got closer and closer and—

“Ahhh” she yelled, throwing her head to the side as the bird came hurtling through the shimmering portal, passing right through the exact spot her head had been only a moment before. The bird barely managed to stop before hitting the ceiling and then, finally, landed with a thud on the kitchen table on legs as short and stubby as its wings.

The bird turned toward the stunned kids and began looking them up and down.   

“Now what?” asked Jenna.

“I don't know,” answered her brother. “But at this point, nothing in the world could possibly surprise me.”

“Hello, kids,” said the bird matter-of-factly.

They both gasped in dismay. The bird’s beak had moved but
their mother’s
voice had come out.

“I have a message for you.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Mimic Bird

Okay, thought Zachary, nothing in the world could possibly surprise me—
except Mom turning into a bird
. He suddenly felt dizzy and put a hand on the kitchen table to steady himself. Jenna had sunk to the floor, her mouth still hanging open.

“Don't worry,” continued the bird in their mother’s voice. “I haven't turned into a bird. And I wasn't eaten by one, either.”

Both kids let out a sigh of relief. But how had the bird known what they were thinking? It must be psychic.

“And I can't read minds, either,” said the bird, reading their minds. “Your Dad and I just took a guess at the first few things that would pop into your minds when this bird started talking.”

Suddenly, they both realized that what the bird was saying was not nearly as important as the
reason the bird was there. That meant everything.

It meant that their parents were alive.

They both began speaking at once. “Who are you? How can you talk? Why do you sound just like Mom? Are Mom and Dad okay?”

“I’m sure you have a thousand questions to ask,” continued their small purple visitor. “Unfortunately, the bird that is talking to you can't answer them. It's only a bird, after all, and not very intelligent. It’s called a Mimic Bird—for obvious reasons. Think of it as a living tape-recorder. It can only repeat the exact words your father and I had it memorize, using our voices. That’s what it’s doing right now. We trained it—using the pictures of you Dad has in his wallet—to replay this message once it found you. Unfortunately, its memory capacity isn't great so we had better get right to it.”

Jenna and Zachary looked at each other and both raised their eyebrows. Of course. Why hadn't they guessed? This was a Mimic Bird. At this point it wasn't any crazier than anything else that had just happened.

The bird continued. “We're so sorry it’s taken us so long to find a way to get a message to you, but we've done the best we could.”

Zachary’s eyes widened.
So long?
They had disappeared just four or five minutes earlier.

“We're guessing we've been gone about ten days—”

“
Ten days!
” shouted Jenna in shock.

“—But we're not exactly sure,” continued the bird. “And we don't know how long it’s taken the bird to find you. We've been worried sick. But Catherine, we just know you’ve been doing a fantastic job taking care of Zachary and Jenna while we’ve been gone. We’ll never be able to thank you enough—or tell you how sorry we are that this happened.”

The siblings glanced at each other in confusion. Catherine?
Aunt
Catherine? They hadn’t seen her in a few weeks.

“We miss you so much,” continued the bird. “And we can only imagine how worried you must have been all this time not knowing what happened to us. And the worst of it is,
we're
still not sure exactly what happened to us.” The bird paused, twisting its head around and using its beak to attend to some feathers on its left wing.

When the bird spoke next, it was using their father's voice. “All we know is that a strange hole somehow appeared in our kitchen and we fell in. Well, we didn’t really fall. I guess we passed through it—like a door or a portal. One moment we were in our kitchen and the next . . . and the next we weren’t even on Earth anymore. We can’t say what world we landed on, but it definitely wasn’t Earth.”

The bird paused. “Since then we've gone through many more of these portals, trying to find our way back to you. As far as we can tell, each one leads to a different place, on a different world. Some of the places look like they could be on Earth, but they're all inhabited by the strangest people and creatures you can imagine. This talking bird in front of you is only one example. But no matter how much we try to question the intelligent beings we run into, no one or no-thing can explain to us what's going on. We don't know if we're somehow traveling between different planets, or if we're traveling to other dimensions from our own. Or it could be something else. Something we can’t even begin to imagine.”

The bird paused for air. “Each world is much different from the others,” it continued. “And each is unbelievably strange. Most of the worlds are treacherous; containing hostile environments or even more hostile natives. But even the worlds that appear harmless have not been—by any means. Surviving each day has been a constant challenge. It’s taken all of our physical strength and wits to stay alive.”

The living tape recorder switched again to their mother's voice. “Unfortunately, after all this time, we haven’t made much progress. We’re not sure we’re any closer to understanding what’s happening or to making it back than when we started.” The bird paused. “But please don't worry about us. We
will
discover a way out of this and come back to you. In the meanwhile, you are both fantastic kids, and we’re counting on you to stay strong and look out for each other. You know how very much we love you,” said the bird, exactly copying their mother's voice when she had spoken these words, soft and choked-up with emotion.

The bird continued in their father's voice. “Unfortunately, we think the bird is running out of memory, so we can't say much more. Before we go, though, we have one more important message for all of you. Whatever you do,
don’t come in after us!
We can't stress this enough. Do
not
come in after us—under
any
circumstances. It's far, far, too treacherous.” The bird paused. “And Catherine, we just want you to know that— ”