The Door Within (36 page)

Aidan faced his bedside table and the twelve tiny figures precisely arranged around his castle-fortress lamp. The pewter knights, dragons, and unicorns were, as always, still and quiet—ready to listen.

“It’s not fair,” Aidan said to them. “How can they just decide to move without even asking what I wanted to do?”

Of course, none of the small medieval beings replied. That’s why Aidan talked to them. They didn’t offer advice. They didn’t lecture. They simply listened.

“I mean, so what if Grampin’s getting too old?” Aidan continued. “Somebody else should take care of him. Why us, huh? My life was finally starting to look up . . .”

Aidan glowered at the fantasy figures. He’d been collecting them for several years, buying a few each time he visited the Maryland Renaissance Festival. At least they had each other to keep company. “I finally get one friend—a good friend—and now, they’re gonna drag me to Colorado? That’s halfway across the country from Maryland!”

The “one” friend Aidan was thinking of was Robby Pierson. Robby and his family had moved from Florida to a house up the street in September, and everything had changed for Aidan. Until that time, Aidan had been known to the kids in the neighborhood and at school as the overweight weirdo who sat around all day drawing castles and space ships. Then Robby showed up. He was tall and muscular and had long blond hair and an earring. And given his good looks and ability to play every sport better than everyone else, he was instantly crowned “so cool” by all the seventh and eighth graders.

For reasons Aidan still didn’t understand, Robby had decided to become his best friend. They hung out between classes, after school, and sometimes had PlayStation sleepovers on the weekends.

As if
coolness
were a magical golden powder that could rub off, Aidan found that he had become a little cool himself just by standing in Robby’s shadow. It was, after all, a large shadow, and Aidan liked it there. He didn’t have to worry about being picked on, and better still, he never had to think about what to do in certain situations— Robby always knew what to do. And, while Aidan still drew pictures of castles and spaceships and was still chunky and peculiar, he had a reliable friend, a new reputation, and something to look forward to every day—that is, until now.

“I HATE my life!” Aidan shouted, he hoped loud enough for his parents downstairs to hear him.

Aidan let out a furious, animal sort of grunt and buried his head in the pillow. In that moment, tears came. Hot, stinging tears. He was bitter, exhausted, and unhappy. And while he was often sad, Aidan almost never cried. Once, when he was eight, he had fallen out of a crab apple tree in his front yard and broken his arm in two places. He had yelled a lot and kicked the tree vengefully a few times, but not a single tear had fallen from his eyes. It was different now.

There was something about feeling trapped—trapped in what seemed to Aidan the most unjust situation to ever occur. There was no escape. Aidan’s vision blurred and his eyes began to burn. He dragged the corner of his pillow across his face and stared miserably at the medieval creatures on the table. Each one was forever frozen in action: two blue and black armored knights on horseback preparing to joust, several others with swords raised high for a duel they would never fight, a trio of sparkling unicorns rearing or in mid-gallop, and one particular silver dragon that seemed to be staring back at Aidan.

Aidan longed to join them, to leave the relentless pain of reality and disappear into another world.
Maybe that world,
Aidan thought,
would make more sense.

Turbulent thoughts of losing things whirled in Aidan’s mind. Summer vacation, gone. Looks of approval from kids at school, gone. Tree forts, crab apple battles, and Brae Brook Creek, all gone. Worst of all, Robby, gone.

Aidan’s eyelids began to feel heavy and liquid. The anger and sadness had drained him of energy. Sleep was a welcome escape. He started to drift off, but gooseflesh suddenly erupted on his arms. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. Aidan felt like someone was there, in the room, watching him. But he hadn’t heard the door open. Aidan sat bolt upright, but the bedroom door was still shut.

He felt it again . . . a strange presence. This time behind him— like the weight of someone staring in at him from the bedroom window. Aidan hesitated to turn. There couldn’t possibly be someone outside. But still . . .

Aidan jumped. A commercial airliner screamed by high overhead. Aidan spun around, bounced off his bed, and went to the window. He stared past the front yard crab apple trees and through the power lines across the street. The tall oaks beyond swayed in the wind. Aidan stared up into the darkening sky. No sign of a plane. Just the roar of jet engines, not shrill like before but deep, throttling up against the turbulence.

Aidan plopped down on his bed. The strange sensation was gone. He shrugged. Of course, no one had been watching him. Aidan laughed quietly at himself and fell backward onto his pillow. He heard the jet again. It really did sound like a roar.

He turned his head and stared drowsily at the pewter figures on the bedside table, especially the silver dragon. Then, he faded away to sleep.

AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY:

Chapter 1 was one of the few chapters that existed almost from the beginning of the whole Door Within concept that I conceived in 1993. I loved it because it helped to build Aidan’s character as kind of a follower, not yet confident enough to find his own way. You also begin to get a picture of Robby Pierson. He’s the most popular guy, but not full of himself, not so caught up in his own image that he wouldn’t have a friendship with a kid like Aidan.

There are many ways to build suspense and gain reader interest. I chose to use intense emotion and unusual phenomenon. The book opens with Aidan hopping mad at his parents, and I wanted the reader to wonder why Aidan’s so upset. I also wanted readers to connect with the pain Aidan feels over having to move. In my sixteen years of teaching, I’ve seen the heartache some kids go through when they have to move. It can truly be like ripping away a part of yourself. The scene grew out of an experience I had growing up. My best friend lived in Panama City, Florida, and my family would drive there every summer to visit my grandfather. But one year, my grandfather died. I grieved for him, but also because I knew that meant I wouldn’t see my best friend anymore. I delved into that memory to give Aidan’s emotion the ring of reality.

The phenomena, of course, was the feeling that someone could be watching Aidan and then, the roar of the jet sounding so much like the roar of a beast. I thought that would be the first hint that this story was going to take a left turn into the fantasy genre. I hoped it would really get the pages turning.

So why did we cut the chapter? In the end, it came down to action. The scene, though touching, was a little too slow to open this kind of adventure. The trend in fiction today is to drop the reader into the middle of the action—force them to hang on for dear life and figure out the characters later. You may have noticed, I scavenged as many lines as I could from this deleted scene and used them in chapter 2, The Unexpected, of the published version. Aidan shrugging his father’s hand off like a wasp was an image I had to keep. I also kept the pewter figures and the strange “I’m being watched” sensation. In the end, I like the published chapter 1 better because it allowed me to do some heavy foreshadowing for the rest of the trilogy.

2
A SWOOSH AND
A SHADOW

T
hree weeks later, Aidan sat on the edge of his bed and finished filling yet another cardboard box.

“I can’t believe I have so many clothes!” he complained. He wound one more turn of clear packaging tape to seal it up. “How in the world did I ever end up getting enough socks and underwear to fill a big box like this?!”

“Shoot, this is nuh-thin’,” replied Robby in his Floridian drawl. “You should see my sister. She’s got a different pair a’ shoes fer every day a’ the year! I mean every style, every color—even spares a’ the ones she really likes. I think she’s fixin’ to open a store right outta her closet. Call it somethin’ like Snob-Mart.”

Aidan smiled in spite of himself. This wasn’t supposed to be fun. But at least Robby was there to help. Aidan looked up at his best friend who was busy stuffing a box with baseball card-filled photo albums. Robby looked up and grinned the little sideways smile he always did. It seemed impossible that, in just a couple of days, he’d have to say good-bye to Robby, and perhaps never see him again. Aidan shook his head and grabbed another box.

His castle lamp was packed already, but he still had the medieval figures from the bedside table to do. One by one, he meticulously wrapped them—first with several layers of tissue paper and then with a half-dozen turns of bubble wrap.

“Dang, Aidan,” Robby teased. “You got enough bubble wrap on those things? You think the movin’ van’s gonna go off a cliff or something?”

Aidan rolled his eyes but didn’t stop with the bubble wrap.

“What are you gonna do with the aquarium?” Robby asked. He pointed to the empty five-gallon fish tank on Aidan’s dresser.

“Throw it away, probably,” Aidan replied. “I don’t think they have crayfish in Colorado. It’s yours, if you want it.”

“Oh, yeah!” Robby grinned. “I’ll put a snake or somethin’ in it and keep it in my room. It’ll drive my sister crazy!”

Aidan laughed. He enjoyed listening to Robby’s war stories about his older sister, Jill. As fierce as Jill was, Robby always seemed to win the battles.

Aidan finished the bubble wrap on the dragon—an extra layer or two—and then placed it softly in the box.

He stared at the aquarium and his eyes fixed on something unseen. “That was the best time, though, wasn’t it?” Robby asked.

“No doubt,” said Aidan. He and Robby had shared many adventures in their short time together, but this one often came to mind.

It had been a very warm day for Maryland in late September. Summer refused to yield to fall and still held the magnifying glass in place over the East. Aidan and Robby had just met, and the afternoon beckoned.

Robby had lived next to a saltwater bayou in Florida and fancied himself a champion crabber. But he’d never caught crayfish before. So, after grabbing a couple of mason jars and paint buckets, Aidan led Robby along a seldom-trodden path through the woods to the best crayfishing spot around: Brae Brook Creek.

Robby looked down from the one-lane bridge. In the shallow areas of the creek, water trickled in happy spurts over mossy rocks. “The water looks clear,” Robby said.

Aidan cautiously descended the rocky bank to the water’s edge. “Let’s try to keep it that way,” he said. “If you step in the mud or lift up a rock too fast, the water’ll cloud up. We won’t be able to—”

“Got it,” Robby said abruptly. He joined Aidan and put down the bucket he’d been carrying. “So these things are pretty much like little lobsters?”

“Yup, smaller than a lobster—maybe six, seven inches long. But they still pinch pretty hard!”

“Can’t be that bad,” Robby insisted.

Aidan frowned. “Do you want me to show you how to catch—”

“No, no, I’ll figure it out,” Robby replied, and in moments, he had waded in up to his shins and was bending over to lift up his first rock.

“Hey, I see one,” Robby announced.

This ought to be good!
Aidan thought. He scrunched his eyes and could barely watch his new friend reach barehanded into the water.

He knew what was coming.

“Yeowww—ch!” Robby bellowed, pulling his hand out of the water. On the end of his middle finger, pinching with all its tiny might, was a four-inch crayfish. Robby waved it around in the air, but still it held on.

“Let go, ya’ little booger!” Robby hollered, and finally, it let go. It dropped into the water and sped away backward to safety.

Aidan stumbled backward from laughing so hard and almost fell in the water. “I told you they could pinch.”

“Didn’t hurt,” Robby argued weakly. “. . . much. Okay, smart guy, so how do you catch ’em then?”

“Well, I don’t use my fingers like you do. I think the best way is to use a mason jar. Hold the jar with one hand. You have to submerge it carefully behind the clueless crayfish. Then place the other hand a little underwater in front of the critter and wave it. The crayfish thinks the danger is in front, and shoots backward—right into the jar. Cover the jar with your free hand, and the crayfish is trapped.”

With just that brief explanation, Robby had soon become every bit as good as Aidan at catching crayfish. That’s the way Robby was with things. He mastered in moments what took others months of practice to learn.

They had spent the rest of that afternoon filling their buckets with little claw-pinching, tail-flicking, temperamental lobster-midgets. And Robby was right: it had been the best time.

“That takes care of this dresser,” Robby said, stacking a box full of t-shirts on top of the cardboard pyramid near the door to Aidan’s room. “What time is it?”

Aidan put down his box of mummified medieval creatures and checked his watch. “It’s almost noon.”

“I gotta go,” said Robby.

“You can have lunch with us,” Aidan suggested. There weren’t many hours left that they could be together, and Aidan wanted to make the most of them.

“I can’t. Momma said I need t’cut the grass ’fore my dentist appointment at one-thirty.”

Aidan still found it odd that kids in the South, even in their late teens, still sometimes called their parents “Momma” and “Daddy.”

“You have a dentist appointment?” Aidan frowned. “You’re not getting braces, are you?”

“Ri-ight.” Robby always said the word in two syllables. It had to be his favorite word, for he used it all the time to mean a great many things. In this case, “Ri-ight” basically meant, “Me, get braces? You can’t be serious.”

Robby smiled broadly, revealing two gleaming rows of perfectly straight teeth. Aidan’s teeth were straight too, but not movie-star-straight like Robby’s.

“Besides, I said dentist—not orthodontist. Just a check-up. I’ll call ya’ when I get home, okay?”