A Walk Through a Window (6 page)
Read A Walk Through a Window Online
Authors: KC Dyer
He closed the back gate and Darby stood staring after him with his basket still clutched in her hand, feeling foolish and trying to think if she even knew someone by the name of Allie.
L
uckily, Gramps had shown up at the house as promised, a few minutes before Nan walked in. He totally played it like he’d been home all afternoon, and Darby wasn’t about to say anything different. She knew the smell of beer on someone’s breath. Gramps had been gone for less than an hour and when he came back he didn’t even smell of cigarette smoke, let alone beer.
Nan didn’t seem to suspect a thing. But Darby prided herself on having a long memory. She mentally banked Gramps’s little trip in the hope that it might buy her some freedom in the future. Sure enough, it paid off even sooner than she had hoped, though not in a way she would have ever expected.
The next morning at breakfast, Nan bustled around the kitchen adding items to a long list she’d written on the back of a cash register receipt. Then she announced she was going to head up Granville Street to the big grocery store in the mall.
“How are you planning to get all the way up there, Etta?” said Gramps.
“Not me, Vern,” she said clearly. “We are going up by taxi. I have a long list and I’ll need your help to carry the bags. Things are different around here these days with a teenage mouth to feed. We can’t have our girl going hungry, now can we?”
Darby cringed. The guilt. Not only was her presence costing them more, but she was making more work for them, too.
“Do you want me to come, too?” she offered, hoping Nan would say no.
Nan looked like she was going to accept Darby’s offer, when Gramps shot her a peculiar look. It took Darby a minute to realize he was winking.
“Let the kid have some time on her own, Etta. I’ll help you at the store—and I’ll even call up Ernie to see if he’ll give us a discount fare on the trip.”
Ah. So this was where Dad’s cheap gene came from. Darby laughed a little to herself. Well, Gramps could be as cheap as he wanted as long as it gave her some time away from peeling potatoes or one of Nan’s million other little jobs.
Nan’s sharp eyes locked onto Darby as Gramps walked out of the room, jingling the change in his pocket in a cheerful way.
“Don’t think for a minute that I don’t know a payback when I see one, young lady,” she said, without the hint of a smile. “Now, while you were enjoying your beauty sleep, I’ve spent the morning washing, so before
you get to riding that skateboard of yours, there are sheets waiting to be hung up out back.”
Darby bobbed her head in the most obedient manner she could muster. “Yes, Nan. I’ll do them right now.”
“See that you do.” She picked up her purse and followed Gramps through the front door. “Now, Vern, what’s this Helen tells me about your little visit to the Legion yesterday?”
Wow. That Nan.
Darby felt lucky she didn’t have to get past that kind of radar at home in Toronto. She’d never make it anywhere near the Eaton Centre with her skateboard, that’s for sure.
As soon as the screen door slapped shut on the front porch, Darby raced into the little back room Nan called the scullery where she did the laundry. There was a big sink under the window and an old-fashioned washing machine with a huge basket of wet sheets on the top.
No dryer.
It took Darby about twenty minutes or so to hang up all the sheets on the clothesline behind the house. It was hot work, and she stopped for a minute in the middle to drink a huge glass of cold milk. When she headed back out to finish the job, she tripped over Maurice and almost dropped the last laundry basket. It could have been a disaster with all that red PEI dirt just waiting to get on Nan’s white sheets, but luck stayed with her. Two minutes after pinching the last clothes-pin, she was rolling up to the end of the street in search of Gabriel.
On the way, Darby passed Red T-shirt kicking his soccer ball. Except that today, just to mess things up for her, he
was wearing a green shirt. She waved at him anyway, ready to let bygones be bygones. But he was so focused on bouncing the ball off his knee, she ended up just cruising on by.
Proves my point
, she thought.
Who’s being unfriendly now?
In the end, she didn’t even have to look for Gabriel. She rolled up to the old blue house and flipped the skateboard into one hand. He was sitting right in front of the house, perched on the old rusty fence beside the gate.
“That doesn’t look too comfortable,” Darby said, with a grin.
He smiled. “I knew you’d come today. Everything is ready.”
What kind of weird remark was that?
“Ready? Ready for what?”
He hopped off the fence and reached out a hand. “May I?”
Darby realized he wanted to see her skateboard. The truth was she had never let anyone lay a hand on the board before that moment. Not even Sarah. Then she thought about Red T-shirt ignoring her. And she
did
know where this kid lived …
“I guess so,” she said, reluctantly. “But no riding it. I’m still breaking it in.”
He nodded absently and turned over the skateboard in his hands, examining it carefully. He spun one of the wheels with a finger.
“Geez, you’d think you’d never seen a skateboard before,” Darby said. “It’s not a fancy one or anything. One day I’ll get one with dual trucks.”
He looked up at her as if from far away and handed the board back.
“I think it is beautiful,” he said. He turned and started up the path to the house. “Are you coming?”
She shrugged and followed behind him slowly.
He paused to wait. “I see you have taken to wearing a moustache,” he said, pointing at her upper lip.
Darby’s cheeks reddened. She swiped a hand across her face. “It’s nothing,” she muttered, and repeated her earlier question. “What did you mean—all ready for me?”
He just smiled. “Have you had a chance to look around the town at all?”
Talk about avoiding the question. Darby marched through the long grass, following him around the side of the house. The little stone chapel and the crab apple trees behind it came into view. On this side of the house the paint was really peeling—hanging off in strips in places, with the grey, weathered boards showing clearly beneath.
“Gabe, you actually live here? Because I think your folks could use a little help with the upkeep.”
He stopped a few paces ahead of her and turned to look up at the old house.
“I love this place,” he said softly. “It has been in my family a long time.”
Darby looked at him sceptically. He sounded sincere, but—
“Did you know my grandfather was born in this house?” she asked.
“Was he?” Gabe didn’t look surprised.
“So Nan says. I guess in those days babies weren’t always born in hospitals. But then something happened to his mother, and his father sold the house and moved away. I guess that’s when your family bought it?”
He shifted his shoulders a little and bent to pick up something from the grass. The sun slipped behind a great grey cloud, rimming its edges with gold. The leaves on the giant oak tree at the very back of the property rustled and danced and the wind swirled the grass at Darby’s feet, flattening it in spirals.
“You told me you thought this was just an old town filled with old people,” Gabe said.
Darby stared up at the darkening cloud behind him. “Maybe it is,” she said nervously. “What difference does that make to you?”
The wind whipped his hair around and the merriment drained out of his face.
“Perhaps I will show you something,” he said.
“Well, okay—but can you make it quick? I’m no judge of the weather around here, but that looks like a serious storm cloud to me.”
He didn’t turn his head or even glance at the sky. Instead he held out his hand, palm up. Darby found it suddenly harder to see for some reason—maybe because the wind was whipping her hair into her eyes. She took a couple of steps closer. But it was only a rock in his hand. A plain, red, Island rock.
Something about the way he held his hand seemed strange, but Darby didn’t take time to think about it. The wind had worked itself up to a roar.
“Look, Gabriel, this is going to be one huge storm,” she said. “I need to get home. That’s a nice rock and all, but we’re just going to have to talk about it later. I’ve got to go.”
Quick as thinking, his other hand shot out and grabbed her by the arm. “No time,” he shouted over the wind. Or maybe he said, “Too far.” Either way, she knew he was right. It was a couple of blocks to her grandparents’ house.
As if to prove it, a sheet of rain swept down from the sky and she was soaked to the skin in an instant. Great. All the work hanging up Nan’s laundry was wasted.
“Follow me.” Gabe’s voice somehow carried through the storm. There was a clap of thunder and something leapt straight out at Darby from the grass. She jumped, but it was only Maurice, her grandparents’ cat, hanging out here again. He must have been looking for shelter because he hopped past them onto the stone windowsill of the chapel.
“This place doesn’t look very safe,” Darby yelled, looking at the half-collapsed roof and piles of rubble inside. Definitely more like a chicken-house than a chapel.
“Perhaps you are correct,” Gabe replied. “But what choice have we? Please take my hand.”
She grabbed on and they stepped up onto the windowsill. There was a blinding flash and the sky split in pieces divided by streaks so brilliant they left blue lines imprinted across Darby’s vision. Unless they dashed across the entire expanse of back garden, the tiny stone building was their only hope for shelter from the storm. Darby didn’t want to make the run, so she hoped it would be
enough. She closed her eyes instinctively and clutched Gabe’s hand as they stepped across the stone windowsill and inside.
The dark was absolute—and wrong. It took Darby a minute or two to figure out the wall of noise from the storm had stopped the instant they stepped inside. Just like someone had slammed a door on it. Darkness dropped around her like a smothering black hood. She couldn’t feel Gabe’s hand. She couldn’t see any light.
The panic Darby felt rising with the onset of the storm threatened to erupt. She had thought things were bad when the darkness was on the other side of the bedroom door, but that had been nothing. Reaching for Gabe, she spun in a circle.
Nothing.
Waving her arms wildly, she tripped and fell, her head rebounding off the floor. It seemed to Darby that the darkness had taken not only her vision, but also her voice—or maybe she was just too scared to scream. One minute she had been yelling at Gabe over the noise of the storm, and the next …
Finally she just covered her eyes with her hands, wanting to make her own darkness and not have it pushed down on her against her will.
For some reason, it seemed to work. When she got up the courage to uncover her eyes, thin daylight outlined the stone frame of the window. The rain had
stopped, too. Instead, mist rose up from the ground in a ghostly shimmer that was almost scarier than the storm itself. It slipped along the rock window and rolled over the sill like foam frothing over a waterfall. The already dim light of the outbuilding took on a grey tone she didn’t like at all. And where was Gabriel, anyway?
“Uh, Gabe? I don’t feel like playing hide and seek, okay?” she said, her voice sounding squeaky and scared to her own ears. She shifted a bit to one side and rolled up on her toes to see if visibility was any better higher up.
It wasn’t.
Her stomach twisted into a knot. Trust your instincts, her mother always said. If a situation feels wrong, it probably is.
“Okay, this is just stupid.” Stupid
and
embarrassing. Her voice sounded small and wavering, but at least she still had a voice.
Enough was enough. It was time to get scarce. “I’ll be back tomorrow for my skateboard,” she yelled into the misty room. “I’ll be bringing my brother, and he’s
really
big.”
As soon as the words came out of her mouth, Darby cringed. An imaginary big brother? It had been a long time since she’d hauled him out. Must be a couple of years at least. One time she had run all the way home from school because some kids had stolen her bus pass. “My big brother will get you!” she’d yelled as she bolted onto Yonge Street. The kids just
laughed. Probably the way Mr. Gabe the Mysterious was laughing now, wherever he was. “I’d better get that board back,” she muttered to herself.
The mist had thickened so much she had to put her hands out to feel for the rocky surface of the window ledge. Bad enough to lose the skateboard. She didn’t want the stormy evening to catch her in the creepy old building. Nan would never let her out alone again.
But something was wrong. More than wrong—weird. The stone windowsill had been right behind her. She had just hopped over it. She could still feel the spot where a sharp piece of rock had bitten into her palm as she climbed up onto it.
Darby reached an arm straight out to feel for the window. Nothing.
She shuffled her feet to one side about a foot. Still nothing.
The wall should be there. I should have bumped into it by now, or at least grazed my knuckles
. She shuffled sideways again.
“Oh, come on,” she said aloud. First the storm and now the fog. What was with the weather in this place? But she’d freaked once and wasn’t about to do it again. Still, the fog had her completely turned around. Stepping carefully so as not to trip again, she flung her arms out wide and slid her feet side to side. The only sound was her own breathing. Finally, when she felt ready to scream—her hand brushed something.
Not a rock windowsill. This surface was cold—so cold she yanked her hand away in surprise.
In the second or two it took to get up the nerve to reach out again, the temperature fell sharply. Darby’s breath felt like ice crystals on her lips.
Ice crystals?
In summer?
What was happening? She took a panicky step forward and sure enough—she bumped her head. Hard. Hard enough to knock her to her knees. And as her knees hit the ground, they crunched.
Just as Darby figured out that the crunch was not breaking bones but rather the sound of frozen snow on the ground, she finally got what she had been waiting for. A light shone through the mist at last.
With the snow under her knees came a realization. She must have fallen asleep. There’s no way this could be anything except a dream. The kind of dream where you find yourself in a place you’ve never been before and yet it seems somehow familiar.
That had to be the explanation. There she was, on her hands and knees in some kind of crunchy snow in the middle of the summer, wisps of fog swirling and fading all around. The only thing to do was to head for the beam of sunlight that gleamed like a beacon ahead. The sun grew brighter and the air was suddenly sparkling like prisms—pretty painful on the eyes, but Darby had never been so happy to see daylight in her life.
She crawled as fast as she could toward the source of the light. If there was a record for the fastest crawl through snow in cut-offs, Darby was determined to
break it. The strangely glittering ceiling suddenly dropped, but after two head bumps in as many minutes, she just ducked down and beetled straight for the light.
By the time Darby got up the nerve to lift her head again, she realized she had crawled nearly twenty feet past the end of whatever weird tunnel she’d been in. And when she did look up, she wished she hadn’t.
Around her was a world of white.
The sky was white. The ground was white. Darby had never seen so many shades of white; from blindingly bright, almost blue-white to a dull, flat white that pounded at her temples like visual static. Everything was white. Nothing was white. Everything was nothing; she couldn’t identify a single object.
She staggered to her feet, one hand over the sore spot above her left eyebrow. First total darkness and then this? The whole dream scenario just wasn’t making sense. This all-white world had to be a result of the knocks she’d given her skull over the past few minutes. Darby remembered the time she’d smacked her head on the curb when she’d first tried out the skateboard. That had been kind of like this. She rubbed the sore spot again. Okay, the truth was that nothing has ever really been like this, but the sense that her brain no longer quite belonged in her body was the closest feeling she’d ever had to this sensation.
That time, after the stars had cleared, her mother had plopped a helmet on her head and everything
had been all right again, apart from a headache that lasted a day or two. But now there was no lecturing, helmet-bearing mother. There was no warm summer evening. Instead, there was cold. Deep, solid cold.
Darby had a sudden longing for one of Nan’s geeky hand-knit sweaters. She touched her head again. It throbbed a bit but didn’t feel so bad, really. She took a quick look at her fingers, too. No blood.
And yet everything was still white. She hugged herself tightly, tucked a hand under each arm and thought about the light. It had been a white light at the end of a tunnel. A chill penetrated her heart with the speed of a slicing icicle. Didn’t people claim to see a white light just before they died?
She wiggled her eyebrows. Sure, there was no blood—on the outside. But what if all this was a hallucination brought on by bleeding in her brain?
“Am I dead?” she whispered, and then jumped a little at the sound of her own voice. She hadn’t meant to speak aloud, but the fact she could had to mean she wasn’t dead.
Didn’t it?
“You’re not dead, Darby.”
The voice, so close to her ear, made her jump again. It was Gabe. Darby felt faint with relief. She spun around.
“Where are you?” she hissed, and then because she really wanted to know, “Where am I?”
“You’ll see me soon enough. Just be patient, and watch for the helping hand.”
What kind of answer was that? Darby made a mental note to find someone new to hang out with. Even Gramps was less weird than this guy.
“Gabe?”
No response.
She could have kicked herself for not listening more closely to the location of his voice. Maybe reasoning with him would work. Or bribery.
“Hey Gabe? Look, just take the skateboard if you want it.”
Maybe that was a bad idea. She’d die for that skateboard.
On the other hand, she remembered the light and the tunnel.
“The board is yours, Gabe. Just get me out of here, wherever here is, okay?”
No response, but as though borne on the wind or from a long way off, she heard the unmistakable sound of his laugh. And at last a figure materialized out of the wall of white around her. A small figure in what looked like a brown hoodie walked toward Darby with an awkward, wide-legged stance.
