Fenzy (12 page)
Xander grabbed his shoulder. “But we won’t go over if we see it,” Xander said. “This time.”
Keal looked at each of them hard. He looked at his watch. “
One
hour,” he said. “Come on.” He stepped toward the wall’s opening.
“You too?” David said, rushing up behind him.
“I’m not going to let you do this alone,” Keal said. He led them through the space between the walls and through the next opening, and started up the stairs to the third floor. “If you see or hear anything unusual, yell, and we all run for the stairs, got it?”
Xander laughed. “Unusual? In this house?”
“You know what I mean.”
In the third-floor hallway, Keal opened the first door. He gestured toward the antechamber with his head. “Let’s go.”
“What?” Xander said. “All of us?”
“Of course, Xander. Safety in numbers.”
“Come on,” Xander complained. “You’re only giving us an hour. Every time, we have to pick up three items to open the portal door. Then we have to look for her. I mean really look. That takes time. If we do each one together, we’ll get through six or seven at the most. If we split up, we’ll hit three times as many.”
Keal frowned. He said, “Let’s do this one together, and I’ll think about splitting up.”
Xander started to protest, but David stopped him. “It’s better than nothing, Xander. You’re wasting time.”
“Go,” Xander said, pushing David into the antechamber.
David scanned the items on the hooks and bench, none of which he’d seen before: a woven red shirt, a necklace of wood beads, a wooden mallet, sandals, a coin, and a roughly hewn walking stick. “Any idea what world these things belong to?”
“Could be anywhere,” Xander said.
Keal leaned past them and picked up the coin. “Ancient Rome,” he said, holding it up. It wasn’t perfectly round. In the center was an engraving of a soldier riding in a chariot pulled by a team of horses. Under it, in a banner, was the word
Roma
.
“Not the Colosseum,” Xander said. “That antechamber had a sword and shield.”
“A helmet and chain mail,” David added. He’d never forget Xander going over for the first time.
“Somewhere else, then,” Keal said. “Rome had a vast empire that lasted centuries.”
“So who’s going to open the door?” David said. He wanted to do this, to look for Mom, but Keal’s attitude had spooked him.
I’m just tired
, he thought.
Not scared
.
Xander took the coin from Keal. He grabbed the necklace and mallet and stepped to the portal door.
“That didn’t take so long,” Keal said.
“It’s not always that easy,” Xander said. He opened the door. Hot wind blew in.
“Ugh,” David said. “Smells like rotten eggs.”
“
Burning
rotten eggs,” Xander corrected.
As if to prove him right, black smoke billowed in. The por-tal itself appeared to be swirling smoke. It cleared, giving them a hazy, out-of-focus view of stone stairs leading down from the portal. The stairs ended at a narrow street, paved with stones. It extended straight ahead of them. Single-story buildings lined the street. People, most of them dressed in tunics, ran toward them. Some darted through doorways, others reached the end of the street at the base of the stairs, turned, and disappeared out of sight.
In the far distance a mountain loomed over the town. Its top was on fire, spewing flames into the sky. A thick plume of smoke rose from it like an exploding atom bomb. A cloud of smoke rolled down the mountain toward the town, seeming to tumble.
“I think it’s
Pompeii
,” Keal said.
“That’s Mount Vesuvius?” David said. “When it erupted and wiped out everything?”
“I think so,” Keal said. “That smell is sulfur.” He extended an arm past Xander and held his palm up to the portal. “Warm, but not hot,” he said. “And I don’t feel a pull, anything that would
force
you to go over.”
“See?” Xander said. “We can do this alone.”
“No Mom, right?” Keal said.
“I hope not,” David said. How could they possibly jump into Pompeii right before it was consumed by a volcano’s ashes? But then, if they saw Mom, how could they
not
? He hadn’t considered that they could be faced with a choice like that. It didn’t seem fair.
He imagined never coming back, and Dad, Xander, and Toria, knowing what had happened, visiting modern-day Pompeii. They would go to the museum that displayed plas-ter casts of Vesuvius’s victims, which had been preserved in the hardened ash. They would stop at a mother embracing her son, and recognize the two of them. And they would cry.
David suddenly felt depressed. In this house such a scenario was not simply a nightmare or “the product of an overactive imagination”—as a teacher had once said about a story he’d written. It could really happen, probably
would
happen. He said, “Shut the door.”
F
RIDAY
, 4:22
P. M
.
“I want to show you something first,” Keal said, gripping Xander’s shoulder to keep him in place in front of the Pompeii portal. “Listen up, guys. We’re only
looking
, right? So when you open a portal door, here’s what you do.” He grabbed Xander’s left hand and placed it on the edge of the open door, forcing his fingers to bend around it. “This is your safety grip,” he said. “Even if the door swings shut, you keep holding on. Got it?”
Xander nodded.
Keal moved around to Xander’s right side. Through the portal, a group of people ran toward the stairs. A churning black cloud of ashes rolled down the street and consumed them. Keal took Xander’s other hand and pressed the palm firmly against the wall beside the portal. “Lock your elbow,” Keal said.
Xander nodded.
Keal knelt. He took Xander’s foot in his hands and brought it to the wall beside the portal, directly under Xander’s hand. He angled it so the heel was on floor and the toes bent upward on the wall.
“Okay,” Keal said. “That’s the stance.” He rose and touched Xander’s hand holding the edge of the door. He said, “One.” He touched the other hand on the wall. “Two.” Xander’s foot. “Three. Say it.”
“One . . . two . . . three,” Xander said, wiggling each anchor point. His voice was crisp as a soldier’s. He obviously liked Keal’s militaristic approach.
“Good,” Keal said. “Step back.”
Xander backed away from the portal, and Keal said. “David, step up.”
“I saw,” David said. “One, two, three.”
“Get up here.”
David stepped close to the portal, trying not to see the boil-ing ash rushing into the buildings to find the people hiding in them. He slipped his arm out of the sling and positioned himself the way Keal had showed Xander.
“How’s the arm?” Keal said.
“Feels good,” David lied.
Keal turned a doubtful eye on him, and David was afraid Keal would punch his arm to see for himself just how it felt. But all Keal did was nod. He gripped David’s shoulder and pulled him back away from the portal. He shut the door on Pompeii’s destruction.
“So we’ll split up?” Xander said.
“Here’s how it’s going to go,” Keal said. “As you go into each antechamber, call out what the theme is.”
“I can’t always tell,” David said.
“Guess,” Keal told him. “Or say what the items are. Then, before you open the door, say, ‘Opening door.’ While you’re at the portal, if you don’t see your mother, call out, ‘Nothing’— every fifteen seconds. Understand?”
The boys agreed.
“When you close the door, say, ‘Door closed.’ Loud enough for all of us to hear. All these things, every time. Right?”
“Right!” Xander snapped, grinning.
David’s “Right” was quieter. He understood Xander’s enthusiasm. Not only did he get his way, searching the portals alone, but he was doing it Dad’s way as well: with caution and thoughtfulness. It was the kind of thing all of them had envi-sioned since setting up the MCC. The goal had always been to rescue Mom without someone else disappearing or getting seriously hurt. That meant doing it like a military operation, but their knowledge of the military came from movies like
Black Hawk Down
and
Saving Private Ryan
. Not quite the same, regardless of what Xander said. Leave it to Keal, former Army Ranger, to bring their plan together.
Even so, something bothered David. If he’d learned anything about the house, it was that nothing here was pre-dictable. It seemed to
know
what you believed about it and then did things completely differently. Strategy and discipline were no match for chaos and confusion.
“Okay,” Keal said, slapping his hands together. “You boys take the doors on this side of the hall. I’ll take the other.” He checked his watch. “Fifty-two minutes.”
Xander dropped the coin, necklace, and mallet on the bench, and the three of them left the antechamber. Keal crossed the hall, opened the door, and stepped inside. He called, “Something to do with trees, a forest.”
“If it’s a jungle,” David said, “watch out for tigers . . . and warriors with bows and arrows.” A chill slid down his spin like a drop of ice water. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Keal!”
Xander stopped at the next door on David’s side of the hallway, and Keal came out of the antechamber. David said, “Other people can see the portals. It’s not like we have magic eyes or something. And we can see into the antechamber from the other side.”
“Yeah, but people don’t always notice,” Xander said. “When you thought you saw Mom in the World War II world, people were rushing by and not even noticing you. We see it because we’re looking for it, and know what it looks like.”
“I think it looks like heat vapors to them,” David said. “Or something they don’t notice unless they’re looking right at it.”
“Even if they can see it and us,” Xander said, “so what?”
Keal answered. “So, they can send things through—at us. Remember that spear that followed you through from the Viking world?”
“It ended up in the antechamber, stuck in the hallway door,” David said.
“Until it got sucked back,” Xander added. “And the spear-head melted to go under the door.”
“Point is,” Keal said. “We can get killed just
looking
into a portal, without going through it.”
“What are you saying?” Xander said, his voice rising into a whine. “We can’t even look? How are we supposed to find Mom? Looking is still a lot safer than going through.”
Keal rubbed his chin, thinking. He said, “Extra caution. Watch for people who see you. Shut the door if they do.”
“Got it,” Xander said.
Keal returned to the forest-themed antechamber. David frowned at Xander, who said, “It
is
dangerous, Dae. All of this is. But it’s either face it or forget Mom.”
David nodded. “You’re right. I’m okay.”
Xander opened the door. Before he left, David said, “Xander . . . be careful.”
“You too.” A few seconds later, he was inside the small room, calling out, “Uh . . . an amusement park?”
David went to the next antechamber and went in. He looked at the items and let out a long breath. He yelled, “Knives and swords . . . a bloody shirt.”
F
RIDAY
, 5:08
P. M
.
So far, David had seen a total of seven people in two worlds. The first four were a family enjoying a picnic in a grassy meadow. The mother wasn’t Mom, but the scene had made him miss her even more. A little girl had spotted him and pointed. He shut the door before the others turned.
Next, he had witnessed a duel. Two men stood back-to-back, flintlock pistols raised in front of them. Another man started counting, and the duelists walked away from each other. At
ten
they turned. One man fired immediately, a great plume of smoke coming from his weapon and drifting off. The other duelist took his time, aiming carefully, using both hands to steady the pistol. His target didn’t move, resigned to whatever happened. As David shut the door, a shot rang out.
Most of the portals opened onto pretty much nothing: an empty cobblestone street, a vast expanse of sand baking under a blinding sun, a beach, a woodsy area behind a log cabin.
He stepped into the hallway and saw Keal approaching another door. “You okay?” Keal said.
“Not seeing very many people,” David said.
“I got a few crowds,” Keal said.
“You do know what she looks like, don’t you?”
Keal grinned. “I’ve studied her pictures.”
David bet he had. He suspected Keal had been trained to identify faces. Keal had never said what he’d done in the Rangers, but David imagined him as a sniper. Those guys needed to recognize a target in a split second, probably by memorizing eye shape, nose type, jaw lines. Keal could prob-ably point out Mom in a crowd as quickly and surely as David could.
Keal raised his watch and called, “Eleven minutes!”
“Let’s get two more each!” Xander yelled.
