Watcher in the Woods (2 page)

His eyes dropped to his sister's face, then over to his dad's. They felt it too, he could tell. They were up to this challenge. He looked at Xander's eyes and saw hope there, and determination.

David nodded. “Let's do it.”

Xander reached for the railing and pulled himself up. “Good idea, Dae,” he said, and bolted up the stairs.

David was right on his heels.

“Whoa, whoa, guys,” Dad called out. “Xander!”

Xander kept moving. He pushed through the front door and took the stairs three at a time. David rushed to keep up.

Behind them, Dad yelled, “Xander! David! Stop!”

Xander turned on the landing, fire in his eyes. “
What
?”

David stopped two steps from the top.

“Where are you going? What are you doing?”

“Rescuing Mom,” Xander said in the same tone he would use to explain that water was wet.

“We're going to do that, son, absolutely. But we need a plan.” “I
have
a plan!” Xander yelled.

It scared David how forcefully Xander said it.

“I'm going over,” Xander continued. “And I'm going to keep going over until I find her.”

Going over
.

Since moving into the house, their lives just kept getting weirder and weirder. It had begun with the discovery that the second-floor linen closet was more than a storage place for towels and bedsheets: it was a portal to a locker at the Pinedale Middle and High School. Then he and Xander had followed an intruder in their home through a secret door in the wall.

There they'd found a flight of stairs to a third floor—a twisting hallway with doors on either side. Beyond each door was a . . . well, that was another thing. The new world they lived in came with its own vocabulary: an
antechamber
was what lay beyond each of the twenty doors in the upstairs hallway. It was a small room containing a bench and a selection of items—clothing, tools, weapons.

Set in the opposite wall of each antechamber was another door, always locked. Unlocking it required putting on or picking up some of the items. Beyond that door was a
portal
, a passageway from their house to one of the other worlds and back.

World
was the word they used to describe the different times and places they could step into from their house. Xander had done it first. He had put on a helmet and chain mail, picked up a sword, and stepped into the Colosseum—right in the middle of a gladiator fight. Their father had barely managed to rescue him.

And
going over
or
crossing over
was the term he and Xander had begun using to describe stepping through a portal to a different world.

“It's not that simple,” Dad said.

“It
is
that simple,” Xander shot back. He ran down the hall toward the secret door.

“Xander!” As Dad flew past David, he said, “Stay here.” He disappeared around the corner.

David threw a quick glance at Toria, who was standing in the entryway. He knew her expression mirrored his own: open mouth, wide eyes. He thought of saying something, then he turned and bolted after his father and brother. He reached the hidden stairway to the third floor and clambered up. Toria was right behind him.

The first antechamber door was open. David could hear Xander's and Dad's voices:

“Let me go!”

“Just wait! Wait, I said!”

David slammed into the door frame. Xander was on his back on the floor; Dad was sitting on him, gripping Xander's shirt in his fists.

Tears streamed out of Xander's eyes. “You don't care!” he yelled. “You
let
her get taken!”

Dad pulled Xander up so they were nose to nose. Dad opened his mouth, then snapped it closed, pressing his lips tight. He stared into Xander's eyes, and slowly his face softened. He whispered, “Don't you think I want to do exactly what you're trying to do? Don't you think I want to go in after her too, just snatch her back? I do, Xander, I do. It's just . . .” He looked up at David and Toria, standing in the doorway. “It's not that easy. I've done this before. If we have any chance to find your mother—”

“
If?
” Toria said.

Dad looked at her sadly. “If we have any chance, any chance at all, it lies in being smart about it.” He lowered his hands until Xander's head was back on the floor. “We can't just go crashing over. It's too dangerous. Your mother wouldn't want that.” Dad stood and extended a hand to Xander.

Xander glared at it, pushed himself up, and stood. He wiped the tears off his face, then he sat on the bench and looked at the floor.

When neither of them spoke, David said, “So . . . what do we do?”

“Now,” Xander said. “Not later—
now
.”

Dad took a deep breath and looked around the room. “What did you see when the guy took Mom? In the room, I mean?”

“It was
snowy
,” David said. “There was a white parka . . . and snowshoes . . . gloves . . .”

“Goggles,” Xander added.

“Okay, so maybe the Arctic,” Dad said, thinking.

“But she didn't stay there,” Xander said.

Their father cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

“She didn't stay there long,” Xander said, sounding frustrated.

David said, “We heard her in the hall. We ran out and she was trying to come through another door. Something . . .” A lump in his throat choked his words. “Something pulled her back in.”

Dad stepped over to him and combed his fingers through David's hair. “A different room? Not the Arctic one?”

“We went in the antechamber,” David said. “There were pirate things. A sword and a three-cornered hat.”

“Like Johnny Depp's in
Pirates of the Caribbean
,” Xander said. Leave it to him to put it in movie terms

Their father's puzzled look deepened.

“What's it mean?” Xander asked.

Dad shook his head. “Grandpa Hank said he thought there was a way to go from world to world without coming back through the house each time.”

“Other portals?” David asked.

“I don't know. If so, he never found them. But if it's true, she could be anywhere, in any world.”

“We already figured that out,” Xander said.

“And if there are other portals,” Dad said slowly, thinking it through, “it'd be like a combination lock. Every new portal would make the number of possible worlds she could have gone to increase exponentially.”

Xander looked at him hard. “What are you saying? That it's impossible?” He stood. “We haven't even started, and you're
giving up
?”

“No, no,” Dad said. He reached out and laid his hand on Xander's shoulder. Xander pulled away, but Dad continued: “It's just that we have even more work ahead of us than I thought.”

“So what do we do?” David said again.

“Let's look for those worlds,” Dad said. “The Arctic one and the pirates. She's probably not in either one, not anymore, but it's a place to start.”

Xander said, “It'll be faster if we split up. David and me. You and Toria.”

Dad studied him. “Xander, look at me,” he said. “Can I trust you?”

David watched Xander meet Dad's gaze.

“More than I can trust
you
,” his brother said.

CHAPTER three

SUNDAY, 7 : 55 A . M.

“Why are you being so mean to Dad?” David asked.

Xander didn't look away from the items hanging from hooks in the antechamber they stood in. Dad and Toria had left to find notepads and pens to catalog the rooms. “What do you mean?”

David mimicked his brother: “ ‘More than I can trust
you
.' ”

“It's true,” Xander said.

“Dad made a mistake, that's all.”

“His mistake got Mom kidnapped. Don't you understand? We may never see her again.”

“We will,” David said quietly. His heart felt like a cannonball in his chest. He surveyed the things in the room. “Doesn't look like any big deal,” he said.

There was a leather jacket, a beret, a sheathed knife, a belt of rifle cartridges. On the bench lay a rolled-up paper and a crumpled pack of cigarettes.

“Hard to tell,” Xander said. He elbowed David's arm. “You should know that, going over the way you did.”

Xander was right. You couldn't judge a world's safeness by the items in the antechamber. After Xander's trip to the Colosseum, David had wanted to try it. They had chosen a room with clothes and tools that had seemed even more harmless than the ones here. And David had stepped smack into the middle of three hungry tigers and a tribe of fierce hunters.

He lifted the leather jacket off its hook. It was heavy, old, and wrinkled. He slipped it on.

Xander smiled and said, “ ‘No man left behind.' That's from
Black Hawk Down
.”

“No woman left behind,” David amended. He snatched the beret off the hook in front of him. It was big on his head, but he left it propped there, tilted down over one eyebrow. He said, “Xander, you know Dad feels the same way. He won't leave without Mom.”

Xander didn't respond.

David said, “He loves Mom.”

“He should have thought of that before bringing us here.”

“He didn't think it would happen so fast. He thought he could protect us.”

“He was wrong.”

“He said when he lived here as a kid, the weird stuff didn't start happening for months. He thought he had time to make it safe, to figure it out.”

The muscles in his brother's face seemed to tighten. David didn't like to see him looking so stern, so angry.

“He loves Mom,” David repeated, whispering.

Xander sat on the bench. “Look,” he said. “I know he does, and I know he didn't mean for any of this to happen. But it did—because of him. He loves us, too, and that's why he might try to get us out of here, thinking it's best. But it won't be, not without Mom.”

David picked up the pack of cigarettes. He said, “This is
open
. And there are cigarettes missing. Weird.”

“Why is that weird?”

David turned the pack over in his hands. The cigarettes inside felt like bones underneath a thin layer of skin. “It makes me wonder whose they were. What does he think happened to his pack of smokes?”

Xander shrugged, clearly not interested.

“And look,” David said, holding the package up. “What language is that?”

“
Flor belmonte . . . extra-vergé,
” Xander read. He shrugged again. “Italian?”

David examined the pack, then slipped it into the jacket pocket. He looked at the door leading to the world where the jacket, beret, and cigarettes belonged. Had he picked up enough of them to unlock the door? Hadn't they determined that it took only three items from the antechamber to open the portal door? He looked sideways at Xander, who was reaching for the roll of paper.

Giving in to curiosity, knowing he shouldn't, David gripped the door handle and turned it. The door flew open as though pushed from the other side. A whoosh of warm air swept in.

“Hey!” Xander said. David sensed him stepping up behind him. He felt a tug as Xander's hand grabbed the collar of the leather jacket. “
David!
”

“I'm just looking,” David said. But really there was nothing to see. Sometimes what lay beyond the doorway was fairly clear, as when they were able to see the jungle floor before David stepped through. But before Xander found himself in the Colosseum, they had seen the world on the other side as indistinct shapes. It was like that now, like peering through a steamed-up shower door.

A blurry object flashed past, causing David to jump. “Whoa!”

Another figure passed by on the other side of the threshold. This one was more distinct—dark hair framing a white face, dark clothes.

“People,” Xander said.

“Doing what?”

More and more figures went past, moving right to left. A child went by, everything about him clear as tap water. David saw fear in the boy's eyes as he turned to look back over his shoulder. And yet, the person whose hand he was holding was blurry and indistinct.

“It's like we're seeing it through a camera lens,” Xander said. “And somebody is playing with the focus.”

The sound coming through was no better. Most of it was a garbled murmur. Now and then words came through. The syllables were sharp, but David didn't understand the language. A low
boom
sounded like the beating of a drum.

“A parade?” David wondered out loud.

“Shut the door,” Xander said. “Wait for Dad.”

More faces—in and out of focus.

“Hold on,” David said. “I want to see more. Maybe I can figure out what they're doing.”

“Don't move,” Xander said, releasing David's collar.

David glanced back to watch Xander step into the hallway. “Dad!” his brother called.

Dust and smoke drifted into the little room. It smelled like fireworks on the Fourth of July. The angle of the view through the doorway seemed to be getting higher. David could see more people, mostly their heads now, not their bodies. He remembered Xander telling him that he had watched the jungle moving past the doorway before he jumped in to rescue David from the tigers. Whatever these portals were, they were not locked in one place. They moved, as though with a breeze or caught in an ocean current.

A face came into focus and immediately blurred. David's heart jumped into his throat. The glimpse had been enough.

“Mom,” he whispered. Then he shouted it: “Mom! Xander! I saw Mom!” He leaned his shoulder into the door frame, hoping for another glimpse.

Xander raced up to him. “Where? David, where?”

“She went past! Xander, it was her!”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm sure! I'm sure!”

Xander went back into the hallway and yelled, “Dad! Dad!” His voice was shrill, panicky. His eyes were wide. He was shifting his gaze down the hall, back to David, down the hall again. David realized Xander was as clueless about what to do as he was.