SUNDAY, 4:51 A.M.
For Xander, the tears did not last long. In their place came resolve. He gently pushed David away. The items hanging on the hooks gave him an idea of where they went. A fur-lined parka. Goggles. Gloves. On the bench was a pair of snowshoes. Someplace cold . . . wintry.
He snatched down the parka. He pulled it on. It was heavy and frumpy, floating like a cloud around his body. He tried the door, still locked. He didn’t know how many items were required to unlock the door; only that you did not need all of them. He plucked the goggles from the hook and slipped them onto his head. The door was still locked.
“What are you doing?” David asked.
Xander threw him a glance.
David knew perfectly well what he was doing. What David meant to ask was: have you thought about what you’re doing? So that was the question Xander answered. He said, “If I can get through quick enough, I can get her. I can bring her back.”
“But that guy was unstoppable.”
“I’ll think of something,” Xander said, “once I’m there.” He reached for the gloves. Holding them, he tried the door again. It opened easily and he looked through. Blinding whiteness everywhere. Snow swirled in. A blast of freezing air. Wind—or something—howled in the distance. He told David, “Come find me in twenty minutes.”
David grabbed his arm. His tears were wet on his lids, his cheeks. “I want Mom back too. But, Xander, you can’t—”
Xander jerked his arm away from David’s grasp. “Don’t try to stop me,” he said.
“But you don’t know—”
A muffled scream. Undoubtedly Mom’s.
The brothers looked through the threshold to the unknown world beyond, then at each other. The scream had not come from there.
In the hallway, a door rattled and clicked open. Mom’s scream was loud, clear, and horrified.
Xander and David bolted across the room. The door behind them slammed shut. They pushed each other through the first doorway into the hall. They looked at the last door, then down the hall toward the staircase. Halfway there, a door was open enough to see their mother’s face. Her fingers were clutching, clutching, the edge. Xander yelled for her, ran. She screamed again. Her fingers disappeared. The door slammed. When Xander burst through, the second door slammed. There was water on the floor, mist in the air. The smell of the sea. He ran to the door, almost slipped. The handle was locked.
David hit the door frame behind him. “The ocean,” he said.
The mist vanished into the gap under the door. The water on the floor turned into rivulets and shot into the gap, leaving not even the slightest moisture where it had been.
Xander’s head pounded. Each pulse brought a new wave of pain and nausea. His eyes stung as though someone had rubbed pepper into them. He was frustrated, sad, and angry. He cast a grim expression at David. He threw the gloves onto the floor and yanked the goggles off his head. He ripped off the parka. He stepped to the bench and surveyed the items as a hunter might consider the perfect weapon.
“Don’t do this!” David yelled. He was stepping up beside him. Xander did not respond. There was a long, curved sword with a big hand guard and a rusty scabbard that might have once been covered in leather. It reminded Xander of a pirate’s sword. I definitely want that. He pulled it down, saw that a thin, long strap ran through an eyelet in the scabbard. He looped it over his head so it hung off his shoulder. There was a three-cornered Jack Sparrow hat. Beside it, a simple scarf for tying around your head. He thought this would be less encumbering than the hat. He snapped it off of its hook.
David grabbed his arm. “You can’t go like this! We don’t even know if she’s still in the world past that door.” When Xander said nothing, David shoved him hard.
Xander sidestepped to keep from falling, and his hip hit the frame of the portal door. He lost his grip on the knot he was trying to make in the scarf. It slipped off his head. He made a grab at it, missed, and watched it settle on the floor.
He snapped his attention to David. The muscles in Xander’s face were tight, his body trembled with emotion and the need to do something. His vision blurred, turning David into indistinct colors. He blinked, sending tears streaming down his face. David came back into focus.
The boy continued his tirade. “You can’t do this!”
“Someone has to!” he yelled, as if it were David who had caused all of this. He knew it wasn’t. The most blame lay on his shoulders. He shouldn’t have let David go through earlier that evening, should have told Dad about David’s intentions so they both could have prevented it. He shouldn’t have let Dad keep watch alone; he should have done a better job helping him block the stairwell and hidden wall. He shouldn’t have gone to sleep, not with all that had already happened. He shouldn’t have let the man take Mom; he should have held on to her, to the death, if necessary.
All the things he had failed to do . . . all the things he had done wrong . . . They washed over him like scalding acid.
“Not like this!” David yelled back into Xander’s face. “You’re beat up! You’re tired! You’re ready to fall over!” David’s head drooped. Everything about him seemed to sag, to lose its vitality. Softly, he said, “If you go over like that, you won’t come back. I know you won’t.” His voice cracked on the second won’t. He shook his head, knuckled away some tears. He plopped onto the bench, bowed his head. “You don’t even have any clothes on. Just your boxers. How stupid is that?”
Xander’s trembling subsided. He could not be mad at David for telling the truth. If he went looking for their mom now, he probably wouldn’t come back. But he was so . . . frustrated. He knew what had to be done. He just did not possess the strength— mentally, intellectually, physically—to do it. It was like seeing a loved one trapped under a burning car that would explode at any second. Everyone has heard stories of adrenaline-fueled feats of inhuman strength, but the reality is: human muscles are no match for two tons of sheet metal.
Loved ones die. Fact of life.
But his mother wasn’t dead, and he was not helpless. He was simply not up to the task at that moment.
“David, we have to get her. We have to rescue her.”
David looked into his face. “I know,” he said. “But we have to do it smart. We can’t die trying, can we? Then who’ll be here to bring her back? We’ll be like that last family. Gone.” Xander’s shoulders slumped—with them, his spirit and whatever had been keeping him going despite injury and exhaustion. He was heartsick and discouraged. It was unimaginable to him that he didn’t simply fall over dead. Were his organs really slipping over one another to pool in a heap at the base of his torso, or did it just feel that way? This must be how people lost in the wilderness felt: At what point do you muster the strength to keep going, against all odds, even after using up every ounce of energy in yourself ? When do you admit defeat and lie down to die?
To Xander, David represented the logical side of the equation. Not that David didn’t love their mother and want her back. He did, maybe even more than Xander did, if that were possible. For some reason, however—maybe his youth or that he had not looked into his mother’s eyes as she was taken away—he was able to set aside the pure gut reaction of rescuing her immediately, at all costs.
Xander looked from David to the remaining items on the hooks. They were the other side of David’s coin. They would allow him to continue the pursuit, to chase until his heart exploded. He would die in some frozen wasteland; or on the deck of a pirate ship three hundred years ago; or—if these rooms allowed it, he did not know—some moon base in the distant future. Perhaps one of those deaths was already written for him.
He knew David’s way—to rest and go again—gave them the best chance of finding Mom, of bringing her back, of all of them growing old here, not there.
On the other hand, he could put on the headscarf and another of these high-seas-faring items. He could open the door—the portal—and plunge through. He could find his mother or die trying. Wasn’t stopping now abandoning her? Live to fight another day was an expression that did not take into account the loved ones who would die because you didn’t continue fighting today.
Feeling every movement in his body—stretching muscles, bending ligaments, the pressure exerted on every bone—Xander stooped to retrieve the scarf. He pulled it over his head and began cinching a knot in the back.
“Xander,” David said, sadly. He shook his head, bowed it.
Xander heard a sniff, saw a tear fall from David’s hidden face to his thigh. He was wearing pajama bottoms that were not his favorite anymore. These depicted characters from Avatar: The Last Airbender. He had abandoned them in favor of a more mature plaid pattern when he’d turned twelve a few months ago. Xander could not believe only one day had passed since they’d lost David’s favorite pjs to the gap under the door. One day from discovering the rooms to losing their mother.
Xander leaned over David and selected a brass spyglass dangling from a hook by a leather thong. He stepped back, saw another tear fall.
“I have to,” he said.
David looked up. “She went into one room, but came out another. We haven’t even found out how to get back to the room we started from. We don’t know enough about this for you to do any good.”
“I have to,” Xander repeated.
“It’s stupid!” David stood up and stepped in front of the portal door. “It’s killing yourself for no reason.”
“Get out of my way, David.”
His brother tightened his lips, scrunched his brow in determination. He widened his stance for more stability. He pressed one palm to the door behind him, the other to the wall beside the door. The doorknob was directly behind him.
“Okay,” Xander said, equally determined. He stepped in to toss his brother aside.
Something banged in the hallway.
David’s eyes flashed wide. “Mom!” he yelled.
Before David could dart past, Xander spun and ran into the hall. His eyes scanned for an open door or evidence of one having just closed. A voice from the other direction turned his head.
Dad was stumbling, touching his fingers to one wall for balance. Behind him, a wall fixture rocked back and forth. Dad must have knocked it as he passed. On his other side, Toria moved with him. She walked sideways, so she could press one hand to his back and grip his arm with her other. He appeared dazed.
“Dad,” David called. He ran for him. The boys reached their father at the same time.
Dad’s eyes stared past them, down the corridor. Xander could tell he was seeing something way beyond. He said something Xander didn’t catch.
“Dad, what is it?” He leaned closer.
“Not again,” Dad said. “Not again.”
Xander squinted at him. “What do you mean, ‘not again’?” “Not again.” Dad’s face reflected something falling apart. His mouth quivered, then his cheeks, his forehead. His eyes grew big and focused on Xander.
Xander saw his father’s attention coming back from that far-off place he had been. Dad’s eyes focused on him, then squeezed shut. He began to moan, his shoulders heaving up and down. He was sobbing. He collapsed into a sitting position on the floor.
David stepped up behind him. His fingers caressed his father’s head. He pulled his hands away. He glared at the blood on them. Then he wiped this fingers on his pajama pants. Xander witnessed his brother pulling himself together, regaining composure that he had not entirely lost. David asked, “Xander, what is it? You know what Dad’s talking about?”
Through his tears, his wrenching sobs, Dad said, “I didn’t mean for this to happen. Not again. Not this time. Not her!”
Glaring at his father, Xander said, “He knew this would happen! It’s happened before and he knew it.” He dropped to his knees before his father. “You knew, didn’t you? You could have stopped her being taken. Was this your secret? Was this your plan?”
Toria began to cry.
“What are you saying, Xander?” David asked, voice trembling.
Xander stood. He didn’t know what to say. Had too many thoughts in his head. He turned and walked slowly down the corridor. He pulled the pirate scarf away. He let it fall from his fingers. He slipped the sword and scabbard off his neck.
It clattered to the floor.
From behind him, someone called out. Dad’s voice stopped him, but he did not turn around. He could not. His father’s first sentence validated what Xander had suspected. It felt like being shot.
“I did know,” his father said. “About this house, about these rooms.”
Xander turned then. He stormed toward his father. “You knew? So when you said I should trust you, this is what you meant? Trust that our mother was going to be kidnapped, that she would be taken into some time- and space-bending place where she’s all but gone forever?”
“No,” their father said. “I meant things would work out. I thought they would.”
Xander reached his father, still sitting on the floor. His anger frightened David and Toria—he knew and he didn’t care. What their father had done was awful and it demanded his fury. They had been betrayed; their mother had been betrayed. She was gone, and his father had orchestrated the whole thing. He wanted to strike out, to punch him. He felt his fists tighten, hardening to stone. He was ready to do it, to pull back and throw his fist into his father’s face.
Dad said, “I thought I could protect you. I thought I could make it different. I locked the door!”
Xander’s anger did not know what to do with this information— his father talking protection, not harm. His putting a lock on the door at the base of the stairs did not jibe with the malicious intent he had ascribed to his father.
Xander said, “What do you mean, ‘this time’? Why did you bring us here?”
Dad lowered his head. He was thinking, considering his words. His faced returned with a tight smile. He turned soft eyes on Xander. Sorrow there, regret. He said, “I thought I would be able to find my mother.”
Xander jabbed a pointing finger at the door where he had last seen his mother. “Find her?” he said. “She just—” He had not really heard what his father had said, but it caught up to him at that moment. He said, “Your mother. What are you saying?”
The pain in his father’s face was obvious. This was an agony he did not want to share. Dad said, “Thirty years ago, I watched my mother get kidnapped by someone who had come out of these rooms. I came back to get her.”