By the afternoon of the following day, the overcast was thick and ominous. Thunder grumbled to the west. I stopped off at home and changed into heavier jeans, a hoodie sweatshirt, and a pair of thick-soled boots. I threw a compass on a chain around my neck and stuffed a pair of oven mitts down the back of my pants.
Fiona showed up in Freak’s backyard a few minutes after I did. She was wearing bright red boots that came up to her knees, a pair of green ski pants, and a yellow waterproof jacket. She looked like a dandelion in a bud vase. Her backpack was loaded with bottles of spring water.
Fiona kept nervously looking out at the road, like she was afraid someone she knew might drive by. I realized she didn’t want to be seen. If I had been dressed the way she was, I wouldn’t have wanted to be seen, either.
Freak emerged from the back door of his house and handed us each a six-foot wooden pole, the kind you might stick in a garden to hold up tomato plants.
“There may be times when you’ll want to test the ground in front of you,” he explained.
“Great,” said Fiona.
“What’s the compass for?” he asked me.
“You can’t get where you’re going without a compass.”
“It’s not like there are woods we’re going to get lost in,” he said, quite reasonably.
“It belonged to my father,” I said.
“Oh.” He looked at it again. “It’s nice.”
We went to the back of the yard and Freak pulled open the slit in the chain-link fence. He bent low and scooted through. Fiona and I followed.
We crossed the backyard of the former Henderson place, went down their cracked driveway, and zigzagged through abandoned streets until we reached Took Lane, where the houses were nothing but charred foundations. The ground got noticeably warmer the farther we went. We crawled through a smaller slit in a second fence, scrambled to our feet, and looked around.
We were in Hellsboro.
It looked like photos of the surface of the moon. It was bumpy and rocky, with long stretches of soil that looked like charcoal from a barbecue. The colors were soot and ash and dirty gray, and I realized I might be seeing things for the first time the way Fiona saw them. I made a mental note to stop making fun of the way she dressed.
Charred and stubby stumps marked the locations of former trees. The landscape had a corduroy look, faint ridges marking where limbless logs lay half buried in the earth, sinking farther into it each year as their undersides slowly cooked away. Off in the far distance, rising from the middle of it all, were the boxy white buildings and towering tanks of Rodmore.
“Think of it as a pizza,” said Freak.
“A very burned, overdone pizza,” said Fiona.
“Actually,” said Freak, “I was thinking more of the coal-dust pizzas they have at Calvino’s.”
The coal-dust pie was a house specialty at Calvino’s. It was topped with crumbled black olives and slivers of portobello mushrooms. It was one of Freak’s favorite types of pizza. And yes, it resembled the surface of Hellsboro.
“The center of the pie is Rodmore.” Freak started walking. Fiona and I followed him, taking care to step where he stepped. “If you cut the pie into eight slices, all the cuts would pass through Rodmore. But if you wanted to get to Rodmore from the outer edge of the pie, you couldn’t walk straight there, along one of the cuts. There’s no direct route that’s safe. You might start out along one of the straight-cut routes, but you’d have to know when to detour.”
We had been walking directly toward the chemical plant. Freak stopped suddenly and turned to the left. Following his example, we walked along the tops of a series of rocks that protruded from the earth like stepping-stones.
“Each winter when it snows, I come out here and make a map of where the snow lasts the longest before it melts. Those are the safest places to walk.”
“Could we stop and look at this map?” Fiona inquired.
“It’s in my head,” said Freak. He pointed at the ground. “If you see something growing, that’s usually a safe place to walk.” Gray grass grew at our feet. Tufts of it struggled here and there for about thirty feet in front of us. I felt a little guilty walking on it. The grass was having a hard enough time as it was.
“If you see anything that looks like smoke, stay away from it.” Freak gestured to the far right. In the distance, white vapor hung above an ash-colored ridge. “That’s where the fire is close to the surface. The ground will be crusty, and you could fall through.”
A flurry of white ash filled the air, drifting over from where the smoke was. It swirled like snow. Freak had suggested we tie kerchiefs around our necks before we started out. Now we levered them up over our mouths and breathed through them. It made us look like Wild West bandits.
We walked along in silence for a while. Once, Freak probed the ground in front of him with his stick. The end of the stick came back charred. We reversed our tracks and took another route. The factory was to the east, but to get to it we sometimes went north, sometimes went south. At one point we passed something that looked like a flat metal bench sticking up out of the ground. Freak said it was the front end of a bulldozer. The rest of the bulldozer had sunk into the earth when the ground had given way beneath it. The bulldozer blade was at just the right height to sit on. I sat on it.
“Isn’t it hot?” asked Freak.
“Very,” I said. “But I’ve got oven mitts in my pants.”
Another moment and it was too hot even for my insulated butt. I jumped up and we continued on.
“I looked up Edward Disin on the Internet last night,” said Fiona. “The only place that has any information about him is the Disin Corporation website.”
“I’m sure it was real helpful,” said Freak.
“It said he was born forty-eight years ago in Tsuris, Russia. I looked up Tsuris and found there is no such place.”
“No kidding.”
“I found a photograph of him in his office, with a bookcase full of PEZ dispensers behind him. In the photo he’s blond, without any mustache. He’s holding what the caption says is the incredibly rare Mary, Queen of Scots PEZ dispenser. He’s got her head pushed all the way back, and there’s a piece of PEZ sticking out of her neck.”
“Did you find anything even remotely useful?” asked Freak as he did an unexpected dance step around a sunken area in the earth and Fiona and I did our best to duplicate his footwork.
“The website listed some of the smaller companies Disin owns. Disin Tel, Agra Nation® Foods, and—get this—Global Organic Research Labs. GORLAB, for short. GORLAB makes chemical weapons like Hista Mime.”
“Hista Mime? It’s also known as the Silent Killer. It’s shot out of a squirt gun, and if you get any on you, you immediately hallucinate that you’re trapped inside an airless transparent cube, and you suffocate. You can’t call out because it freezes your vocal cords.”
“Sounds nasty.”
“It doesn’t sound like anything. That’s why it’s the Silent Killer.”
Freak nodded. “So the GORLAB connection pretty much proves Disin was the one bidding on the crayon.” He hopped on one foot for three yards, did a half pirouette, and jumped twice to the left. Fiona duplicated what he had done as well as she could. Freak turned to her and said, “That was totally unnecessary. I just wanted to see if you would do it.”
Fiona chased him for about fifty feet, but I hung back. It seemed a little reckless to me.
Lightning flashed at my back. Instinctively I turned around, and when I turned back, Fiona and Freak were gone.
“GUYS!” I shouted, panic-stricken. There had been no place for them to go. We were on a flat, treeless plain with nowhere to hide. I looked in the air as if I expected to see them carried off by buzzards. The air was empty, except for another flurry of ash.
It was as if the ground had swallowed them. The moment I thought it, I knew that’s what had happened. And Hellsboro was the last place you wanted the ground to swallow you. The ground was hungrier there than anywhere else.
“GUYS!” I shouted again, starting to work my way toward the last place I had seen them. I furiously tapped the ground in front of me with my stick, daring it to cave in.
“River!” I heard Freak’s voice, muffled, to my right.
“I’m here! Keep talking!” I altered my course.
“Over here! Down here! Don’t fall in!” Freak shouted. “If you fall in, we’re all dead!”
“Thin ice!” shouted Fiona, proving she was with Freak and just as crazy as ever.
Then I realized “thin ice” was a warning. I moved the oven mitts from back to front and threw myself on my face. I crawled along the ground, distributing my weight, the way you’re supposed to when you’re trying to rescue someone who’s fallen through ice. I hoped it would work just as well on the crusty earth of Hellsboro.
I crawled up on a ridge made by a log that was buried in soot. On the other side, I looked down into an abyss. A sinkhole had opened beneath Freak and Fiona and dropped them ten feet. The heat I felt against the underside of my body was bad, but the heat and strong smell of sulfur rising out of the sinkhole was worse. Freak and Fiona stood in the center of it, covered in ash, clutching each other and choking. A few minutes down there and they would bake.
“Hey!” I shouted, and both their faces turned up to me, tear tracks like rivers in the grime of their cheeks.
“We can’t climb out!” said Freak, between coughs. “The wall just crumbles when I try!”
One of the walls was, in fact, faintly glowing. I leaned forward as far as I could and stretched my arms down toward them. My arms didn’t stretch far. Fiona climbed on Freak’s shoulders and reached for me. A good two feet still separated us.
Fiona fell forward, broke her fall against the side of the pit, then cried out when she brought a small avalanche of fried earth down with her. The log underneath me trembled, like it might at any moment split and dump me down with my friends.
I thought furiously. What would River Man do? Channel energy. That was about all he was good for. Sometimes, though, he used his brain. I yanked off my hoodie and yelped when I felt the heat of Hellsboro through only the thinness of my T-shirt. But I leaned forward and dangled the hoodie into the pit.
Fiona clambered up Freak again, caught one of the sweatshirt’s arms, and twined her hands into it. I pulled with all my might. I was too close to the edge to have enough leverage, and I felt myself sliding forward. Just before I went over, the hoodie’s arm ripped and Fiona fell back again. I saved myself just in time and wiggled backward.
“Wait! Wait!” said Fiona. “This is my summer-camp backpack!”
She ripped the backpack open. Freak grabbed the water bottles and doused himself and Fiona with the contents. I was pretty sure steam rose off their skin as the water hit them. Fiona yanked a Camp Monongahela T-shirt out of the pack, then three origami swans, and then, finally, a jump rope.
She tossed the rope to me. I wound one end around my hand, braced myself as well as I could against the buried log, and threw the rope’s free end back into the pit.
After a moment, I felt Fiona’s weight on it. I pulled with all my might, digging my feet in deeper and deeper against the log, and just when I thought I couldn’t hold on any longer, Fiona came clambering up over the edge. She grabbed the log and hauled herself to safety.
“Well done!” said the same voice that had said “Bravo” back on the school bus. I ignored it. Fiona and I both scrambled back to the edge.
Freak was looking up at us, dancing from foot to foot. Behind him, all three origami swans had burst into flames. I threw the rope back down. Fiona grabbed me by the waist. The rope dangled inches out of Freak’s reach. Even when he jumped, he couldn’t grasp it. Without someone’s shoulders to stand on, Freak wasn’t going to make it.
I pulled the rope back up and twisted the chain with my father’s compass onto the end, adding two feet to the length. I threw the rope back down to Freak. He caught it, twisted his hands into the chain, and Fiona and I threw our weight into hauling him up. I wondered if the chain would hold. It was a lot thinner than the rope.
Fiona and I staggered backward and then fell over each other as the rope went alarmingly slack. It occurred to me Freak might have passed out from the heat. But after a heart-stopping moment, Freak’s arm swung over the lip of the pit and he pulled himself onto the log.
Then the log broke in half and all three of us fell.
The log dropped about a foot, then lurched and didn’t fall any farther. We scrambled away from it as fast as we could. We all would have thrown ourselves on the ground to catch our breath, but in Hellsboro that would have meant frying like eggs in a skillet. We kept to our feet, weaving back and forth a little as we recovered from the narrow escape we had just had.
“Are you sure there isn’t a team?” I gasped, thinking we had all worked pretty well together.
“Take us back!” Fiona yelled at Freak, wiping soot from her face.
“We’re a lot closer to Rodmore than we are to home,” said Freak, breathing heavily and gesturing back the way we came. It looked like it was already raining there. “Trust me. If there’s no fooling around, I can get us to Rodmore safely. Before it rains.”
“And just who was it who started the fooling around?” asked Fiona. She looked like she was trying not to cry. I didn’t blame her. I was pretty shaken myself after almost losing my two best friends. But we couldn’t turn back now.
“We’ve come this far,” I said, making it two against one.
Thunder rolled over us. Fiona looked at the sky, took a few shaky breaths, and said, “All right. Rodmore. It had better be worth it. Because I’m never coming in here again after this.”
Freak took his role as our guide seriously for the remainder of our trek. He found us a route where we only had to double back twice. After we had all calmed down, he asked me, “Are you aware your dad’s compass is broken?”
“It’s not. It was working fine before I left the house.”
I looked at it. Freak was right. I knew where north was, and the compass wasn’t pointing to it. The compass was pointing to Rodmore.
The first drops of light rain started to hit us as we stepped onto the concrete apron surrounding the chemical plant. Freak raced us around the perimeter fence until he got to a gap in it, then we all squeezed through. The chemical works spread out before us.
“It’s like a small city,” Fiona announced.
Freak ran down the alley between two warehouses.
“There are six main buildings,” he told us when we caught up with him at an intersection. “And eight storage tanks. The biggest building is three stories high. That’s the one I think we saw the doghat go into. That’s the door I want to try. It’s around this way.”
Five of the storage tanks were huge cylinders and three were giant spheres. They towered over most of the buildings, with stairways spiraling around the outside and catwalks about thirty feet up connecting them to one another.
I noticed we were leaving footprints. A thin layer of soot clung to everything. Most of it was undisturbed. We passed a wide stretch of concrete with a very large circle imprinted on it. It was clean, like a huge fan had blown the soot away.
“I can picture a big, black helicopter landing there,” said Freak. “Maybe bringing in supplies. Maybe dropping somebody off.”
“Whumpa-whumpa,” I agreed.
“Are you sure that isn’t the portal?” Fiona asked.
Freak paused. He bent down, picked up a piece of broken brick, and tossed it into the center of the circle. It bounced twice and stopped. Nothing else happened.
“Pretty sure,” he replied.
A few moments later, Fiona nudged me and pointed to a set of tracks belonging to shoes with tread unlike anything the three of us were wearing. We followed them to the largest building. They went up a set of concrete steps.
As we started up the steps, the rain, which had been making small dimples in the soot, suddenly started coming down more heavily. It started to erase our tracks and the tracks we were following. Before it did, though, we all saw the neat arc the door had made when it had been opened by the doghat. There on the landing in front of the door, the soot had been swept aside in a perfect quarter circle.
The quarter circle disappeared as the rain started coming down in sheets. I threw my arms over my head. Fiona held her backpack up like an umbrella. A lightning flash was followed almost immediately by one of the loudest thunderclaps I had ever heard.
The door was slightly ajar. Freak yanked on the door handle and it swung open easily when he pulled on it. From the look on his face, I could tell he hadn’t expected it to. The rain gusted at our backs. We piled in through the door and the wind slammed it shut behind us.