We stood inside the door and dripped. Freak shook himself like a dog, and spray went everywhere.
“Hey!” said Fiona, and she moved away from us, grabbing handfuls of her hair and wringing it out. The rain, at least, had washed some of the ash off of us.
“I’ve tried some of the doors every time I’ve been here,” said Freak. “That’s the first time any of them have opened.”
“The doghat didn’t close it properly,” I said. I tried the door. The handle wouldn’t budge.
“It’s locked now,” I reported.
Freak and Fiona both tried the door themselves.
“Are we trapped in here?” asked Fiona.
“We can always get out through one of the windows,” Freak said. He didn’t sound entirely confident.
We looked around. The room had two small windows with chicken wire embedded in them, so even if we managed to break the glass, we would still need wire cutters to get out. I had a feeling none of us had thought to bring wire cutters.
The room was small, with a couple of overturned metal chairs in the middle and a punch clock hanging on one wall, with an empty rack where Rodmore employees would have placed their time cards after they punched in. The punch clock said it was nine seventeen. I looked at my watch. It was three twenty-six.
“How long is the rain going to last?” Freak asked. He was looking at Fiona when he said it, and she pulled out her cell phone and massaged it a bit. She scowled.
“There’s no reception here,” she said.
“We can’t phone out?” I asked.
“No,” said Fiona.
Freak was already investigating the place. Two of the nearby walls had clothes pegs where Rodmore employees would have hung up coats and caps. Freak pointed to a peg near the punch clock, which appeared to have a coyote skin hanging from it.
The skin turned out to be a hat with an extended brim. Seen from the top, the hat resembled an aerial view of a large dog. Freak put the hat on. Seen from floor level, it made him look like he was wearing a small canoe.
“Coyote is still in the building,” said Fiona.
We thought about that. Being wet, maybe one or two of us shivered. Freak hung the hat back on its peg.
I looked at my dad’s compass. The needle was spinning wildly. I held the compass vertically, and after a moment the needle stopped spinning and pointed straight down.
“According to this, the north pole is in the basement!” I announced.
Science Girl scowled at the compass. “That’s just gravity,” she informed me. “Any compass needle points straight down if you hold it like that.”
“Maybe it’s the portal!” I said decisively, brushing her aside.
I eagerly crossed the room to its only other door. A tattered poster taped to the door’s center reminded us, SAFETY BEGINS WITH YOU! I yanked on the door’s handle. It refused to budge.
“There’s no keyhole,” I reported.
Freak and Fiona came up on either side of me.
“Which means,” said Freak, “Coyote had to have opened it with the keypad.”
A grimy keypad was mounted on the wall next to the door.
“Which means,” said Fiona, “we’re stuck in here.”
“This would not be a good place to spend the night,” I observed.
I punched random buttons on the keypad. The pad showed no signs of life. I punched in the letters for “Rodmore.” I punched in “Disin.” I punched in my birthday. Nothing.
“How long before anybody notices we’re missing?” asked Fiona.
“It’s the weekend,” said Freak. “My father could easily be unaware until Monday.”
He picked up one of the overturned chairs and slammed it as hard as he could against one of the windows. It bounced out of his grip and skidded across the room. The window didn’t crack.
“My aunt should be home around eight,” I said.
“My parents will be trying to call me before that,” said Fiona. “But they won’t get through.”
She glanced at her phone again and frowned. She looked lost without it.
“Did anybody think to bring snacks?” I asked.
“This wasn’t supposed to take more than an hour or two,” said Freak.
Fiona, who had been pacing back and forth, stopped in front of the door with the keypad. She put her hands on her hips and stared at the door thoughtfully.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said to the door’s poster. Then she said quietly to herself, “ ‘Speak, friend, and enter.’ ”
“What?” I asked, not sure if I had heard her correctly.
She shook her head, as if clearing it. “Nothing. Just something I read once.” She looked at me with an odd sort of light in her eye. “What does safety begin with?” she asked.
I looked at the poster. “You?”
“But it doesn’t, does it? It begins with S.”
She stepped up to the keypad. She tapped six of the keys. A faint buzzing came from the door and it popped open an inch. Fiona grabbed it by the handle and swung it all the way out. It opened on a descending stairwell.
“How did you do that?” Freak asked, too surprised to keep the admiration out of his voice.
“It’s right there on the poster,” said Fiona. “I spelled safety with a U. I punched in U, A, F, E, T, Y. That was the password. Pretty obvious, really.”
I looked down the stairwell. A single dim lightbulb burned on the far landing. I consulted my compass.
“The portal is down there,” I said. “I’m sure of it!”
“Coyote is down there, too,” said Fiona, with considerably less enthusiasm.
“Whatever’s down there, it’s the way we have to go if we’re going to get out of here,” said Freak, nudging me into taking the first step.
“Keep an eye out for a ladies’ room,” Fiona whispered as we started down.
“You should have gone before we left,” said Freak.
“I did. But I’ve been rained on and I’m cold. I have to go again.”
“Shhh!” I hissed.
We reached the landing. I pushed the release bar on the door there and peeked out. It was an empty corridor, with doors on either side, faintly illuminated by low-wattage overhead bulbs. Closing the door behind us as quietly as we could, we tiptoed down the corridor.
The doors were clearly labeled with nameplates: MAINTENANCE. CUSTODIAL. STORAGE 1. STORAGE 2.
“Are we looking for a door marked PORTAL?” Freak asked. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. I still wasn’t sure if he was as convinced of the portal’s existence as I was. He hadn’t had the advantage of falling asleep on the sofa. Or having my so-called overactive imagination.
“For all you know,” replied Fiona, “one of these doors is the portal.”
We tried each of the doors in turn. Most of them were locked. One of them, labeled J. ATHERTON, turned out to be an office. The furniture was covered in dust; the floor was fuzzy with cobwebs. The sofa could have grazed there for days.
The corridor ended with a door into another stairwell.
“Up,” said Fiona.
I looked at the compass. “Down,” I said. “Whatever it is, we’re still above it.”
“That’s because ‘it’ is the Earth’s core,” said Fiona, still hung up on her gravity thing.
I ignored her. “Here we are,” I said, “in the basement of a building surrounded by eight hundred acres of underground coal fire. And the temperature is what?”
“Chilly?” Fiona answered warily. I knew she couldn’t argue; she had goose bumps.
“Yeah. Chilly. It should be like an oven in here. Basements in some of the Sunnyside houses crumbled from the heat.” I gestured down the stairwell. “There’s a cold draft coming from down there.”
“You think the draft is coming from the portal?”
“The portal is supposed to be closed,” said Freak.
“We’re here to investigate,” I said. “The three of us nearly got killed getting here. We shouldn’t waste the trip. Let’s investigate.”
I hadn’t won an argument with either of them in a long time. But they both nodded begrudgingly and followed me down. The stairway zigzagged back and forth four times before Fiona announced, “One more flight! If we haven’t found anything by then, I’m going back. We’re getting way too deep.”
“If I were a portal, I would be deeper,” Freak said.
The final flight brought us to a door. It was propped open with a fire extinguisher, and the air flowing through it was frigid. This time it was Freak who leaned out for a first peek.
“Holy cow,” he said. He stepped out of our way. Fiona and I slipped by him.
We were on a balcony about thirty feet above the floor of a room big enough to hold a small ocean liner. It was a huge cavern of a room, much longer than it was wide, and the balcony ran all the way along one side of it. The balcony was about ten feet across. Lights suspended from the ceiling bathed the place in a harsh blue light. We went to the balcony’s railing and looked down.
The floor was the size of a football field. Stretched across the end of the room to our left, from floor to ceiling and from side to side, was what appeared to be an enormous spiderweb made of braided metal cable. To our left, at the remote end of the room, the far wall glistened as though it were covered with diamonds.
“Are we in, like, some sort of storage tank?” wondered Freak.
“For a storage tank, there are a lot of doors here,” I said, pointing to a series of doors that ran the length of the balcony to our right. The one that was closest to us bore the nameplate CARBOYS.
“We’re very exposed here,” said Fiona, hugging herself. “It’s way too easy to see us.”
“Said the girl in the bright yellow jacket,” Freak muttered.
I crossed over to the railing, stepped up on the lower rail, and leaned out. I wanted to see what was under the balcony. I discovered the area was largely empty, except for two unoccupied golf carts.
Suddenly the upper rail that was holding my weight gave way. It detached at one end and swung out over the drop. I went with it, gripping it fiercely with both hands. It was like swinging on a gate thirty feet in the air.
As I felt my feet leave the bottom rail, I also felt hands grabbing the back of my shirt. Freak had hold of me. He swung me back to the balcony.
Even when my feet were safely back on the floor, I had a hard time convincing my hands to let go of the upper rail. Fiona gently massaged my fingers until I opened my grip. She averted her eyes from the thirty-foot drop next to her. “Calm down,” she said soothingly. “It’s okay.”
“Th-thanks, g-guys,” I was finally able to sputter.
“Now we’re even,” said Freak, sounding pleased. He adjusted the loose end of the railing so it didn’t look broken.
I recovered enough to remember our mission and consulted my compass. It no longer spun crazily when I held it horizontally. It pointed in one clear direction.
“That way!” I said, and raced off down the balcony toward the glistening wall. It took my friends a few seconds to catch up. I wasn’t accustomed to leading the way.
A humming noise that had been barely noticeable got louder the farther along we went. On our right, we passed doors labeled TANKS, SPOOLS, and BINS. Then we passed one labeled MEN.
“Finally!” Fiona sighed. “The next door should be—”
She ran ahead to the next door and stopped in front of it, staring. When Freak and I caught up with her, we read the door’s nameplate: HAZMAT SAFETY.
“This should be the ladies’ room,” Fiona said indignantly.
This door didn’t have a knob. Fiona examined the wall and pushed a button she found near the door frame, and the door slid open. It was dark inside, but she found the light switch, and when the lights sprang on, she screamed. All three of us did.
A dozen men were lined up against the far wall, facing us.
They were wearing bright red rubber suits and space helmets. Their heads all hung down like they were being scolded for bringing home a bad report card. It took us a moment to realize the suits were empty and we weren’t facing a row of men after all. The suits were hanging off a row of pegs. Each suit had the hazmat—hazardous materials—symbol on its chest.
A conference table stood in the center of the room, surrounded by a half dozen folding chairs. High up on the wall hung a sixty-inch TV screen. As far as I could see, there were no toilet stalls.
“Right!” snarled Fiona. She killed the lights and pushed us out on the balcony. Then she headed back the way we had come.
“I’m using the men’s room,” she announced as we caught up with her. “You guys are going to stand guard.” She pushed Freak to one side of the men’s room door and me to the other. She opened the door and went in.
“What, exactly, are we guarding?” Freak asked me.
“If you try to go in there, I’ll stop you,” I explained. “If I try to go in there, you stop me.”
“What if Coyote is in there already?”
We looked at each other.
“Nah,” said Freak, dismissing the idea. “Coyote would have just lifted his leg against one of the walls.”
The door swung open and Fiona came out.
“That was fast,” said Freak.
“Do guys,” said Fiona, “go to the bathroom in some weird way I may not know about?”
Freak looked at me. I looked at Freak. Neither one of us wanted to answer the question.
“Possibly,” said Freak.
“I don’t mean urinals,” Fiona said, rolling her eyes. “I understand urinals. My aunt has one she uses as a planter. What I mean is, there’s nothing you guys do that requires lying down inside of a six-foot pipe, right?”
Freak and I pushed open the door labeled MEN. We found ourselves in a narrow room. On either side of a central aisle, two long metal cylinders were nestled horizontally in plumbing that connected them to the wall. They were a little like sewer pipes, and a little like coffins. At the foot of each cylinder was a dimly glowing glass lozenge about the size and shape of Fiona’s cell phone.
“You don’t think there might be… men in them?” Fiona wondered.
“Because it says MEN on the door?” Freak didn’t sound as sarcastic as he might have.
“Because the people of Indorsia are more advanced in the sciences than we are, and these are just the right size to have human beings inside,” I said, trying to encourage Fiona.
“You mean, like, frozen?”
“Or in suspended animation.”
Freak shook his head and walked over to the nearest cylinder. It was windowless, with no way to see inside. He thumped it with his fist and it sounded hollow. As soon as he thumped it, the glass lozenge on the end flickered briefly. I thought I saw numbers appear on it, but they came and went so quickly it was difficult to tell.
“I don’t think there’s anything in these. I think the name on the door is somebody’s idea of a joke,” said Freak, although he sounded far from positive.
“They’re probably tanks for some sort of chemical storage,” Fiona decided. She twitched uncomfortably. “This is not the room I wanted. This cold air is not helping.”
We returned to the balcony. I looked at my compass, pivoted on my heel, and resumed walking toward the glistening wall. Once again, I arrived there a few moments before my friends.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “It’s frost.”
The entire huge wall was covered with ice crystals. And it wasn’t a thin coating. It was thick, like a refrigerator freezer when the defrost isn’t working. I leaned in close and studied it.
“I triple-dog-dare you to put your tongue on it,” said Freak.
“Don’t even joke,” I said. “This makes no sense. The other side of this wall has to be Hellsboro. Hot, stinking Hellsboro. This wall should be sizzling.”
We looked over the balcony. Thirty feet below us, on the cavern’s floor, a line of boxlike machines stretched across the wall’s base. I counted ten of them, each about the size and shape of a washing machine and each giving off a loud hum. Red lights along their tops got brighter and dimmer as the humming got louder and softer. I held my compass out over the closest one. The needle spun like an airplane propeller.
“I think,” said Fiona, very deliberately, “we’ve found the portal.”
“It’s a little big to take a picture of,” I said, pulling my cheap cardboard camera out of my pocket. I looked through the viewfinder. All I could see was ice.
“I don’t suppose that thing has a wide-angle lens,” said Freak.
“I don’t even think it has a flash.” I peered at the camera. “But it does have three pictures left.”
“Great,” said Freak, without much enthusiasm. “How about taking a picture of the washing machines down there on the floor?”
“Good,” said Fiona. “Then we can prove to the authorities we found a Laundromat. That’ll bring ’em running.”
I cautiously leaned over the rail, taking care not to touch it, and snapped a picture. I was right. The camera had no flash.
“Two to go,” I said.
“We should be farther back,” said Freak. “We need a picture to show how big this thing is.”
Retracing our steps, we walked back along the balcony until we were opposite the door marked HAZMAT SAFETY.
“Let’s try one here,” said Freak. “Any farther away and all it will look like is a shiny wall.”
I didn’t think the picture would come out, and, even if it did, I didn’t see how it would prove anything. I took it anyway.
“There’s one left,” I said. “How about a picture of you and Fiona standing at the rail and pointing?”
“This isn’t our trip to the Grand Canyon,” said Freak.
“If there are people in the shot, it will show how big the wall is,” I explained.
Freak and Fiona posed. Fiona fluffed her hair out. Freak frowned.
As I snapped the shot, I heard voices behind me. We froze and listened.
The voices came from the far end of the balcony, where the only stairway out of the place was located. As we watched, a figure emerged from the doorway to the stairwell. It was a man dressed in camouflage fatigues. He came out of the door backward, talking to someone following him. He didn’t see us.
We dived for the HAZMAT SAFETY door and scrambled inside.
The voices got louder as they approached. It sounded like more than one conversation, implying at least four people were in the group. Suddenly one voice rang out louder than the rest. “I’m going back to see what’s keeping Jackal. You go on ahead. We’re meeting in Hazmats. Fourth door down.”
They were coming to the room we were in.
The room had only one door.
We were trapped.