“Can’t . . .” Xander gasped. “Can’t . . . feel . . . my . . . legs . . . arms.”
“The poison is paralyzing your muscles,” Keal explained. “It’s not permanent, Xander. Don’t worry. When the poison wears off or gets neutralized by an antidote, everything will return to normal. We just have to keep you breathing in the meantime.”
Xander gasped, gasped . . . helped by Keal’s pushing. It was the worst thing David had ever seen. He moaned, dropped his head, and began sobbing.
“David!” Keal said. “Not now! Get ahold of yourself. Now! Xander needs you.”
David’s crying hitched to a jerky stop like an eighteen-wheeler slamming on its brakes. He pushed the tears away, saying, “What do I do?”
“See what I’m doing?” Keal said. “Down, up. Time it with your own breathing. Relax when you inhale, push when you exhale.”
“I can do that.”
“But not too hard. You’ll get a feel for it when—”
Wind blew in from under the door. It swirled around them. The dart Keal had tossed aside zipped along the floor and through the gap. David spotted another dart sticking in the wall beside the hallway door—the one he had seen flash past his face. It vibrated, popped out of the wall, spun in the wind, and disappeared under the door.
He felt his pant leg flapping around. He watched the cannibal’s spit come off his jeans, form into tiny beads in the air, and fly away.
Xander pulled in a breath, deep and full, like a man breaking the surface after too long underwater. He exhaled, sucked in more air.
Keal’s hands were off his chest. They trembled as the big man watched Xander breathing on his own.
“What’s happening?” David said.
“Look,” Keal said.
The wind stopped.
Xander blinked and looked from Keal to David. He was breathing normally. He sat up and placed a palm over his chest. He inhaled deeply and let it out, almost as though he were making sure he could.
He smiled. “I feel great,” he said. “I’m fine.” He hopped up and held his arms out in a look-at-me posture.
They did, and David laughed. “The wind . . . Time . . .” David said. “It took the poison back to where it belongs, like it does everything else. It pulled it right out of your body!”
“I . . . I don’t believe it,” Keal stammered. “I mean, I do. I saw it with my own eyes. And of course, I know you’re right, David. It’s what Time does, takes back what doesn’t belong here.” He stopped, seeming to realize he was rambling. Then he added what David felt: “Ha!”
“Well,” Xander said, sitting on the bench. “That was a little scary.”
“A little?” David said.
“You’re really fine?” Keal said. “No aftereffects? No achiness, shortness of breath?”
“Achiness, yeah,” Xander said. “But nothing I didn’t feel before getting shot with a poison dart.” He said it the way he might have said, The man jumped over the building: it was the most amazing thing, and no one would ever believe him. He rubbed his chest where the dart had struck him. “This hurts a little,” he said. “But I’m not complaining.”
Keal shook his head. “What just happened is impossible in the medical world—to get every atom of poison out of your blood and muscles.”
“Nothing’s impossible here,” David said.
“There you go,” Keal said. “You remember that about rescuing your mom.”
“I never thought that was impossible,” David said.
“Hey,” Xander said, staring down at David’s leg. “What happened?”
“That cannibal guy!” David said. “He tried to eat my leg like corn on the cob!”
“Ow. You all right?”
“Hurts,” David said. “I was starting to feel sorry for myself. You know, like, when am I not going to get hurt? Then I remembered you getting that dart in your chest and falling over. I forgot all about this little thing.” He shrugged and waved a hand over his bloody pants. But it did throb. He wished Time could take away wounds the way it had the poison. Guess that was asking too much.
CHAPTER
thirty
FRIDAY, 5:26 P.M.
The wind returned. It blew in under the door in a single gust and went out again, as though Time had sighed. Three objects clattered to the floor. David leaned over and picked one up. “A piece of metal. Almost flat.” He handed it to Keal.
Keal smiled. “A slug . . . one of the bullets I fired at those . . . guys.”
“Cannibals,” David said, like spitting out something disgusting.
Keal nodded. “Well, these bullets don’t belong there anymore than the poison belonged here.” He reached behind him and produced the pistol.
David recognized it as a semiautomatic, an army gun. He used to have a miniature one like it for his G.I. Joes. “Where’d you get that?” he said.
“One of the antechambers,” Keal said. “I was looking through a portal at a modern battle—Korean War, I think— when you yelled.”
“Keep it,” Xander said.
“Wish I could. Soon enough, the antechamber’s going to want it back. Those slugs, too, I bet. I’ll put them back before they hurt someone trying to get there.”
“Did you . . .” David gazed at the portal door. “Did you kill them?”
Keal grinned and shook his head. “David, you’re the only person I know who wouldn’t want to kill the people trying to kill him.”
“Did you?”
“Not unless I scared them to death,” Keal said. “I shot them in their arms. No sense killing if you don’t have to.” He made his facial muscles hard. “But if that hadn’t worked, I would have.”
David nodded.
“And for the record,” Keal said, checking his watch, “time’s up.”
“But,” Xander said, “just for today, right? We have to do this, look through the portals . . . for Mom.”
“You’re kidding,” Keal said.
“Keal, we have to.” Xander stood. “The only reason we’re still in the house is Mom. We’re here to look for her, to rescue her.” He thrust a hand at the portal door. “This is how it’s done. Look through or go over. If we can find her looking through, I’d rather do that. But at least that.”
Keal dropped his head. He appeared to be examining the gun. He looked up at Xander. “I know you’re right. I just don’t like it.” He turned to David. “What happened, son? Can we learn from this? Something we should be doing differently?”
David frowned. “I should have been paying better attention,” he said. “I turned away to say Nothing, then . . . bang! That guy was all over me.”
“Okay,” Keal said, standing. “I’ll talk to your father. Maybe we can come up with a way of making it safer.” He held out his hand to help David up.
When David put his weight on the leg, it felt like the guy was still biting it, and he almost fell.
Keal grabbed him. “That bad?”
“I guess so,” David said. He balanced on his good leg and gently tested the other one. The pain was less severe now that he was expecting it. “I can walk,” he said, and made it to the hall door on his own.
“A broken arm and a bad leg,” Xander said. “You’re running out of appendages.”
“Tell me about it.” He opened the door and limped into the third-floor hallway. The others followed.
“Hold on,” Keal said. “I gotta put this gun and these slugs in the antechamber.” He walked toward the back of the hallway.
“Then what?” David said.
Keal went into the room and returned. “Then I patch up your leg, and the two of you are going to bed.”
“Finally,” David said. He looked at Xander, expecting a fight.
His brother said, “I’m ready.”
“What about you?” David asked Keal.
“We don’t need the Sleep Police today,” Xander said, reminding them of when Keal sat in the hallway outside their bedroom to make sure they slept.
“I w
as going to work on those walls at the bottom of the stairs,” Keal said, “but if you’re going to be sleeping, I can find something else to do.”
“Work on the wall,” David said. “I could sleep through World War III.”
“Me too,” Xander said. “Maybe that poison did have an aftereffect. Or being crazy-scared you’re going to die is exhausting. Whatever it is, I’m beat.”
At the landing, David looked back at the crooked corridor. It may have looked like an old-fashioned hotel—ten doors on each side, a carpeted runner covering the hardwood floor, wainscoting and wallpaper and wall lights—but it was as far as anything could get from the normal world of hotels. These doors opened into all of history, every tragic event and atrocity this poor world has ever seen. He’d lost blood and tears up here, and something a million times more important . . .
“Wish we’d found Mom,” he said.
Xander put his arm around David’s shoulders. “Me too, Dae,” he said. “Tomorrow’s another day.”
CHAPTER
thirty - one
FRIDAY, 5:59 P.M.
“Keal stitched you up?” Xander said. “You mean, literally? Needle and thread through your skin?”
“Three stitches,” David confirmed. They were lying on their beds, both of them staring at the ceiling, waiting for their minds to realize it was time to shut down. Xander had untied the sheers to let them fall over the windows again, but the room was still bright. But the light wouldn’t keep David from sleeping. He felt like a Pony Express horse that’d just run back-to-back shifts.
Xander had gone to bed ahead of him, while Keal tended to David’s gnawed-on leg.
“Let me see,” Xander said, flipping his covers aside.
“I’m tired,” David said. “Go to sleep.”
Xander stood and pushed the covers away from David’s leg. “Oh, man,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “That guy really bit you.”
“What’d you think, that he licked me? I told you, corn on the cob.”
Xander touch a stitch. David sucked in a breath and pulled his leg away.
“Sorry,” Xander said. “How many teeth marks is that?”
“Eleven,” David said. “Keal said only three were bad enough to need a stitch.”
“And he did it himself ?”
“Who else?” He could tell his exhaustion was making him grumpy. “Dad said a long time ago, parents would stitch up their kids all the time. Besides, Keal’s a nurse.”
“Still,” Xander said. He flipped the cover back over David’s leg and returned to his own bed. “Does it hurt?”
“It throbs,” David said.
“You really think they were cannibals?” Xander said.
“I don’t want to think about it.” He already had, and imagining what would have happened to them if the cannibals had pulled him and Xander into their world had turned his stomach.
Xander was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “No school tomorrow.”
David laughed. “I finally get how you feel about having to go. Finding Mom is a full-time job.”
“Tell Dad.”
“Yeah, right,” David said. His tongue was feeling thick, his brain sluggish. He rolled onto his stomach and nestled his face into the pillow.
“I mean it,” Xander said. “If we whine enough . . .”
That’s all David heard. He startled awake to find himself no longer in bed. Instead he was lying on a long silver platter, surrounded by potatoes, carrots, and tiny tomatoes. The platter was at the center of a big table, around which sat cannibals. They were dressed in tuxedos and top hats, with plastic bibs tied around their necks—the kind seafood restaurants used, but instead of a picture of a lobster on them, there was a picture of David. The bottom half of their faces were painted red, and their tongues made sick, sloppy noises as they slid over their lips. Each held a fork and knife. One leaned toward him and jabbed a fork into David’s leg.
That’s when he startled awake for real. Sunshine still filled the room. His leg hurt, and Xander was snoring. He groaned, stuck his head under the pillow, and went back to sleep.
CHAPTER
thirty - two
FRIDAY, 6:50 P.M.
Keal examined the two walls at the base of the third-floor stairs. He walked between them and eyed the reinforcing joists he’d mounted to the ceiling, running from one wall to the other. He slammed his shoulder into each wall. They didn’t so much as creak.
He nodded with satisfaction.
He still had to install the doors. They would be the weak points, so he intended to spend extra time on them and use industrial hardware to make sure they were as sturdy as the walls. But he wouldn’t do it today, not with the boys finally getting some sleep. Didn’t matter what they said. No one could sleep through pounding and drilling, especially in a house where every noise could mean approaching danger.
He walked to the doorway of the MCC and looked in. A history timeline ran the length of two walls, near the ceiling. He saw a few points the Kings could tag as places—times— they’d been: World War II about 1943; on the Titanic in 1912; the Civil War in 1862; the Roman Colosseum, circa 80; Hannibal’s march over the Alps in 218 BC. He had no idea when some of their other adventures had taken place—Atlantis, the torture chamber, David’s jungle jaunt, for example.
The walls were covered with white boards and corkboards and maps and movie posters—tough-guy posters like Gladiator, 300, and Commando. Keal liked it, all of it. This family of schoolkids and a principal had done an admirable job of getting ready for war. Getting ready? They’d gone to war . . . and survived.
He moved down the hall and into the second floor’s main corridor. He stopped at the railing that overlooked the first-floor foyer and front door. The window next to the door was shattered. In any other house, it might have been a baseball that had crashed through it. Not in this house. No, it had been a dagger—one that seemed to have a mind of its own.
He continued down the hall. The back of a wooden chair was wedged under the linen closet’s door handle, where it belonged. Until I can put a dead bolt on the door, he thought. So much to do.
He reached the boys’ room and eased the door open. Someone was snoring. He entered and walked between the two beds. Xander, he was the snorer. The boy’s mouth was wide open. His hair splayed out against the pillow like brown fire.
He turned to David, who was facedown, pillow over his head. Keal’s heart ached for the child’s injuries. Too much pain. It was bad enough that he’d lost his mother. To couple that grief with physical agony just seemed like . . . Keal didn’t know what. Torture? Cruelty?
Keal believed everything happened for a purpose. He wondered what God had in mind for these young men. What kind of men was he forging in the fire of this house? In only a few days, Keal had already seen Xander become more compassionate, more outwardly loving and protective of his family, especially his brother.
And David—this kid had changed big-time. He was braver, more decisive. The boy had told him about the way his classmates had teased him about his name: David King . . . King David. Dae hadn’t liked it, but Keal wasn’t so sure the comparison was all that far off. If this house wasn’t David’s Goliath, then maybe Keal didn’t understand the biblical story. The first King David had become a great man, and Keal had good feelings about this one.
He shook his head. He remembered yesterday pondering how and why he had come to care so much for this family. He’d chalked it up to shared experiences and that their goodness was obvious, but he thought it might go beyond that. He didn’t usually think this way, but being here felt like destiny. He was meant to be here. And the character of each of the Kings was what kept him here. If they weren’t who they were, what they were, he wouldn’t have stayed past that first night, when Jesse had brought him here. No way. Life was too short to spend it with bad people.
He managed to make it back to the door without waking the boys up. No easy task considering the obstacle course they had made in thei
r room: boxes everywhere and a pile of stuff— trophies and knickknacks—in the middle of the floor.
He gently closed the door, and something banged overhead—upstairs, on the third floor.
Already?
He considered opening the boys’ door again, rousting them and getting everybody out of the house. No, not until he knew what they were facing. Xander and David needed rest, and this house made all sorts of noises that didn’t mean anything, like a giant mumbling in its sleep.
He strode to the end of the hallway and turned toward the false walls and the stairs to the third floor. As he passed the stepladder, he grabbed his hammer. He stopped, went to a box of tools and pulled out a big screwdriver. He shoved it into his back pocket. At the base of the stairs he heard another bang. He waited to see if someone appeared on the top landing. When no one did, he went up slowly, silently.
At the top step, he leaned and looked down the hallway. No one. He stepped up to the landing and stood in the entryway between it and the hall. There were no windows up here, so without the lights, it would be dark. Even with the lights, the far end of the hall was cloaked in shadows. That’s how he could see the light coming from one of the last antechambers. It wasn’t filling the hall—the door wasn’t open—but sliding out from under the door. Something stirred shadows through the light, so it appeared to swirl and dance on the floor.
He wasn’t about to march down there and open the door. Who knew what monstrosities he’d encounter? And too close for a smooth getaway. No, he could wait. This way, when he—or they—came out of the antechamber, he’d have some time to assess the danger, to figure out whether to fight or run.
But why would someone come through a portal and hang out in the antechamber? He wondered if that’s the way Phemus met with Taksidian for instructions. Phemus would come over and wait for Taksidian to show up. If so, then maybe Taksidian was coming too.
Keal backed into the corner of the landing, a place where he could see the hallway and the stairs leading to it. He tapped the hammer against his leg and willed his heart to slow.
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