Frenzy

by Robert Liparulo

  forty - two

  SATURDAY, 11:57 A.M.

  Ed and Toria had looked in each antechamber until he found one whose items appeared somewhat safe—though he knew you couldn’t judge the worlds by the items that led to them. He remembered when David and Xander had looked for a “safe” world for David to check out the first time. They had thought the absence of weapons—unless you counted a machete— meant it would be less dangerous than Xander’s gladiator experience. But the boy had been stalked by three hungry tigers and attacked by warriors—he had come back with an arrownick in his shoulder.

  Still, Ed wasn’t about to teach Toria about looking through portals in a room full of guns, knives, grenades, or any other weapons. That would be too much like ignoring a Beware of Dog sign. Entering a yard without such a sign didn’t mean a nasty animal wasn’t waiting for them, but it improved the odds against it.

  So now they stood in an antechamber whose theme seemed to indicate that it opened onto a circus world: floppy shoes, which Ed wore; a red clown nose, hanging around his neck; a tube of white greasepaint, stuffed in his pocket.

  “Okay,” he told Toria, who stood on the bench beside the closed portal door. “First, you have to brace yourself like this.” He showed her the way Keal had instructed the boys to put their hands and feet. “The most important thing is to keep your eyes open for anyone on the other side who sees you. If you even think that maybe they do, slam the door fast. Understand?”

  “Slam the door fast,” she repeated. “But even if they can’t see us, we can see them, right? So we can look for Mom?”

  “Right,” he said. “You never know where the portal will be. It could be up high, looking down, or level with everything. Sometimes there’s nothing to see, just landscape. Usually it drifts around, so you can see the world from different angles. Sometimes it’s blurry, and other times clear as a TV show.”

  “Why is it always different?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought about it, about all the ways each portal was different. “Maybe it’s like the weather . . . a lot of things deciding how it’s going to be at any given time.”

  Toria nodded as though she understood, but he wasn’t sure she did. Heck, he wasn’t sure he did.

  “Step back a little,” he said as he turned the knob and pulled the door open. Daylight flooded in, the odor of car exhaust. Colors swirled, then came together into recognizable forms: a car parked at the curb of a busy city street. They were looking at its front bumper, as though from the gutter twenty feet in front of it. An expanse of sidewalk stretched from the car to a glass-fronted building with a revolving door. People walked past, heading away from Ed and Toria. Others walked toward them.

  “I can see them!” Toria said. Then, quieter: “But even if Mom’s in that world, we’re not going to see her—a whole city of people?”

  Ed nodded. “That’s what I thought when I did this as a kid, looking for your nana: like throwing a dart at a map and hitting the very place she was. But my father explained that there’s a connection between the portals and the time traveler. They’re sort of drawn to each other. I know that’s confusing . . .”

  “I get it,” she said. “It’s like the portal is looking for her, too, and knows more about where she is than we do.”

  “You got your mother’s smarts,” he said.

  A muffled sound came through the portal, like a baby crying: waaa-waaa-waaa-waaa, but too consistent to be human. A glass door beside the revolving door opened, and two clowns stumbled out onto the sidewalk. They wore white face paint and red rubber noses; one had a big painted-on frown and the other an equally ridiculous grin. Their suits were billowy fabrics whose colors and patterns hurt Toria’s eyes. They tumbled over each other and rolled across the sidewalk.

  She started to laugh, but then the clowns hopped up, raised their arms, and she saw pistols in their hands. They fired back into the building. The glass door shattered. Pedestrians scattered. A clown stumbled and fell again, losing a cloth bag, which opened, spilling dollar bills onto the sidewalk, into the wind. The car door opened, and the clowns jumped in. The car leaped forward, heading directly into the portal.

  Ed swung the door closed. As he did, two dollar bills fluttered in on a breeze that smelled like the burning rubber of tires. He spun and slammed his back against the door, expecting the car to come crashing through. When it didn’t, he let out a breath.

  Toria stared at him with eyes so big they looked like cue balls dotted with blue paint.

  “See?” he said. “You never know.”

  “They were robbing a bank!” she said. “Clowns!”

  “I never did like clowns.” He sat on the bench to catch his breath. “Too creepy.”

  She jumped down and pulled the big floppy shoes off his feet. She set them on the bench and sat beside him. “Hope Mom wasn’t anywhere near that,” she said.

  “Maybe she was one of the clowns,” Ed said.

  Toria gasped, and he grinned at her. She punched him in the arm and said, “That’s not very nice to say. Mom would never !”

  A wind blew in under the door, and the cue-ball eyes returned to her face.

  He pulled her close. “That’s normal,” he said. “Remember? Watch . . .” He pointed at the dollar bills on the floor. They flipped into the air, swirled around the room, and whipped away under the door with the wind.

  “Coooool,” Toria said. She sniffed. “Even that bad smell’s gone.”

  He pulled the rubber nose over his head, reached up behind him, and hung it from a hook. He was digging for the tube of greasepaint when she hopped up.

  She spun and bounced up and down. “Let’s do another one!”

  CHAPTER

  forty - three

  The first of the movie people reached them, a squat man with a flaming red face and bulging eyes. “What have you done?” he screamed. “My pyrotechnics! My jungle destruction! It’ll take days to set it up again! What have you done?” He stumbled into the jungle behind them, picking up branches and wires.

  Two men with fire extinguishers rushed past and began spraying foam at the many little fires burning within the path of destruction.

  A man holding a clipboard stomped up and grabbed David’s shoulder hard enough to almost knock him off his feet.

  Xander knocked the man’s hand away. “Hey!” Xander said. “Don’t touch!”

  The guy turned on Xander. “Who are you?” he growled. “Where’d you come from?” He spotted the hammer and snatched it out of Xander’s hand. “Are you with one of the set crew?” He spun around and held up the hammer. “Who do these kids belong to?” he yelled.

  Xander reached up and grabbed it back.

  “Gimme that!” the man said.

  Xander put it behind his back.

  The man jabbed a finger at Xander’s face. “I am going to find out who you belong to! And when I do, they’re not going to find a job wiping a go-fer’s nose.”

  David laughed.

  “You think that’s funny?” the man said. “Wait’ll I—”

  A woman in her twenties, dressed for a safari, came up behind him. She touched his shoulder. “It’s all right, Mark,” she said. “I’ll take care of this.”

  “All right? Do you have any idea—?”

  She turned him away from the boys and gave him a little push toward the cameras. “Go,” she said.

  He stormed off, casting evil glances back at the boys.

  David smiled at Xander. “Wipe a gopher’s nose?”

  “That’s a guy who gets things for people,” Xander said. “Go for this, go for that. Go-fer. He meant whoever we belong to won’t even get the worst job there is in the movie business.”

  “Good luck with that,” David said. He was so relieved not to be cut in half by crazed soldiers, he didn’t care how mad everyone was at them.

  The woman flashed them a smile and raised her eyebrows. She was pretty, David thought, and he liked that she was actually smiling.

  “Well,�
�� she said, “talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Lady,” Xander said, “you don’t know the half of it.”

  She held out her hand. “I’m Lizzie.”

  Xander shook her hand. “Xander. This is my brother, David.”

  She shook David’s hand. “How’d you get here?” she said. “Who brought you?”

  “No one,” David said.

  “I understand,” she said. “Come, let’s get you off the set.”

  She began walking toward the cameras. The boys followed. People everywhere scowled at them.

  “Great,” Xander said. “I finally get on a movie—a big-budget action set—and everyone hates me.”

  “Would you rather we were really in Vietnam?” David said. “Getting shot at?”

  “Maybe.” He tapped David’s arm and pointed at a man with headphones perched on his head and a camera lens hanging from a cord around his neck. He was talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger. “That’s John McTiernan,” Xander said. “Great director. He did Die Hard! And Last Action Hero! And The Hunt for Red October.”

  Lizzie smiled at him. “You must be thinking of someone else. John didn’t do any of those.”

  “Not yet,” Xander said.

  “I haven’t even heard of those movies,” she said.

  “Not yet.”

  They walked past the cameras, to the back of the clearing. Lizzie pointed to two director’s chairs. “David, Xander, why don’t you sit here while we figure out what to do with you?”

  David started to sit, then saw the name stenciled on the canvas chair-back. He said, “Uh . . . this is Mr. Schwarzenegger’s.”

  Lizzie leaned close and whispered, “Don’t worry. He never sits.”

  As soon as she left, Xander hopped up. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere but here. I don’t want people around us, maybe guarding us, when the pull starts. You want them to chase us into the portal?”

  “But,” David said, looking past his brother at the film crew, the cameras, the lights, the actors. “This is your thing. Don’t you want to look around?”

  “Like they’ll let me,” Xander said. “They won’t even—”

  A hand clamped over his shoulder, and Schwarzenegger stepped up next to him. He was grinning.

  “You guys causing trouble, ya?” he said.

  David gaped up at him. Phemus was muscular, but this guy was totally ripped. It was the difference between a boulder and a granite statue. His arms were bigger than David’s legs, and they seemed to ripple and flex on their own. Black and green camouflage grease was smudged over his cheeks and forehead, and his hair was cropped short, making the top of his head look as square as a castle. David remembered where he was sitting and started to hop off. Schwarzenegger stopped him with a finger to David’s chest—firm as a railroad spike.

  “Stay,” Schwarzenegger said. “I insist.” He hitched his head toward the glade. “I guess that was really, really scary.”

  “I almost had a heart attack,” David said.

  Schwarzenegger laughed. “You should have seen your faces.”

  David said, “Sorry about ruining your . . . thing.”

  The man leaned a scowling face toward David. “Don’t do it again,” he said and grinned.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The whole time, Xander had been looking up at Schwarzenegger as though at a shiny new Ferrari. The actor turned a worried eye on him. “You okay, boy?”

  Xander nodded. He snapped out of his daze and said, “Great director, Mr. McTiernan.”

  Schwarzenegger glanced back at the director. He was showing one of the other actors how to hold the Gatling gun. Schwarzenegger said, “Want to meet him?”

  “Uh . . .” Xander said. “As long as he doesn’t shoot me.”

  “He’s a pussycat. Come on.”

  Xander looked at David, a questioning look on his face.

  “Go on,” David said. He watched Da Terminator himself take his brother through the set. They stopped at the cameras, and Schwarzenegger pointed to things while Xander nodded. Xander shook hands with the cast and crew. Schwarzenegger wrapped an arm around Xander’s shoulders like they were old buddies, and David was happy for his brother.

  Xander suddenly ducked out from under the massive arm, turned, and fast-walked toward David.

  Schwarzenegger called to him: “Is it my deodorant?” The other actors laughed.

  “Gotta go,” Xander told David. “The hammer’s pulling. Hard.” He grabbed David’s hand, and together they darted into the forest. “That was so cool,” he said.

  With the hammer held out in front of him, his other hand clasped around David’s, Xander led them directly to a portal. It shimmered in front of a fat green-barked tree.

  David stopped, pulling Xander’s arm to keep him from going through. “Is it the right one?” he said. “To the antechamber?”

  “I’m just following the hammer, Dae. What choice do we have?”

  All the places they’ve been, all the places they could go flashed through David’s head. He braced himself for whatever they’d find on the other side and said, “Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER

  forty - four

  SATURDAY, 12:10 P.M.

  Toria stood in front of the portal. She was dressed in a dirty monk’s robe ten sizes too big for her. The sleeves bunched like accordions around her elbows; the heavy canvas material completely covered her legs and feet and pooled against the floor. A necklace of wood beads looped over her neck, and an ornate gold ring adorned her finger.

  Standing just behind Toria, Ed clutched the back of her collar and looked through the portal over her head. The image before them was of an ancient town: stone-block buildings and streets, people herding donkeys and oxen past vendors selling bread and fish, a group of boys kicking around a ball. The portal seemed to be hovering on a raised terrace. A railing crossed in front of them, with the street scene playing out below.

  “Always three things?” Toria said.

  “Three antechamber items unlocks the portal door,” Ed confirmed.

  “Any three?”

  “Yes, but you should choose ones you don’t have to hold,” he said. “That’ll keep your hands free to hold onto the door and the wall next to the opening.”

  She nodded.

  “Where do you think this is?” she said.

  “Could be anywhere,” he said. “A long time ago, probably. I don’t see anything modern.”

  “Looks like it’s going to rain.” In the distance, beyond the town and flat, brown hills, dark clouds rolled toward them.

  A loud bang came at them from behind, through the open hallway door.

  “That must be the boys,” Ed said, relieved to hear it. They’d been gone way too long. He pulled her back from the portal. “Shut the door and put the stuff back,” he said.

  “Aww,” she whined.

  He turned away and darted into the hall. “Toria, please!” He ran to the antechamber that led to Young Jesse’s world.

  CHAPTER

  forty - five

  SATURDAY, 12:11 P.M.

  David tumbled into Xander, catching glimpses of hooks, a bench, Dad standing in the hall doorway: they were home! Yes! The portal door slammed. He climbed off Xander and sat on the bench. He leaned his head against the wall and groaned.

  Xander crawled up his legs, flipped around, and sat beside him.

  “You okay?” Dad said. “What happened?” He checked his watch. “You’ve been gone almost an hour.”

  David looked at Xander. “Seemed longer,” he said.

  “You can’t stay in each world that long,” Dad said. “Don’t—” He stopped himself, turned his head, and yelled, “Toria?”

  “Yeah?” Her voice seemed far away.

  “Did you shut the door?” Dad called. “Like I told you to?”

  “Just a sec!”

  “Now! Come here where I can see you!” He turned back to the boys. “Don
’t tell me you went through the wrong portal again. Did you hit another world?”

  David nodded. “We met Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

  “On a movie set,” Xander said, with a toothy grin.

  “What about Jesse? Did you see him?”

  Xander’s smile ran away from his face. He began breathing fast.

  David’s eyes watered up. He had been trying to avoid thinking of Jesse’s prediction—or was it Xander’s prediction? That part was confusing. But they had to tell Dad, and that meant bringing it all up.

  Dad stepped in, closed the hall door, and leaned against it. “What is it?”

  Xander reached into his pocket and pulled out the scribbled note. He frowned at it as though it were a disgusting bug, then handed it to Dad.

  Dad studied it, checked the backside, and returned to the drawing.

  “That’s supposed to be a drawing of David,” Xander said. “Dead.”

  Dad shook the paper. “What is this? Who drew it?”

  “I did,” Xander said. “We saw Jesse’s dad, and he said I’d just been there an hour earlier. He said it must be that I go over to see them soon in the future, but when I do, I’ll arrive an hour before this time.”

  Dad nodded. David knew he understood the way the portals worked. He said, “And you told them what? That David was dead?”

  “I said Taksidian killed him,” Xander said. He was talking quietly, as though David’s death was his fault.

  Dad squinted at the paper. He pointed at it. “What’s the heart?”

  Xander offered David a weak smile. “I love my brother.” He stood. “Dad, it’s not going to happen. It won’t, I won’t let it.”

  Dad looked down at David, whose tears hadn’t spilled out yet; they just sat there on his lids as though waiting for a starting gun. He said, “When is this supposed to happen?”

  Xander shook his head. “Jesse’s dad said soon, but he didn’t know.”

  Dad knelt in front of David. He grabbed David’s thighs, crushing the paper under one palm, and stared sadly into his face.

  David blinked, and the tears rolled.

  “Do you believe it?” Dad said.