by Rix, Dan
“So are you.” He grinned into my hair, his breath hot and tired. “I was trying . . . to shake you . . . I couldn’t.”
I punched him weakly. “Meanie.”
I was pretty sure, when the Glipper had me, I’d been about to tell him I loved him. Whoops.
Leaning past him to peer over the cliff, I saw we had a panoramic view of the river valley, but from an angle I’d never seen it. Way in the distance twinkled the faint lights of downtown Big Pine, and draped across the vast, moonlit flats in between, a shade darker than the lakebed, was the accelerator ring.
It was insane to think we’d traveled this far—almost twenty miles—and yet there it was, just a stone’s throw away, just like across the valley.
Malcolm’s phone changed to 10:46 p.m.
“One minute,” he announced, grinning. “Ain’t nothing going to stop us now—but let’s get behind a tree, we don’t want to get roasted by the flash.”
Just then a wave of static electricity swept over me. Our flashlight bulbs sputtered and winked out.
I whipped around to find the weak moonlight casting the Glipper’s shadow on a pine tree at the edge of the clearing.
“Uh . . . Malcolm . . .” I tugged on his sleeve, fear thick in my throat.
“Stay behind me . . .” Malcolm angled himself so he was shielding me, “. . . move toward the trees . . . slowly.” Eyes locked on the Glipper, he eased his finger around the pull string of his flare while nudging me into the cover of the forest.
The Glipper continued to watch us.
I whacked the plastic case of my spotlight, and the beam came back on, sputtering weakly. I aimed it back at the Glipper, whose shadow seemed to come apart and reform around the light, undeterred.
Not bright enough.
Malcolm ignited the flare and held it in front of him, and the clearing blazed like day.
The Glipper vanished and reappeared on a farther trunk, its shadow rippling in the light, as if about to boil away. We had three flares left. We could hold it at bay for three minutes. Three minutes was enough.
I peeked at Malcolm’s phone.
The clock changed to 10:47 p.m., and my stomach gave a nervous quiver.
But nothing happened.
The flare began to dim in Malcolm’s hands.
Why was nothing happening?
As the light died, the Glipper’s form grew stronger, blacker . . . blacker than any shadow . . . and for a moment, it didn’t even look like a shadow—it looked like a man-shaped hole in the fabric of space.
The forest’s shadows crept in.
The flare fizzled out. The Glipper rushed forward, hopping from trunk to trunk, closing in with frightening speed. I gasped, too startled to react. Malcolm cast the spent flare aside and reached back for mine, lighting it and lunging forward in one fluid movement.
“BACK!” he roared.
The Glipper reeled back and slithered away to cower in the shadows beyond the clearing.
After this one, we only had one flare left.
“Malcolm, it’s . . . it’s already 10:47,” I said, alarm creeping into my voice.
But even as I said it, the air around me chilled and my breath misted in front of me, followed by a deep sense of unease . . . like the eerie calm before a storm.
“Feel that? Close your eyes.”
“What?”
“Close your eyes! Get down!”
I followed Malcolm’s lead and dropped to the ground behind a tree. He wrapped his arm around me and held the burning flare above us like a protective shield, and not a moment too soon.
Even shut, my eyelids turned a blinding white. Heat blasted my skin.
When I opened my eyes again, the Glipper was gone.
The forest smelled like singed ash.
Malcolm jumped to his feet and ran into the clearing. “That was it! That was the flash. The wormhole should be open.” He spun around, jerking his flashlight left and right. “Now we just have to find it.”
Yippee!
But how do you find an invisible doorway when the universe on the other side looks exactly the same?
“Stand across from me,” he said. “I’ll circle you. Wherever you see my body vanish, that’s where it is.”
So I stood in the middle of the clearing and watched him move around the edge.
Only he never vanished.
Because the wormhole wasn’t in the clearing.
“Malcolm, something’s wrong,” I said.
“No, we just have to find it. Here, you try it—let’s try a different angle.”
“I don’t think we’re in the right spot.”
I stepped up to the cliff.
Way down at the bottom, a creek flowed toward the base, sparkling in the moonlight.
“But these are the GPS coordinates.” He checked his phone again, squeezing his jaw. “It’s supposed to be here . . . it’s supposed to be right here.”
“Unless we were wrong. Unless Mabel was wrong. Unless we were all wrong.”
I leaned out farther.
Huh? The creek was flowing toward the cliff? That didn’t make sense.
Then where did it go?
“Unless the GPS is wrong,” he muttered.
I looked back. “What is GPS again? It’s latitude and longitude, right?”
“Yeah, coordinates. Mabel gave us coordinates, we went to those coordinates. It should be here.”
“And you’re sure there’s only one point that matches those coordinates . . . ?” I trailed off, my eyebrows pinching together.
Timeout.
Hadn’t we had this conversation before?
Yeah, when we were using GPS to track down Vincent’s phone . . . and we’d figured out there could be two points with the same coordinates.
I peered over the cliff again, clicked on my spotlight. The beam reflected off the creek’s gurgling surface.
I followed it toward the cliff, leaning out as far as I could.
And then I had my answer.
“Malcolm,” I murmured, scarcely believing my eyes, “Malcolm, there’s a cave at the bottom of the cliffs . . . there’s a cave directly below us.”
At the bottom of the cliffs, sure enough, we found the creek draining right into a huge cave entrance, whose trickling, echoing blackness radiated static electricity.
The wormhole had formed underground.
We had been at the right coordinates, only at the wrong altitude.
I slapped my forehead, realizing something else.
“Duh, it’s supposed to be in the same plane as the accelerator ring, that’s what Mabel said . . . we were like a hundred feet too high.”
“Glad one of us paid attention.”
Though Malcolm had kept the sixth, and final, flare ready during our climb down, the Glipper hadn’t shown itself since the flash.
If there was anything more terrifying than the Glipper you could see, it was the Glipper you couldn’t.
Had it left us alone?
Or was this a trap? Would it follow us into the cave and corner us like rats?
I threw an uneasy glance at the woods behind me, before facing forward again. It didn’t matter. Once we went in there, we weren’t coming back out.
Not in this universe, at least.
The beam of Malcolm’s spotlight vanished into the misty gloom. “Jesus, how deep is this thing?”
“You know how this all used to be a lake,” I said, “and it supposedly drained through an underground cave like a million years ago? I bet this is that cave.”
“You’re on fire, tonight, Remi.”
I blushed at his praise.
“Well, let’s do it.” He leapt over the creek onto a ledge of glistening limestone, which had grown along the banks, and his silhouette shrank into the darkness.
I executed the same jump, then scooted after his bobbing flashlight, hugging the wet rock walls for balance.
Inside the opening, the cave expanded into a cathedral-like space, the floor and ceiling overg
rown with bulbous stalagmites and stalactites, some of which had joined into hideous Gothic-like pillars. Their shadows stretched along the walls as we passed . . . like a hundred Glippers, stalking us, closing in, creeping up behind us—
I spun around, the flashlight jerking in my hands. My raspy breath echoed into the silence.
But none of the shadows was the shadow.
We ventured deeper into the cave, passing strange, sulfur-yellow mineral formations.
Malcolm consulted his phone. “Okay, it should be here . . . assuming it’s not buried under fifty feet of bedrock.”
Together, we swept our lights around the chamber, spreading out to search.
Please be here . . . please be here . . .
“There! There it is!” Laughing in disbelief, I pointed toward the ceiling, where a fuzzy circular shadow had formed in his beam . . . a shadow cast by something invisible.
Because part of the beam was disappearing through the wormhole.
Moving side to side, I could just make out a gentle shimmer in the air . . . the doorway itself, ten feet off the ground.
Luckily, it hovered between two knobby stalagmites, which looked easy enough to climb.
He frowned. “I don’t see it.”
“Because you’re where the light is.” From where he was standing, he was seeing that light hit the ceiling in the other universe . . . he was looking through the wormhole. “Come over to where I am.”
He stood next to me and scrunched up his eyes. “I kind of see it . . .”
“Well, now we’re both at the wrong angle.” I laughed and grabbed his hands, jumping up and down. “Malcolm, we found it!”
He gripped my shoulders. “Celebrate when we’re on the other side, alright? You go first.”
Malcolm set down the backpack to give me a boost.
Pushing off his palms, I found a toehold, wrapped my arms around the slimy stalagmite, and began shimmying up like a koala bear, ignoring the nasty scrapes I got on my inner arms and thighs.
I just wanted to get home.
At the top, while Malcolm held the light for me, I braced my foot against the opposite stalagmite and stretched toward the space where I’d seen the wormhole.
Couldn’t tell where it was anymore.
No wonder Vincent had run right through one without realizing it.
“From where I’m standing,” Malcolm called, “it looks like your arm’s vanishing.”
I looked down to see him grinning at me.
I’d never seen him look so happy.
“Go all the way through,” he said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
I grinned back, and was about to leap through the wormhole when I saw the Glipper drop into the shadows behind him, and its long arm shoot out along the floor toward his feet.
No, no, NO—
“Behind you!” I screamed.
Malcolm jerked around, his hand already on the flare.
But too late.
It all happened in terrifying slow motion. The Glipper yanked him off his feet, and I heard the thump of his body, the crunch of limestone, his frantic breath and the scrape of his nails as he was dragged to the cave wall, as his legs began to vanish into solid rock. He lost his grip on the flare, and it fell . . . fell through his outstretched fingers, landing just out of reach. It rolled away and plopped into a pool of milky water.
He never even got the cap off.
Yelling and cursing, Malcolm twisted around, drew his gun, fired.
Shards of rock chipped off and whizzed into the darkness, but the Glipper wasn’t made of rock.
Only shadow.
Only emptiness.
Suddenly, he was yanked in up to his hips, leaving only the upper half of his torso.
I jumped.
In midair, my heart came to a sickening halt in my throat. The dank cave air whistled past my ears.
I crashed onto the floor, and all at once, the world sped up again.
I scrambled to his side, grabbed his arms and heaved, my heels scraping for purchase on the slick limestone.
“Remi, no, what are you—run!” he yelled, realizing I was still in the room. “Get through the wormhole!”
I shook my head, tears streaming down my cheeks, then tried a different angle, another grip, planted my feet against the wall and tugged his body with all my might, but he was still slipping, still sliding into the wall.
“Remi, you have to go.”
“No,” I screamed, “I won’t leave you!”
“You have to go,” he said, touching my cheek. “You have to go, Remi . . . GO!”
Those were the last words he said to me.
His eyes bulged, and he was wrenched out of my hands and dragged across the floor, and sucked into the cold, hard earth.
“Malcolm!” I shrieked.
Running after him, I slapped into the cave wall into which he’d vanished, now solid granite.
Gone. He was gone.
A terrifying buzzing began to fill my ears.
“No, wait”—gasping, hyperventilating, I backed away, bumped into a stalagmite—“wait, wait, wait . . .”
He couldn’t be gone. He couldn’t.
My heels sloshed in the pool.
On the cave wall, barely illuminated by the fallen spotlight, the Glipper was hauling Malcolm’s shadow away.
As I stared, their shapes grew blurrier.
Fading. They were fading.
“Malcolm, where are you? Tell me where you are!” My voice broke, my eyes gushed tears.
Then a whisper brushed my ears.
“. . . emi . . . use . . . ormhole . . . ave yourself . . .”
The sound came from nowhere and everywhere at once, like he was both inches away and beyond the edge of the universe.
“Malcolm!” I screamed, spinning around.
My voice echoed.
Alone.
I was alone.
Nonono . . . please no . . .
I looked around, frantic. What could I do? The backpack. The flashlight.
I began to shiver, little shakes at first, then full-body convulsions.
I had to do something . . . anything . . . I had to get him back, I had to try.
Our supplies.
I skidded to the backpack and wrenched it open, and the hundred feet of rope spilled into my hands.
Rope.
Could I use rope?
My gaze snapped back to the Glipper’s shadow—faint, but still there. Hadn’t Malcolm once stuck his hand in the shadow? And he’d said something . . .
The shadow’s a doorway . . .
Suddenly, I had a plan.
A stupid, insane, suicidal plan. But a plan.
I just needed something, some kind of weapon . . .
The flare.
I grabbed the flashlight, now beyond the point of thinking, or reasoning, or logic, and dove into the pool, forcing my eyes open in the bitter, calcium-rich broth. Running off desperate adrenaline, I panned the spotlight back and forth underwater, and the beam sparkled off rocky sediment, more rocky sediment, more fucking rocky sediment, and then a blurry red thing—the flare!
Then the flashlight popped and went out. Because it wasn’t waterproof.
Fuck.
Now blind, and running out of breath, I groped around where I’d seen red.
My fingers closed around the tube.
In pitch darkness, I crawled out of the pool, waved my arms around for the second flashlight—I bumped its plastic case near the backpack, and pounced on it. The beam blinded me.
The shadows of the Glipper and Malcolm were almost gone, almost completely faded.
Recalling how long Jace took to vanish, I knew I had seconds.
I threw one end of the rope around a stalagmite, and began to knot it. My fingers, my hands, my whole body shook uncontrollably. Over and under . . . through the hole . . . over and under . . .
At last, the knot cinched tight. I tied the other end of the rope around my waist.
Done.
The moment I finished, my insides seemed to knot up just like the rope.
What if I was too late? What if I couldn’t get him back?
Then I would die trying to save him.
Fueled by that final thought, I sprinted to the wall and located the Glipper’s faint outline, and reached straight into the middle.
My hand disappeared into the slimy cave wall, like it was no more than a hologram.
Because the shadow was a doorway.
Hold on, Malcolm, I’m coming.
Then, tied to a stalagmite and carrying our last flare, I took a deep breath—because I had no idea whether I’d be able to breathe on the other side—and stepped all the way into the darkness.
Chapter 26
As my eyes passed through the rock wall, the strangest thing happened.
Everything in my field of vision—the cave, the glistening mineral spires, the pools of milky sediment—squished together onto a flat, two-dimensional plane and receded behind me.
I drifted forward into a vast blackness.
Before I could help it, the air escaped from my lungs, and I took a startled gasp.
There was oxygen.
I could breathe.
But the sensation of air in my lungs was strangely out of reach, and I wondered if I was really breathing or merely experiencing the illusion of breathing.
Was I weightless? I couldn’t really tell, except that every inch of my skin tingled, as if I was being bombarded from all angles by millions of tiny needles.
Looking back, I saw the rope unspooling behind me. It looked three-dimensional out here, but where it met the surface I’d just separated from, it became two-dimensional like everything else . . . sort of like how when rope extended underwater, the angle got all funky.
My shadow, I imagined, was now on the cave wall.
Peering out farther, I could see, projected onto the surface, an expanse of solid rock, the entrance to the cave, and way in the distance . . . moonlit trees, all appearing strangely flat, and strangely beautiful.
If I could somehow swim over there and climb back in, it would be like vanishing and reappearing somewhere else without touching anything in between.
That was how the Glipper moved.
Now I understood.
I was viewing the entire universe, but from outside it, from a fourth dimension.
Malcolm.
I was here for Malcolm.