The Door

by Andy Marino

  “Stay behind me, everybody,” she said.

  One more step down, and the stone walls on either side of the old staircase were gone. There was a vastness to the space down here, as if the mayor’s basement sprawled beneath the entire city.

  One hundred seventy billion souls.

  Fuzzy click-clacks came out of the darkness like the crawling of distant limbs. None of the traps back at Cliff House had prepared her for that.

  “Did you hear something?” she asked.

  “No,” her mother said.

  “Can you guys still see the walls?”

  Her father, after a moment: “Yes, Hannah.”

  So she was on her own, standing in the middle of nothing, until she heard a mad skittering, closer and closer. All at once, metal-tipped spears were launched from beyond the absent walls of the staircase, from the endless dark place only she could see. And with them came a great volley of darts. At the same time, a wooden fence flipped up like a stepped-on rake, trapping her. Her only chance was to shove it down, break through, or slide underneath — but there wasn’t enough time. The first dart whined past her head. Placing her hand against the barrier, she decided to leap over it and hope none of the projectiles found their mark.

  There was a stabbing pain in her forearm and Hannah thought she’d been hit. Was that all it took — one little dart — to blink her out of existence? The pain traveled to her thumb, and the toothpick from the attic slid out of her skin and into a tiny hole in the fence.

  Instantly, the barrier crumbled. The empty space on either side of her solidified into walls. The spears and the darts were trapped in that dark place beyond. She was safe. She let out a breath.

  “Everybody okay?” Her voice was shaky and weak.

  “Uh … we’re fine,” Stefan said.

  “Is something the matter, Hannah Silver?”

  They really can’t see what I see. “No. I’ll just keep going.”

  Two more steps down and she was back in that endless cave. She had the sinking feeling that it didn’t connect to the undercity at all, and wasn’t exactly on any Institute map.

  This time there was a rotten stench to accompany a far-off gibbering and scrabbling, as if two vicious armies of rats were fighting over scraps. The stink was searing her nostrils, making her dizzy. Her vision swam.

  She felt something brush her leg.

  It was a white, viney appendage. Beyond the walls, whatever disgusting thing it was attached to exhaled in satisfaction as it discovered prey. Hannah wondered how long it had been since anyone had ventured down here.

  Steeling herself, Hannah grabbed the vine. Fungus from the subway station in Nusle Kruselskaya came pouring out of her thumb. The predatory thing’s anticipation became a surprised yelp, then a keening whine. The vine began to wriggle. Hannah held on until the fungus stopped spewing out. It went slithering away, fading into the darkness. The staircase was whole once again.

  “Are you hurt?” her mother’s anxious voice called out.

  “No,” she said hoarsely.

  “Let me walk beside you,” Eri said.

  Hannah steadied her voice. “I’m fine.”

  She took a few more steps before she realized the next trap had already begun. The walls hadn’t disappeared; they’d become two complex puzzle pieces, full of unearthly geometry. Hannah could sense their desire to be together before they even started to close the gap. There was an ominous rumbling. She was going to be crushed, her spine snapped before her soul was taken. Desperately, she searched the patterns — labyrinths of angles that didn’t quite make sense. She mashed her thumb against the walls at random, but they just kept pressing on, narrowing the stairwell so that she was forced to turn sideways. At the last second she spotted the missing piece: a rectangular gap the size of a —

  Space bar.

  She felt it exit her thumb and slot into place. The walls stopped. Hannah turned to find four worried-looking expressions.

  “Did you see that one?” she asked.

  Her father raised a bushy eyebrow.

  “Never mind.”

  Now the door stood alone in the void. The stairwell had faded into oblivion. It was too far to jump — and besides, what would she land on? She thought for a moment, then placed her hand out over the emptiness and gave it an encouraging shake.

  Water sprayed from her thumb. It smelled fishy and gross, like the floating canals of Caymiri. Instead of dripping down into the darkness, the water flowed across the void. A canal rippled into place.

  With an awkward diving motion, Hannah pushed out into the water. She paddled hard to keep from going under (after all, there was no bottom). Her legs kicked down into the empty air, but she splashed her way across. Treading water, she reached up until her fingers gripped the doorknob. She pulled herself up onto solid ground.

  Her mother and father held hands. Stefan shifted his weight nervously. Eri folded her arms. They all stood in front of the door. Hannah tried to think of something to say.

  Charlemagne crawled up the handle of Eri’s sword. “Get on with it!”

  Hannah’s father jumped. “That thing can talk?”

  Hannah sent a silent thank-you to Albert, Nancy, and Belinda. Then she opened the door….

  They stepped out into the tall grass of a prairie. She watched her mother cross the threshold, followed by Eri and Stefan. Her father came through last, and the door slammed shut behind him.

  With a surprised grunt he reached for the doorknob and grabbed nothing but empty air. Before anybody could stop him, he drove his shoulder into the space where the door had been and flopped into the grass. Hannah’s mother rushed to help him up. He got to his feet, brushed off his corduroys, and picked a twig out of his beard.

  “Guess that was a one-way trip.”

  Like a mime, he measured out the area of the door frame with his hands, slapping his palms against the air.

  “Here, boy!” Stefan called out, agitated. “Over here, Charlemagne! Where’d you go?”

  Hannah’s heart sank. If Charlemagne was trapped on the other side of the vanished doorway, Stefan would be heartbroken.

  “Lullaby!”

  Hannah’s mother recoiled in horror as Charlemagne bounded up her leg, across her stomach, and wrapped himself around her arm.

  “Oh,” she said, freezing in place, as if the paint-lizard were likely to sting her if she moved too quickly. “What do I do?”

  Stefan scooped his pet away from Hannah’s mother. “I think he wants you to sing him a lullaby.”

  Hannah began humming “Cork on the Ocean.”

  Her mother tried to dab the paint from her sleeve, gave up, and started singing along. The melody swam into Hannah’s head and buzzed pleasantly, like a sugar rush.

  “If only I had a guitar,” her father said, shooting for a harmony line and ending up with something slightly off-key.

  Hannah watched her mother skim a hand along the wispy tips of the waist-high grass. Her father studied the empty sky, a puzzled look on his face. It didn’t have the brilliance of a lightday or the melancholy of a noonday, and it certainly wasn’t dark. It was none of those things, and yet somehow it was all of those things, a perfectly neutral color that Hannah had never seen before.

  Stefan was the first to ask the question on everybody’s mind.

  “Where are we?”

  Her mother took a deep breath. “It smells like … home. Like earth. Like we’re alive. Is anybody else getting that?”

  Hannah wanted to believe they had crossed back over into the world of the living, and considered how good it would feel to entertain that thought, even for a little while. But it would be a lie.

  “I’ve never seen a sky like that back home,” she said.

  “Maybe it’s Ascension,” Stefan offered.

  “I do not think so,” Eri said.

  “How do you know? Maybe this is it, a field with some grass and stuff. Maybe we’re the first souls to ever make it here. Think about that.”

&nbs
p; “Hannah was the first soul to make it here,” Eri said. “We just followed her.”

  Her mother swished through the grass in a lazy circle, bending stalks with her arms. “Hannah, it’s the strangest feeling, being your mother right now. It’s like I don’t know anything about you. How did you know you could do that?”

  “Because I think the city wants me to be a part of it. Ever since I crossed over, it’s almost like it knows me. Maybe this is what dying is.” She held her hand up to the light and gave it a long look. “Maybe I am dead.”

  Her mother pulled her in for an embrace. “We’re together. It doesn’t matter if we’re in Cliff House, or the city, or … here, wherever this is.”

  Her father joined them. His big feet flattened entire clumps of grass. “Look at that, up ahead.” The flatland unfurled like wall-to-wall carpet, as far as she could see. But then she noticed that what she’d taken for the haze of a distant horizon was really a long bank of fog. It wasn’t much darker than the sky, but there it was, blocking her view.

  She followed it with her eyes, turning her feet slowly, until she had made a complete circle. The view never changed. The field was encircled by fog. If they kept walking in any direction, eventually they would hit it.

  She had never been in such a flat place before, and the sheer panoramic breadth was making her woozy. Looking down into the grass, she saw a black flower. Kneeling for a better look, she realized it wasn’t a flower at all but a bulbous fruit about the size of an artichoke. She poked it and a little bit of dust puffed out. She picked it up and handed it to Stefan.

  “Wow,” he said, “I think it’s —”

  “Foundation,” her father said. Gently, he took the fruit. He closed his hand into a fist, and when he opened it, the flower had been crushed. He was holding a pile of black grains. “Raw, unprocessed Foundation.”

  “Then we haven’t gone anywhere at all,” her mother said.

  “Perhaps Ascension is built from the same material as the city,” Eri said. “Foundation could exist here, too.” She smiled — smiled — at Stefan. “As you say, nobody knows.”

  “I say we start walking,” Hannah said.

  “Which way?” Stefan turned in a circle of his own, gazing out at the fog.

  “North,” Eri said.

  Stefan thought for a moment. “How do we know which way that is?”

  “It was a joke,” Eri said. “I was telling a joke.”

  Charlemagne cackled. Hannah’s father shuddered.

  “Let’s go this way,” Hannah said, leading her mother by the hand.

  “Is this another one of your new skills?”

  “No, I just picked a random direction.”

  They walked in silence. The only sounds were the hushed whispers of the grass and a faint hiss whenever someone trampled a Foundation plant.

  Hannah pointed. “Look!” She could have sworn she’d spotted the fog thinning out.

  “What is it?” her father asked, squinting.

  She glimpsed the edge of a great city wearing the haze like a cloak: towers of glass, monuments of stone. A skyline on the horizon, suddenly exposed.

  “It’s —”

  But the fog had already rolled back, and the city was gone.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Let’s keep going.”

  She didn’t want to think about choked sidewalks and traffic. Somewhere out there, billions of souls went about their business. Here, five souls crossed a field, and it was peaceful.

  THE END

  ANDY MARINO is the author of two young adult novels, Unison Spark and Uncrashable Dakota. Growing up in upstate New York, Andy spent a lot of time orchestrating LEGO pirate battles, drawing detailed maps of imaginary video games, and writing his first fantasy novel, which was never completed. He now lives in New York City.

  Copyright © 2014 by Andy Marino

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marino, Andy, 1980– author.

  The door / Andy Marino. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Hannah Silver can sense things that other people cannot, and living in Cliff House she is surrounded by secrets and the voices of people who are not really there — but when she finds her mother murdered she will have to confront the secret of a mysterious door that may lead to another world.

  ISBN 978-0-545-55137-3 (jacketed hardcover) 1. Future life — Juvenile fiction. 2. Children’s secrets — Juvenile fiction. 3. Mothers and daughters — Juvenile fiction. [1. Future life — Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters — Fiction. 3. Secrets — Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M33877Do 2014

  813.6 — dc23

  2013032039

  First edition, May 2014

  Cover art © 2014 by Alexander Jansson

  Cover design by Christopher Stengel

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-55139-7

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.