Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  Brady and I slowly did as we were told, sitting gently on the old couch. I snuck a quick look to be sure I wasn’t landing on anything gross, but other than some stray cat hair, it seemed safe enough.

  “We did have guests, when we started. There was a botanical garden near here. People would stay for that. But then some billionaire bought it and made it into his own backyard. Oh, well. He does open it to the, um . . .”

  She was cleaning obsessively the whole time she was talking, and no matter how frantic her actions, it didn’t seem to be making things any better. She ducked out of the room for a moment with an armful of trash, and Brady and I sat still on the couch, not sure if we were meant to follow her.

  The building was clearly very old. I would guess a hundred years or so. It still had some pieces here and there—an old chandelier hanging from the ceiling, some iron wall sconces—that were both beautiful and eerie, if completely out of place with her decorations of cat toys and incense sticks.

  “ . . . to the public,” she said as she walked back into the room, arms empty, finishing her earlier thought.

  “What’s that?” Brady asked.

  “The billionaire.”

  “Sage, we need to ask you . . . ,” I began.

  A knock at the door sprung her out of her seat. “Pizza!” she all but shouted, and continued to talk as she walked back out the door. “You must be hungry. There’s plenty to share. Let me just grab my purse . . .” Her voice faded as she turned the corner, without any indication that she was actually going to stop talking.

  Brady turned to me. “How did you know her name?”

  “She’s an old friend of my mother’s. I met her at Pat’s Diner the day that . . .” I gasped slightly as my mind galloped ahead to the next thought. “The day that my mother disappeared.”

  “Did you know Sage was one of the Mystics?”

  “No, of course not.” I started to get out of my seat, trying to figure out what Sage and my mother’s disappearance had to do with each other.

  “It’s okay,” Brady said, pushing me gently back down. “We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  We could hear Sage returning, still talking. Her voice reminded me of the jangling blue bracelet she had been wearing when I’d first met her: constantly in motion.

  “I hope you like pepperoni,” she said as she came back into the room, opening up the box. I looked at Brady, whose eyes were on the pizza, and I realized he was probably starving. I nudged him lightly, realizing that we’d both think more clearly with some food in our stomachs. He grabbed a piece and started wolfing it down. Sage laughed. “Ah, young people. I forgot how you eat.”

  Brady laughed too. “Sorry,” he muttered through a full mouth.

  “No, it’s nice, it’s nice,” Sage continued. “I just need to save a couple pieces for John. He always eats a big lunch. If he eats after five, he gets heartburn. Should I order another?”

  “John?” I asked, and Brady wiped his mouth with a napkin and leaned in a bit. I could have sworn the man she’d been with at the diner had a different name.

  “My husband,” Sage continued. “Do you want juice? I have juice.”

  “Sage,” I began, looking to Brady for support. I pointed subtly to my pocket, where I had the diary page, and he nodded. “Is this yours?”

  “Well, what’s this?” she asked, taking the letter, her voice still jolly and a bit distracted. “Hold on, let me grab my . . .” The sentence simply trailed off as she stood and started pushing things around on a desk. While her back was to us, Brady turned to me.

  “When you met her, what did she say to your mom?” he whispered.

  I looked over at Sage, whose back was still turned, although she had finally stopped talking. “I don’t know. They talked about something called ‘the old grounds.’ I didn’t know what that meant.”

  At this point, we noticed that Sage was still quiet. She was standing at her desk, facing away, holding up a pair of reading glasses with only one stem as she read the diary page. I heard her sniffle, and I stood up.

  “Where did you . . . ,” she began, but once again, she let the sentence die.

  “Sage?” I asked as I approached her.

  “Where did you find this?”

  “Behind the boiler room,” I said.

  She nodded and finally turned to face us. She had been crying, and made quite a show out of wiping her eyes and grabbing her purse to dig through it for a tissue.

  “I haven’t seen this in a long time. I have to find . . .”

  “You wrote it?” I asked again.

  She stopped messing around with her purse then and simply leaned against the desk. “I was probably your age,” she said. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Ah,” she nodded. “I was a bit older than you, then. Your mother and I were seventeen—it was senior year of high school.”

  I stiffened a bit when she mentioned my mother, and I became aware that Brady had stood up beside me.

  “You two have been behind the boiler room?” she confirmed, and we both nodded. “And you’ve been down?”

  Brady put his hand on my back in the same protective gesture my father always used, and I suddenly felt like a child who was supposed to remain silent while the grown-ups talked. “Yes.”

  She chuckled then. “And we thought we were being so smart. We thought when they blocked off all the old science rooms, that it would be over. We should have known. Now you’re showing up in droves . . .”

  “In droves?” Brady asked. “Was there someone besides Piper?”

  “Just a boy named Adam. But he’s . . . he’s different.”

  “Different how?” Brady asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sage said, distracted again.

  “I think it does,” Brady insisted. “I knew Adam. He was a senior when I was a freshman. Do you know where he is, Sage?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where Piper is?”

  Sage looked at Brady, almost as if seeing him for the first time. “I get it,” she said. “You’re the boyfriend.” She turned to me. “And the two of you thought if you came here, I could help you find her.”

  “Can you?” I asked.

  “No, sweetheart,” she said, turning kind once again. “Piper was here, but she . . . well, she went down. I tried to talk her out of it, but once you cross the River Styx . . .”

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded. “Down the river?”

  “Sorry,” she laughed, shaking her head. “That’s what we used to call it. What do you kids call it now? Down World? That’s cute.”

  “So you do know about the portals?” I asked.

  “Yes. We discovered them.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me. John. And a few of our friends.”

  “You mean my mother, don’t you? Has my mother known about the portals this whole time?”

  Sage hesitated only a moment, and then seemed to realize that by hesitating, she had already confirmed it. “Your mother was the first one in.”

  “And what about my brother, Robbie? Does she know that Robbie is in there?”

  “Yes, she knows. She wrote to me right after it happened.”

  “Why?”

  Sage looked to Brady, unsure if she should continue.

  “He knows everything,” I assured her. “Just tell me.”

  “To see if we could find a way to get him out.”

  I felt a great exhale expel itself from my lungs, as though under the strain of this information, they could no longer perform their function. “That’s why you were in town that day. At the diner.”

  “Yes. We . . . we had been trying to find the answer for three years. I wanted to tell her to her face. It’s not the kind of thing you say over the phone—”

 
“But you barely said anything at the diner. Just something about the old grounds.”

  “That was a code. To meet me at the grounds that night.”

  I nodded, replaying the conversation in my head. That explained why my mother had been acting so strange that day, why she had left that evening. She must have been going to meet Sage before going to the tracks. “What did you say to her that night?”

  Sage started stuffing the letter into a drawer, suddenly quite distracted. “You’ll really need to ask your mother about that, dear. I can’t—I really shouldn’t . . .”

  “I can’t ask my mother about it.”

  “Why are you two here?” she asked. She was rummaging in her desk. “You shouldn’t be here. Did your mother send you?”

  “My mother can’t do anything,” I told her. Her face froze and a panic set into her eyes. I swear I could see her lips curling as she stood before me. “She’s gone. The day she saw you. She had some sort of mental break. Someone spotted her on the tracks, but then she disappeared.”

  “No.”

  “They said she was trying to kill herself. But she wasn’t, was she? She was trying to follow Robbie. It didn’t work, though, because then she went into the high school. And now . . . now she’s missing.”

  “No, that’s not—that’s not right. That’s not what she was supposed to do.”

  I turned to Brady, as if to confirm that he had heard her. He stepped before me. “What was she supposed to do?” he asked.

  Sage sat down behind her desk, as if she were suddenly too weak to stand. “Nothing,” she said. “There was nothing to do. The answer to her question—about whether there’s a way to get Robbie out—the answer is no.”

  I don’t know how long I sat behind the hotel, shifting uncomfortably in one of those lawn chairs with only half a seat. It could have been ten minutes or an hour; my mind was at once racing with information and yet muddled with all the parts I still didn’t understand. I had been convinced that Sage would know where my mother had gone. But now I could see that she didn’t.

  All that I knew was my mother had been lying to me, and to my dad, for the past three years. She’d known Robbie was in Down World. She’d known that in some universe, in some way, he was still alive. I suppose a more gracious way to think about it is that she was burdened with a secret she couldn’t share. “My son’s not dead—he got sucked into a train portal and he’s trapped in another dimension” isn’t exactly the kind of thing you can just drop at the next PTA meeting.

  And maybe she was holding out hope the whole time that her old friend Sage would discover the secret way of rescuing Robbie. And when that last shred of hope fell through, she did something desperate—whatever that was. I could hardly blame her. The absence of Robbie in our house had been making us all feel desperate for years. Our family without Robbie was like an old blanket that had been sewn together using one thread, and it was being slowly unraveled as that thread was pulled out until nothing would be left.

  “Okay,” Brady said, entering the courtyard and pulling up a chair, only to fall right through the bottom as he attempted to sit on it.

  I couldn’t help but laugh, and I was surprised that anything could make me do that. Brady buried his head in a silent chuckle, trying to extricate himself from the remains of the chair.

  “You like that?” he asked. “Thank you, folks. I’ll be here all day.”

  He looked around and grabbed a planter, caked in dry mud and full of the dying remains of what used to be some sort of plant. He picked the whole thing up, shook it until all the debris fell out, and placed it gently upside down by my side so he could sit on it.

  “Let’s see if my ass falls through this one too.”

  I laughed again. I couldn’t tell if he was doing this for my benefit, or if Brady just had a way of finding the lighter side of things.

  “Okay, so here’s what I was going to say. You ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “This woman’s a nut job. This hotel is creepy and the pizza here sucks. I say we get back on the train and head home, go into DW, and find them ourselves.”

  “How? The brick walls,” I reminded him.

  “There must be a way to open them. We’ll get some TNT and blow them if we have to.”

  I thought about that for a moment. What were the portals beneath the school anyway? They were doorways, like passwords to open a computer program. The doorway itself didn’t matter, only the program that you were accessing.

  “No, it wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?” he asked, clearly growing frustrated.

  “Blowing the door won’t make the world behind it suddenly appear,” I said. “We need to find out why the brick walls appeared, and somehow undo it.”

  “That one’s on you, kiddo,” he said. “I’m getting lost here.”

  I laughed again. Nobody called me kiddo except my dad.

  “I want to talk to John,” I realized. “I want to ask him. Sage doesn’t know everything.”

  “What makes you think John will?”

  “Just the way she described him in her journal. That she was afraid he might disappear someday. He was obsessed with it. And he’s older now. So maybe after all this time, he’s figured out some things.”

  Brady nodded.

  “Are you with me?” I asked. “Because if you want to go . . .”

  “I’m with you,” Brady said, his tone softening. “Of course I’m with you.”

  We were sitting close together again, conspiring in whispers like we had in his room that day. But then he pulled away.

  “Besides, it’s the only way I’ll find Piper.” He stood and offered me a hand to help me up.

  “All right, then. I guess we should invite ourselves to dinner or something.”

  “Okay,” Brady agreed, guiding me over to the hotel again, “but remember, if John eats after five, he gets heartburn.”

  I laughed again. “I’ll bring him a celery stick,” I said, indicating the garden plot beside us marked CELERY, but containing nothing but weeds and dirt. Brady cracked up as we walked back inside.

  We searched the whole ground floor for Sage, who had apparently disappeared.

  “Hello?” I called as we made our way from room to room. As Brady had pointed out, this place was indeed “creepy.” The whole building was very old and looked somehow frozen in time from the Old West. The carpet and the wallpaper both used the same dark red and brown colors, designed in swirls, which, while clean, had been dulled and darkened by the years.

  There was a front desk with an old-fashioned register and an actual rotary phone hanging from the wall. It smelled like burned coffee and I looked around for where it might be coming from.

  “Do you feel like we’re in an episode of Scooby-Doo?” Brady asked.

  “Totally,” I agreed. “And they would have gotten away with it too . . .”

  “ . . . if it hadn’t been for those darn kids.”

  It was then that we heard the music drifting down from upstairs. It was a bluesy kind of music, and it reminded me of something my grandpa would listen to—a woman with a high voice singing on what sounded like an old record player. Floorboards creaked overhead. The hotel was so old that every time someone moved above you, you could trace their every step simply by listening to the creaks.

  I pointed to the sound and started walking up the wide staircase that curved behind the front desk, covered in that same threadbare burgundy carpet. Brady followed.

  The second floor looked like a typical hotel floor, with long dark hallways leading to maybe a half dozen doors in either direction. We heard someone humming to herself from one of the rooms with a propped-open door, and I could tell it was Sage, probably doing some cleaning. That must have been the source of the footsteps we’d heard, but not of the old-fashioned music. That came from farther up the stairs. I
glanced at Brady, who nodded towards the music.

  With each passing floor, the music grew louder, but we had not yet reached its source. Each of the next three floors looked exactly the same, and there was no indication that any guest was staying in any of the rooms. In fact, judging by the generally dank smell of old cigarettes and mildew, I would guess that no one had stayed here in decades.

  Around the next bend, the staircase narrowed and was met at the top by a door. It was notable, since it looked like the front door of a house, complete with knocker, and had clearly been installed by the hotel’s owners. The door was slightly ajar and the music was pounding out of it, accompanied by the tapping of a foot keeping rhythm inside.

  I looked to Brady, who gave me a shrug and nodded towards the door. I smiled and nodded in agreement. I took a second to collect myself and then banged the knocker a couple of times.

  I wasn’t prepared for how loud it would be. It echoed like we were standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. I flinched, and Brady moved to edge himself in front of me in a protective way, until we could see who answered.

  “Is that them, Sage?” came a man’s voice. “I thought you said they left.”

  Brady seemed to think about it for a second, debating whether to respond or just push the door open. “It . . . it’s us, sir,” he called.

  After a brief moment, the music turned off and the silence from behind the door was startling. “Well . . . ,” the man finally said. “Are you coming in or what?”

  Brady positioned his body to block mine even more as he pushed the door open. I couldn’t really see anything but his back when I heard him gasp at the sight before us.

  “What? What is it?” I asked, all but pushing him out of the way. I came around him and saw the last thing I had been expecting.

  The top floor of the hotel had been completely gutted. They had knocked out all the walls, removing every room, and leaving nothing but a few support posts here and there. The hideous carpet had been replaced with hardwood floors, highly polished and bolted together with what looked like flattened black railway ties. What remained was one enormous loft, clearly decorated by Sage, with sitting areas here and there peppered with ornate throw pillows, white billowy sheets separating a bedroom area from a dining area, and wisps of yellow sunlight streaming in across a coffee table that looked like it had been handmade using one enormous piece of wood from a giant tree. And a glimpse to my right revealed a large bathroom area, the only part of the whole place with a door, painted fire-engine red.