Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  Sage and John lived in my dream apartment. It was like they had read my mind. Or maybe I had read theirs. It was so beautiful I suddenly wanted to cry.

  John was sitting at a workbench. He had a magnifying glass strapped to his forehead and seemed to be painting little figurines under a lamp. It seemed like an odd pastime for a man who looked about forty, but judging from the collection of little warriors and knights before him, he had been at it for quite a while.

  “Well, don’t leave the door open,” John ordered.

  “Sorry,” Brady said immediately and closed the door behind us. It sealed with a resounding thud, which made me swallow back a tinge of fear. “We’re sorry to disturb you.”

  “Well, I already told her I can’t help you,” John said, muttering so quietly I almost couldn’t make him out. He didn’t stop painting the whole time, and didn’t look up at us once.

  Brady seemed to be weighing the situation, figuring out how to approach this man. “Nice work there,” he finally said. “May I?”

  John muttered some sort of approval under his breath. And so Brady walked across the great expanse of floor and approached the table, picking up a figurine. “Great detail,” he finally said.

  “I sell them,” John responded. “There’s a shop in town. The kids here love them.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  I quietly walked a bit closer so I could hear them, taking in the artwork on the walls as I passed—a hodgepodge of cultures and images, ranging from a bust of a Greek woman to a picture of a Japanese geisha putting on makeup to a tableau of African women doing laundry in a river.

  “That’s awesome,” Brady added. “You know, my dad owns a shop like that where we’re from. He would love this stuff. Maybe I could buy a few pieces for him?”

  I listened, a bit dumbfounded. Brady had said it so naturally that anyone listening would never doubt it was true. For a moment I wondered if it was. Maybe his dad did own a shop somewhere, and the fishing-boat story had been the lie.

  “Suit yourself,” John said, still not looking up.

  “Sir, the reason we’re here . . . ,” Brady began.

  “I can’t help you get your girlfriend back,” John interrupted him, having obviously already talked to Sage about this.

  “It’s very important, though, sir,” Brady kept going. “If you could help me talk to her. If you could tell us how to find her . . . ,” and here he paused for a second and glanced at me, “or find Marina’s mom . . .”

  “If I knew how to find someone down there, do you think I’d be here painting hobbits for the rest of my life?”

  “You must know more than you’re saying,” Brady insisted. “I mean, you invented it.”

  “I didn’t invent it!” John suddenly exploded, standing up from his chair. “I didn’t do that. They did that. It’s not my fault!”

  “Okay, okay,” Brady said, backing down.

  “You think I wanted to lose everyone and everything to that pit? You think I chose this? I warned them.”

  “I believe you,” Brady said, but it was too late to stop the torrent of words from John.

  “I warned them and nobody would listen to me.”

  “John, stop,” came a voice from behind me. We turned around and saw Sage standing in the open doorway. She was still holding the attachment to a vacuum cleaner. “Don’t do this. They’re just kids.”

  “Why is this always my fault?” John asked.

  “It’s not your fault, honey,” she said, clearly having been down this road with him before. “Sit down.”

  John did as he was told and sat back down at his worktable. But he took the magnifying lens off his head. He rubbed his hair absentmindedly while he continued to mutter to himself.

  “Sage,” I began. “Can you please tell us what he’s talking about?”

  Sage came into the room a bit and put down the vacuum attachment. “Well . . . ,” she began, stretching out her back and sighing. “How well do you understand nuclear fission?”

  Brady and I looked at each other with the same blank faces.

  This was going to be a long afternoon.

  We sat on the floor on some of those beautifully knit throw pillows around the coffee table. The afternoon sun was still high in the sky and the loft had turned quite warm. John opened a couple of windows and turned on some ceiling fans, creating a nice breeze that stirred the curtains and made the whole place feel like it should be in a design catalog.

  “So when you explode an atom,” Sage began, “and stop me if you already know this, I don’t want to bore you . . .”

  Brady and I both shook our heads.

  “ . . . you release an extraordinary amount of energy.” Sage looked to John, who was at his worktable, actively ignoring us. She poured us each a cup of tea from a large pot with a bamboo handle. “Do either of you take sugar?” She offered us a little spoonful of some large yellowish grains, about the size of ants.

  “Yes, please.” Our response, in unison.

  “Imagine,” she continued, “dropping a grain of sugar into, say, a pot of tea.” She took the lid off the teapot and, while the steam billowed past her, she took one of those large sugar grains into her hand and dropped it into the tea. It landed with a plunk.

  “Did you see it?”

  “It fell in,” I replied.

  “Not the sugar,” she continued. “That’s just the dead weight. I mean the energy. Look closer.”

  Brady and I leaned in a bit closer, until the steam from the tea was tickling the tiny hairs at the top of my forehead. I didn’t see what she was talking about, but leaning over the dark liquid like that made me think of something. It reminded me of the darkroom at the school, of that time I was hiding out up there, and I knew someone was coming up the stairs because of the vibrations in the little pool of developing solution.

  “Do you mean the vibrations?” I asked.

  “Smart girl,” she answered. “When you disturb a flat pool, you set off a series of waves, emanating out from the drop point. They’re in the teapot now, even if you can’t see them. And where do they end?”

  Brady sat back a bit. “They end when they hit the pot.”

  “If they’re in a pot, they do,” she agreed. “Now imagine there is no pot. The pool is infinite. Where do they end?”

  I looked to Brady, who was shaking his head and smiling a bit to himself. He was clearly done with this lady and her weird metaphors. “I don’t know.”

  “They don’t end,” I realized. “They go on forever.”

  Sage smiled at me. “That’s right.”

  “So what?” I asked. “What does that have to do with nuclear fission?”

  “The pool is time,” she explained. “And yes, it goes on forever. And the sugar grain, in this scenario, was the explosion of the atom. But now imagine that there isn’t just one plane of time and space. There’s the plane that we live on, of course, which is like the surface of this table.”

  We all looked at the flat surface of the beautiful table, the one that looked like it had been carved from a single tree.

  “But there are also infinite planes. Above us, below us. Infinite tables.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “The other planes contain the other existences,” Sage said. “The ones that might have been if you had been born a second later, if you never existed, if you hadn’t . . .”

  “ . . . had an accident,” I finished her thought, finally beginning to understand where she was going with all this.

  “We aren’t supposed to know about those planes. They are parallel, they’re never meant to intersect. But when an atom is split . . . Have you seen a mushroom cloud?”

  “Of course,” Brady said, the stiffness in his body reflecting a growing impatience with this whole conversation.

  “It doesn’t just go out
in a flat circle, does it? It goes everywhere, up, down. The waves of the energy explosion, they start to blur together the different planes.”

  “But we never split an atom in our town,” I said, not sure what any of this had to do with the portals under the school. “Wasn’t that New Mexico or something?”

  “That’s where they tested the bomb,” Sage explained. “But they first split the atom in that school. Of course, it wasn’t a school then, was it?”

  “This is stupid,” said Brady, whose body suddenly burst up from the floor. He paced tensely over to the window.

  I watched Brady as he stood by the open window, looking down on the town below. I wasn’t sure why this was upsetting him so much, but I needed to hear more.

  “I wish it were,” Sage insisted. “The closer you go to the time of the explosion, the less you can see its effects. The waves haven’t had a chance yet to make much of a difference, to blur the planes too much. But over time, as the waves travel farther and farther, as they grow smaller and more intimate, well, then you can see it. Then things that shouldn’t exist together begin to do just that. And when you travel to another plane, you can see what might have been. Yesterday isn’t so bad. When you enter Today, things may seem normal, but they’re not. And Tomorrow—Tomorrow is the one you have to be really careful of.”

  “You’re the one who labeled the doors,” I realized. “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. That was you.”

  Sage smiled. “No, that was your mother.”

  “But the doors all worked?” Brady asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re brick walls,” Brady said, clearly exasperated. “All the doors, just brick walls inside.”

  “All of them?” she asked. It was clearly news to her. “Oh, dear. Did you hear that, John?” she called out. “All of them now.”

  “Mmm,” John responded. “Probably for the best,” he added a moment later.

  “It isn’t for the best,” I countered. “People are still trapped down there. My brother and Piper. Maybe my mom too.” Sage nodded as I spoke, unmoved.

  I looked to Brady, who still stared out the window.

  “Let’s go,” he said suddenly, turning to me. He reached out his hand as he walked over, and I couldn’t help but stand to take it. “She’s crazy,” he whispered to me, taking my hand with more force than I had anticipated.

  “I wish I were,” Sage said, having overheard him. I was deeply embarrassed that we had offended her, and couldn’t figure out what had upset Brady so much. We were almost to the door when Sage stood up and said one more thing.

  “Marina, there’s something else. It’s about the portal on the tracks.”

  It was as though she had pulled me back with a string. I yanked my hand away from Brady’s. We both turned back to face her.

  “We discovered that portal before we left the town. It’s why we left.”

  I stared at her for a moment, a million emotions bubbling up.

  “Your mother always suspected that Robbie had fallen into it. Right after the accident, she was going to try to follow him. But she knew there’d be consequences. She might miss the window and be hit by the train. Even if she could find the portal, who’s to say she wouldn’t be stuck in there with your brother forever? None of us had ever been in the train portal before. At that time, we didn’t even know how it worked. But one thing that seemed very clear was that you couldn’t just back out of it like you could with the other portals. And if she did get stuck, she’d never see you again.”

  “She stayed for me?” I asked, and my voice sounded high and tinny in my ears. All this time she could have been with Robbie. But she stayed for me.

  “And so she asked us if we could find a way . . . a better way, that is, to save him.”

  “But you said the answer was no. How could you be sure?”

  “Because what we did find . . .” Sage trailed off again. I’d never met someone so distractible; it was like trying to have a conversation while loud music was blaring. “What we did find was not good, Marina.”

  I readied myself for whatever she was about to tell me. Brady had put his hand back on my lower spine, and I suddenly realized what he had been so upset about. He knew bad news was coming. He sensed it somehow. And he was trying to protect me.

  “You have to understand,” Sage continued, “the train portal is different. Because the crossover is so violent, the moment so fleeting . . . That portal is unstable. It doesn’t just take you to another plane, it takes you to all the planes. It doesn’t blur the lines, it whirls them around. It’s constantly in motion. Do you know about the balance between the dimensions?”

  “Yes,” I nodded, remembering how Brady had explained it to me.

  “Small imbalances cause small disruptions. But an imbalance in the train portal . . .”

  Sage turned to John, almost as though she couldn’t bring herself to say whatever was next.

  John put down his tools and sighed. He looked at Brady, not at me.

  “The brother—Robbie, is it?” John asked. Something about his voice seemed disingenuous, and I got the feeling he knew exactly what my brother’s name was.

  Brady nodded.

  “He can’t stay in there. He’s the reason it’s all falling apart now, the reason the cracks are showing. He’s probably the reason that brick wall appeared over the door. He’s been in there a few years, right? So it’s becoming noticeable.”

  “Okay,” Brady said. “But you said you didn’t know how to find anyone down there, and besides, the portal that actually worked is bricked up, so what do you want to do?”

  “I said I didn’t know how to find Piper, because when you go in through a regular portal, you could end up anywhere, on any plane. There’s no way of knowing where to look. But the train portal . . .”

  John seemed to lose his train of thought, and I was losing patience. I turned to Sage. “Please help us,” I implored. “Sage, what do we do?”

  “Your brother has to come out,” Sage said, and something about her tone reminded me of doctors on TV shows telling the family that someone has died on the operating table.

  “You just said there’s no way,” Brady said with a sigh, exasperated. “Make up your minds.”

  “There’s no way . . . ,” John began. His eyes shifted to me for a moment, and then back to Brady. “There’s no way to take him out alive.”

  The room turned quiet, and his words echoed against the wooden floor.

  “Someone will need to go into the train portal,” John explained, “find him, and push him back out.” He paused, still eyeing Brady. “You understand what I’m saying, son?”

  I could hear a loud hissing sound, a buzzing in my ears, and it took me a moment to realize it was my own breathing. My head was spinning. And I felt nothing but relief as Brady put his arm around my waist and practically carried me out of that room, slamming the door behind us.

  We were almost down the stairs to the lobby when Sage caught up with us.

  “Wait,” she implored. “Don’t go yet. Please wait.”

  I could feel my breath still straining to regulate, my body gulping down short bursts of air, as though my lungs couldn’t decide if they were too full or too empty.

  “She needs to lie down,” I heard Sage say. “I’ve made up a couple rooms.” The words seemed to be drifting to me through a wind tunnel. The lights went all dark and I realized I was passing out.

  CHAPTER 12

  I woke up in a strange place and felt a moment of panic, just as I had in the hostel that morning, before remembering where I was.

  The sky outside the window was starting to dim, and with the long summer days, I figured that must have made it around 8 p.m. Somewhere in the distance, children were running and squealing. Grasshoppers were singing in chorus. I sat up slowly and took in a painting across from the bed. In it,
an old man and a young girl were rowing in a small boat across a sea. The man was looking down at the girl lovingly, but she, straining to pull the enormous oar in front of her, looked directly out of the painting, as though imploring the viewer for help.

  I was still staring transfixed into her small eyes, feeling trapped in my place, when I heard Brady’s warm voice nearby.

  “Hello, sleepyhead,” he said. He was sitting in a chair by the window, his figure obscured in shadow, with only the glow from his cell phone illuminating his face.

  “Hi,” I said. “What happened?”

  “You passed out.”

  I let out a snort. “You’re kidding.” I sat up a bit and realized I wasn’t wearing my shoes. “Well, that’s embarrassing.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just so damsel-in-distress of me.”

  He laughed. “It was a lot to take in. I was feeling a little lightheaded myself.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “We get out of here,” he answered. “They didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.”

  “Are you kidding? They told us everything! About the planes and that whole atom-bomb thing.”

  “They don’t know how to find Piper, and they don’t know how to get Robbie out alive.”

  “Because there is no way.”

  “As far as they know. Think about it, Marina. These guys created this mess twenty years ago, right? Then they sneak out of town to some random hotel where they can hide out for the rest of their lives. Why? Because they don’t know how to control the thing that they found. They don’t really understand it, any more than we do. So why should we believe them when they say there’s no way to take him out? They could be wrong.”