Down World

by Rebecca Phelps

  In the restroom, I did hear two women speaking Russian, but then they switched to English when I came out of the stall to wash my hands. Was that a coincidence? Or, despite what Piper had said, could they see me?

  Piper and I made our way back to the food kiosks, and I was relieved to see that Robbie was already there. Robbie and Piper stood with their backs to the food baskets, and subtly shifted some things into their pockets without even looking behind them to see what they were grabbing. I did the same.

  “Okay, we better get back,” Robbie said, and then he turned to me. “The stops usually only last about fifteen minutes.”

  My voice caught in my throat. I still wasn’t sure this was the right dimension, and I didn’t want to suggest staying if it meant we’d be trapped in the wrong place.

  I glanced quickly left and right for a newspaper, and found one in a stack by one of the food vendors. I grabbed it off the top, but I didn’t have a chance to read it as Piper was pulling my hand, all but dragging me behind her. I kept it pressed close to me as we wove through the passing crowds.

  We made it back to the area outside the station, and found that at least six trains were pulled up to the various platforms, with others on their way in and out. I had no idea, of course, what our train looked like, having never seen the outside of it. And for a moment, with Robbie and Piper both scanning the possible trains and looking quite anxious as they did so, I began to panic that the train had left without us.

  Maybe that was for the best. I cleared my throat before I spoke. “Robbie,” I began, “I think this might be the dimension under the lake.”

  “What’s that?” Robbie asked, his eyes still scanning past various trains that were pulling in and out of the station as if in a choreographed dance.

  “I said I think maybe we should stay—”

  “There it is!” Robbie said, pointing, and he wasn’t able to hide the relief in his voice. Piper sighed, her breath catching in her throat. I wondered how often this happened.

  Robbie and Piper hadn’t heard me. Instead, Piper continued to drag me by the hand across two empty platforms to a very shiny old-fashioned train. It didn’t seem possible to me that this was the right one. On the outside, it looked as clean and polished as could be. I thought of the dilapidated library car and the abandoned dining car I had passed through, and I realized that this must have been what the train originally looked like. It had been gorgeous once.

  Robbie and Piper both stood by the doors, as if waiting for them to open.

  “Come on,” Robbie whispered under his breath. Piper took his hand.

  My hands now free, I began furiously flipping through the newspaper pages, trying to find any evidence as to which dimension we were in. But it seemed hopeless. The stories were about people I didn’t know, sporting events with stars I’d never heard of, fashion pages full of people doing their best imitation of Elizabeth Taylor.

  Should I suggest that we stay? What if I was wrong?

  But then the doors opened. And out popped the head of a man in a faded red cap, wearing a jacket that almost looked like something from an old Confederate Army costume I had seen in textbooks when we’d studied the Civil War.

  He looked worn and skeletal, his sharp cheekbones protruding beneath tired, somewhat haunted eyes. He didn’t even seem human, but almost like a CGI character in a movie. I was shocked when he looked right at me, seeing through me, it seemed, with an accusatory glare that made me shiver as I stood there.

  I dropped the newspaper, my hands losing all control at the chill that ran through me from the conductor’s glare. His ageless eyes trailed from my head down to my feet.

  “Your paper, miss.”

  I swallowed the fear down into my throat. “Thank you,” I whispered, leaning down to pick it up.

  “Do you have your tickets?”

  “You have mine already,” Piper told him politely.

  Robbie averted his eyes, looking down at his shoes. “I’ll pay on the train,” he said.

  The conductor nodded, and stepped back to allow us to enter. Robbie took both of our hands and we all boarded the train together. My mind had gone blank by that point.

  Once we were aboard, as Piper had promised, the train reverted to its former self. We were in the lounge car, where the books were scattered out across the couch. And the train began to lurch out of the station.

  I looked down at the now-jumbled newspaper I held under my arm, the front page of the National section now on top. And the headline, in bold text, proclaimed, “New Minister of Treasury Appointed.” And underneath that, shaking hands with a blond man in a sharp military suit, was my mother—looking as she had in the hotel under the lake portal.

  “Robbie,” I said, an urgency now making my voice loud and vivid. “It’s the world under the lake! Get off the train. We have to get off the train.”

  “We can’t.”

  “But we can get home from here,” I insisted.

  “No, Marina, we can’t,” said Piper, her voice resigned and tender. She held my arm tightly as the train rumbled beneath our feet.

  I looked desperately from her eyes to his, and then back again. They both had the same pitying but firm expression. Piper looked at Robbie, as if trying to decide whether to say what she was thinking.

  Then his eyes fell down to the newspaper in my hands, to our mother’s picture, clear as day, staring back at him. But his stone face didn’t even flinch at the sight.

  “You’ve both been here before,” I realized as the train began to pull away from the station. My shoulders slumped in despair. “And why can’t we stay?” I asked, though I dreaded the answer.

  “Because,” Robbie explained, looking to Piper again for courage. “We’re not really here.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “What do you mean, we’re not really here?” I asked once we’d made it back to the little bedroom car.

  Once again, Robbie glanced at Piper before he spoke, and she offered him a loving smile. It scared me how much he needed her. How lost he was without her.

  “The train portal isn’t like the others,” Piper finally answered me. “You don’t take over your other self. You can’t interact with people. Like I said, most of them can’t even see you. It’s like you’re just . . .”

  “A ghost,” Robbie finished her thought. An eerie silence fell between us all, and I could feel the weight of Robbie’s pain in every breath that escaped his lips, in the deep, haunted look that had taken over his beautiful brown eyes—the same shade as our mother’s.

  “You’ve tried to stay somewhere before?” I prodded.

  “When I was first on the train,” he nodded. “The first time it stopped. I didn’t know where I was. I just knew I had to get off the damn train.”

  I bit my lip, not wanting to interrupt. I could see him as clear as day. Fourteen years old, skinny and alone. Scared to death. In some strange train station somewhere. “What happened, Robbie?”

  “I stood on the platform, watching the train pull out of the station. I was just gonna let it go.”

  Piper scooted closer to him on the bed, placing a careful hand on his knee, which he didn’t seem to notice.

  “The walls started melting. The people . . .” His voice trailed off for a moment, not betraying a hint of emotion. “It was like they were painted there, and the paint was dripping. It was like the hands that hold the world up around you had decided to let it all drop.”

  “My God,” I whispered.

  “I ran for the train,” Robbie explained. “And I hopped back on. The conductor was there. It was the first time I saw him. He wasn’t there when I first got hit. And he asked me for my ticket, like he has every time since.”

  “I’m gonna make some coffee,” Piper declared, apropos of nothing. I couldn’t tell if her cheeriness was real, or if it was her way of coping with stress. Either way, it
made her seem impossible to know, like a Barbie doll on happy pills.

  “Thanks, baby,” Robbie called to her, a smile finally cracking across his lips.

  “And then?” I asked, trying to get Robbie focused back on his story.

  “That’s it,” Robbie said. “I never tried it again. I assume the same thing would happen.”

  I nodded. It made sense, of course, given what Sage had told me. The train connects all the planes that ever existed. So when the train pulled into a station, it was like it was visiting a certain plane. But then when it pulled out, that plane disappeared. Or at least, it disappeared as far as the train and its reluctant inhabitants were concerned.

  “But you’ve seen Mom before,” I realized aloud, nodding to the newspaper, which had made its way to the floor.

  “Yeah, I’ve been to that station a few times,” he conceded. “It’s always the same. Everyone dressed like it’s an old movie or something. And Mom is always in the paper for something different.”

  “Piper?” I looked up to her as she was making the coffee. “Is that the same station where you got on?”

  “No.” She sighed, looking like she was growing tired of this conversation. Or maybe she just didn’t like how it was affecting Robbie. “Different station, same dimension.”

  “But why?” I couldn’t help but wonder out loud. “There are billions of dimensions. Why does the train keep getting sucked back to that one? It’s like it has some sort of pull or something . . .”

  “I don’t know.” My brother shrugged. “We started showing up there a lot after Piper came. To be honest, I’m sick of trying to figure out how any of this works.”

  “But maybe Piper connects you to it somehow since it’s where she got on—”

  “Time for your lesson, baby,” Piper said, returning with three cups of coffee and handing me one. “Pick a subject.”

  Robbie got up and started rifling through some of the books that they kept by the bed. I must have looked confused when he glanced up and caught my eye.

  “Piper teaches me something new every day,” he said, smiling at her like she was the damn Mona Lisa.

  “You can’t go through life with an eighth-grade education,” she said to me, clearly waiting for me to agree.

  But this isn’t life, I thought to myself as he continued to scan the books.

  I didn’t say it out loud. I just watched Robbie from a slight distance, as though he was a painting to be examined. I was still trying to gauge how four years on this train had affected my brother. He’d grown strangely quiet, like he had left the room but his body remained. Robbie had always been melancholy at times, so in some ways this gloomy air was a welcome reminder that I truly had him back.

  But he never seemed to shake it off anymore.

  I pictured myself on this train. All alone, for years, waiting for an end to a nightmare that might never come. And I knew that, had it been me, I wouldn’t have been strong enough. I would have gone crazy long ago.

  This is no life, I repeated to myself. I have to get him out of here.

  “Mmm, how about graphing?” Robbie asked, handing her a math textbook that looked like it was about forty years old.

  “Oh, wow,” Piper said. “Okay, let’s see what I remember. Not my best subject.” She turned to me then. “Do you know a lot about graphing?”

  “Make an x and a y line,” I stated, my mind already racing to another place, trying to connect the dots of the thoughts that were swirling around in my head. “And once you solve for where x and y intersect,” I continued, following my brother’s gaze out the window, “then you can chart the location.”

  Piper nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.” She opened the book and reached into a tin cup on the windowsill for some pencils. “So let’s get started.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, standing with no real idea where I wanted to go. “I’m gonna just . . . I’m gonna lie down.” I headed next door into the lounge car, and once alone, I plopped myself down on the sofa. My eyes scanned over the books, with their obscure titles and worn print. Some of them must have been from the original train library, maybe one hundred years old. Someone bought those books once. And that someone was no longer here.

  There was a way off this train. I knew it—x and y always intersected somewhere. You just had to chart the right point. And find a way to get there. My mind kept returning to the idea that Piper’s presence was somehow luring the train back to the dimension where she had boarded. Was it possible that the conductor was trying to take her back to where she had come from, as if to say, “You can stay here, it’s where you belong”? So then why wasn’t the same happening for the place where my brother and I had boarded?

  Was it because we had never really “boarded” at all? We’d been hit.

  Robbie never saw the conductor until the first time the train stopped. And so he wasn’t a real passenger. Passengers have to be admitted. Passengers have to buy tickets. “Wait a second,” I said to no one. “Wait a second.”

  I got up and crossed the little platform between cars, coming back into the bedroom car and closing the door behind me. “You’ve never bought a ticket,” I declared, looking at Robbie.

  He shrugged. “I don’t have any money.”

  “Of course the train won’t take you where you want to go. You have to buy a ticket first.”

  “Do you have any money?” asked Robbie.

  I bowed my head, thinking of the time I had stolen the hundred-dollar bill from the cash register for Brady. But something told me that the kind of tickets they sold in the stations weren’t what we needed. This wasn’t a normal train, and it didn’t need normal currency.

  I checked my pockets, and of course all I found there was Kieren’s flattened penny.

  “Not really.”

  That’s when the train did something odd. It sped up, taking the next curve at such velocity that the whole car tilted to the side and for a moment I thought we might tip over. I grabbed the wall, bracing myself, but we made the turn and straightened up again.

  Then we entered a tunnel and everything grew very dark. Only intermittent flashes of light speared their way into the car through the windows as we would occasionally pass openings in the tunnel, only to be plunged into the darkness again.

  “What’s happening?” Piper asked, and for the first time, I actually heard fear in her voice.

  “I don’t know,” Robbie said.

  We all stood frozen in our spots, not sure what we were supposed to do. Something was happening, but clearly none of us knew what.

  The train continued to chug along, its rhythms steadily increasing and the tunnel seeming to never end.

  And then we heard the footsteps. At first, I thought it was more banging from the train itself as it shot its way through the tunnel, but then the pat-pat, pat-pat of heavy boots hitting the wood planks of the floors became undeniable.

  Someone was coming this way, and getting closer.

  I moved towards the bed, away from the lounge car where the footsteps were growing louder. And finally, with nowhere left to go, I sat next to my brother, feeling his hand on my shoulder. My heart was pounding out of my chest as the door to the car opened.

  The conductor stood there, staring down at us with his skeletal eyes and a face completely devoid of emotion. An eternity seemed to pass while we all sat there, and I could hear the breath catching in Piper’s throat. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her bury her head in Robbie’s arm. I felt like the Angel of Death had come to claim us, but I knew I had to stay strong.

  “Tickets, please,” was all he said.

  Robbie gulped in a deep breath, and I looked to him to judge by his reaction if this had ever happened before. The answer, clearly, was no.

  “We don’t have any . . . ,” he began.

  “Here,” I said, standing and thrusting out my hand. “Here
you go.” I held out Kieren’s penny, and the conductor’s eyes fell to meet it.

  He took another step towards me, and I wasn’t sure if my legs would be able to hold me up. But my knees stayed locked, and I held my ground.

  The conductor reached out one of his bony hands, and I could see the coin shaking in my palm at the sight of his long stick-like fingers touching mine.

  He took the penny out of my hand and put it in his pocket.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  I looked back at Robbie and Piper, sitting together on the bed, their eyes glued on me and clearly having no idea what was happening.

  “Home,” I said. “Take us home.”

  The conductor continued to stare at me for a moment, his deeply set eyes almost hollow in their emptiness.

  And then he nodded, and he left the car. A moment passed in which none of us spoke.

  But after that moment, the train slowed down, and it left the tunnel, shedding a burst of light into the car.

  The train pulled through many more stations that day, and it would slow down as it passed through, but it didn’t stop. I began to realize, after a while, that most of the places we pulled through were indistinguishable from each other. Most planes, I suspected, weren’t really that different from one another. People went to work, they took their kids to school. College kids with large backpacks would wait together in clumps, off on some summer camping trip or on their way to study abroad somewhere.

  Sometimes we would pass through stations where the fashions were different, like in the strange 1950s-inspired world where my mother was, apparently, some sort of political figure who ran a fancy hotel.

  We passed through a place where half the women were wearing corsets outside their clothes, and another where the men all had their heads shaved, while the women had very long hair that they seemed not to have cut in years.

  We passed through an empty station. Not even an alley cat was waiting for the train there, and I wondered if the station was closed, or something horrible had happened to all the people.