Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

Dark water. “DW I’ll never tell,” I said to no one. “This is about DW.”

The baths had been disturbed by footsteps on the stairwell leading up to the door. Someone was coming for me.

I looked quickly for a place to hide, but it was too late. That was just as well. The time for hiding was over. I turned to face the door.

Brady came in, out of breath. He had clearly been searching everywhere he could think of since the assembly let out, and when he saw me, the look of fear was quickly replaced with relief. But then a darkness came over his eyes. He closed the door behind him.

“You need to tell me what DW is. Now. Or I’ll go to the principal.” I couldn’t believe the assertiveness of my own voice. I sounded so confident, so grown-up. I wondered if he could see that my hands were trembling.

Brady nodded and came closer, and I immediately felt my stomach betray that newfound confidence by tensing up with his proximity. I willed my cheeks not to blush. And yet, there he was, not two feet away from me. And my face got hot, and I could only hope that in the darkness he didn’t see it.

“I mean it.” But this time it didn’t sound as strong as before. And I realized, hearing the waver in my voice, that it wasn’t just his nearness that was making me nervous. I was terrified of DW, a force so powerful it had made a girl disappear.

“I was trying,” Brady began, his body slumping next to me against the table, “to keep you out of it.”

I stood next to him, his warm flannel shirt so close I could feel it brush my arm. And I knew that whatever it was he was going to tell me would change everything.

“I don’t know why,” he continued. “There was something about you, in the hallway that first day. You reminded me of . . . someone.”

“Piper.” And he nodded. Despite myself, I couldn’t help but be flattered. I reminded him of beautiful, missing Piper McMahon.

“She used to get lost every day in this school. I drew her a map, but she couldn’t understand it. So I would just take her to class and tell her to wait for me after. One day she didn’t wait.”

I nodded.

“We were freshmen then. A little younger than you, I guess. Feels like a million years ago.”

“You’re not that much older than me.” I realized immediately that it was a stupid thing to say. Brady swallowed and took a deep breath. He hadn’t seemed to hear me.

“It was Piper who found it,” he went on. “She didn’t wait for me. And she got lost. And then she found it.”

“DW?”

Brady looked at me a long moment. As my eyes adjusted to the faint light, I could just make out the intensity of his gaze.

“Do you really want to know?”

Before it was a high school, as my father had told me, East Township High was an army base called Fort Pryman Shard. Dad’s grandfather, like all men back in the early ’40s when it was built, had been a young kid from a nearby farm, recruited to go and fight in World War II.

The fort was considered a great thing for the town, and for the whole county, really. Ever since the prospectors from the fancy houses on the other side of town, or “Money Row,” as my mother called it, had abandoned the place during the Great Depression, times had been tough. Now there was industry, manufacturing, all kinds of jobs for men and women, and all for the most noble reason of all—to defeat the Nazis. The way my father told it, the fate of humanity rested on the shoulders of our forefathers. And they had been very successful.

But nothing lasts forever.

When the war ended, the army sealed up the parts of the complex that were intended for top-secret purposes and connected the rest of the scattered buildings with a twisted network of hallways, forming a makeshift high school for all the screaming babies who had been left behind by the departing soldiers. The result was a building that was not quite useful for any one purpose, and which gave the overall effect of a web spun by a disoriented spider. But as far as the army was concerned, it was good enough.

The women found ways to pay their mounting bills. It was well known that beneath the fading paint of Groussman’s Pharmacy, across the street from the train station, was a sign advertising DANCE HALL GIRLS. Robbie was the one who’d shown me that. I can’t remember when. I was probably about seven. I laughed, because I could tell it was supposed to be funny or shocking. But I had no idea what a dance hall girl was.

The basement of Fort Pryman Shard became a boiler room for East Township High School. And it was one of the darkest, eeriest, and quietest places I had ever seen. If I hadn’t had Brady’s hand to hold, I never would have made it down the stairs.

It took a moment to adjust to the lack of sound. I couldn’t remember when I had experienced quiet like that before. It hurt my ears. I could feel my eardrums straining for some vibration to latch on to, and finding none, they seemed to beat against my ear canals in protest.

Brady kept holding my hand. “Just let yourself adjust to it for a second.”

As my pupils grew accustomed to the light, or rather the lack of it, I began to make out some figures. The enormous shell of what must have been the old boiler sat in the corner, clearly having been abandoned years ago with the invention of gas-powered heat. Nearby, worktables were covered with all sorts of objects, from hammers and wrenches to old textbooks.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“It’s just where they store stuff.”

“What does this have to do with Piper?”