Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

“We were able to keep the secret for quite a while, more than a year. We developed rituals around it. Out on the old grounds—there were these old carnival grounds that had been built in the forties for military kids. Fun houses and swings. It was all made to look like a little Nordic village. By the nineties, when we were teenagers, it wasn’t used for much. The company that had run it went out of business and the town used it on occasion for holidays. At night it was empty.

“We would go there before going down into the portals, late at night, and we would hold a little ceremony, blessing our journey.”

I smiled, trying to imagine my mother as a part of that group, how beautiful she must have been then.

“I know it probably sounds strange to you, that we were on our own so much. You have to understand, things were very different then. No one locked their doors. Kids were expected to take care of themselves quite a bit.”

I nodded. “And then?”

“And then spring came and we all graduated. But nobody wanted to leave. Our parents couldn’t understand why none of us wanted to go away to college. Dave’s dad threw him out, called him a bum. He and Jenny got an apartment outside of town.

“John started to warn us that we had to be more careful. That we needed it too much, like a drug. He was right, of course. It can become an obsession. Our eyes would be glassed over during the day, wired open at night. We found ourselves unable to talk about anything else. Unable to enjoy anything that didn’t happen when we were inside one of the doors, finding a new plane. Taking risks we wouldn’t take above ground.”

“What kind of risks?”

She nodded, seeming to weigh the question, or maybe unsure how to answer it.

“The different planes, they’re like galaxies. Nobody knows how many there are. Billions, maybe. Maybe more. And it started to become clear that you could do whatever you wanted in these planes. Probability told us we’d never end up in the same one twice, so there were no consequences.

“We started to steal things from the different planes, try on new personalities, crash in empty houses. Dave cheated on Jenny, figuring she would never find out anyway. But she did.”

“How?”

“Because I told her,” Sage said, a sardonic smile on her face. “He’d cheated with me.”

“That’s terrible,” I uttered, without really thinking. “I’m sorry, it’s just . . .”

“No, you’re right. We did terrible things. When you believe there are no consequences, you start making incredibly selfish decisions. And we were all going down that rabbit hole. It was corrupting us, splitting us up. I’m not proud of it.

“Jenny was furious. She wanted to leave. And then John said it was getting too dangerous, and we all had to leave, immediately. It was like the moon had fallen out of the sky.

“I demanded to know why. I wasn’t ready to go. And then John told us. He and your mother had discovered the train portal. It was an accident, of course. They were biking along the track when your mother noticed a squirrel run in front of the train. And she could have sworn she saw that flash of light. You know the one?”

I nodded, flinching at the thought of the train hitting the squirrel, and thinking of my brother.

“They experimented with it for a while, trying to find it and realizing, of course, as you have, that it only exists for a split second when the train is passing. But while they stood waiting, searching, that’s when they noticed. The planes shifted. Buildings disappeared. For a moment, the track itself was gone, and they were in the middle of a great farmland. And then the track was back, and the rest of the city around it. But the colors were somehow off, they said. Like they were home, but somehow still in Down World. They waited until the next train passed to see if the flash happened again. But instead, something else happened. The squirrel leaped back out in front of the train and was immediately struck and killed by it.

“When the train had finished going past, the little body of the squirrel was there, crushed. And everything went back to normal.

“But we knew, all of us, that something had shifted. Things were getting too real, too scary. John had some money a grandmother had left him. He used it to buy this hotel after he found it at the back of an old real-estate flyer. It was going to be a fresh beginning. We were going to move on.”

“But you didn’t, did you?”

“You have to understand,” Sage began, her eyes imploring me. “You try. Every day you try. You try to be good. You try not to think about it. You try to remember what it was like before you knew. And we all pretended for a long while. For the first year we all lived out here together, congratulating ourselves on how well we were doing. But then it would creep in again. Someone would mention another dimension at dinner or wear a bracelet I knew they had stolen from another plane.

“It was too much for your mom, and she left John. She went back home, said she missed her parents. She was done with the portals, done with us. It was her way of moving on, by leaving us. We were nineteen then.”

“And you took her place.”

“I had always been in love with John. I guess a part of me was always waiting for her to leave.

“So your mother met your father, got married, had your brother and you. And then one day, maybe five years later, she showed up here with you by her side. ‘Just a visit,’ they told me.

“I didn’t know it, but John and your mother had been talking on the