Down World by Rebecca Phelps (beach read TXT) 📗

must have been the one who’d cut the slit in the fence so Sage and her friends could get through. And for that, I owed him a lot.

But as we approached his cabin, I thought of the pictures he kept of my mother in the closet. What if he had been in love with her, and not Sage? What if he still loved her, even the dark, twisted version of her that lived on this plane? Would he still be devoted to her?

My questions were answered before we reached the lip of the woods. A slight click came from nowhere, and suddenly the entire woods around us were drowned in a sea of bright lights, which had been rigged to the tops of dozens of trees, flooding the ground below like a football stadium. We were caught, and the four of us froze.

“Hide her, hide her,” Sage hissed to Milo, who grabbed me by the waist and all but carried me off into the thickest part of the foliage to one side of the path. We ran only a few feet before I could hear the familiar dinging of a bicycle bell coming from the direction of George’s cabin.

“This’ll have to do,” Milo whispered, practically hurling me to the ground and burying me in a pile of leaves. He quickly grabbed a handful of mud and smeared it over my face, then covered all but my nose in the leaves as well. “Stay still,” I heard him add before he disappeared. I was lying under a fairly bright light from a nearby tree, and I could only hope the camouflage would hold.

I heard the little bell from the bicycle come to a chirping stop near the others on the path. “Found them,” the man in the uniform called. And soon other footsteps approached, maybe three or four separate sets of feet. I kept my eyes closed and focused on their voices, trying not to even breathe.

“George, how could you?” Caryn said.

“I didn’t . . . ,” George began, his voice small and defeated.

“He’s in love with her,” Milo replied, rejoining the others. “I told you this would happen.”

“Where were you just now?” the soldier on the bike asked Milo.

“Taking a leak,” Milo replied, as casually as possible.

“Search the woods,” the soldier called, and I heard two sets of footsteps start in my direction. I sealed my mouth and did everything I could not to move, but I knew it was a matter of seconds before I was discovered.

“She’s not in the woods, Rain. She went to the hotel,” said Sage, using the nickname that only people who went to high school with my mother seemed to know. So this version of Sage must have grown up with my mother, too, but in this reality.

Had they been friends? And if so, when did my mother change?

“Stop,” my mother’s voice responded, cutting off my thoughts. Miraculously, the footsteps stopped just short of me. I could feel my heart pounding in my rib cage, and wished I knew some magic trick to make it stop. “Why would she go to the hotel?”

“You didn’t recognize her?” Sage continued. “She’s your daughter.”

The man with the bicycle laughed. “Ana doesn’t have a daughter,” he said. “Only a son.”

I could feel the impulse to gasp hit my throat. What son? Did he mean Robbie? Was there a version of Robbie here in this plane? But not of me? Or was this some other son that only existed here? There were too many questions flooding my brain. I couldn’t process them. And my shallow breathing was starting to make me dizzy.

The two men with the bicycles were chatting softly in Russian and clearly finding each other very amusing.

“Back to the hotel,” my mother snapped. And like that, all the other chatter stopped. “George, you too.”

“It’s late, Rain. I’d like to get to bed.”

My mother must have given him a sharp look, because after a second’s pause, George corrected himself: “Sorry. Ana.”

“We’d all prefer to be in bed, George. But you keep letting these vagrants into the woods.”

“They just want to go swimming is all, Ana. What’s wrong with that?”

“They’ll spread their disease into the lake,” my mother retorted, a tone of disgust in her voice I had grown all too familiar with during her long and declining depression in our house.

“Enough,” said the guard with the bicycle. “They’ll get away.”

“The young man who came in with her?” my mother asked.

“He took off,” I heard Caryn respond. “He didn’t say where.”

“Fine,” my mother said. And the whole caravan started to walk away from me, back towards the hotel. I found my body paralyzed by fear. Was one of them lingering, waiting to catch me? I tried to count the number of different footfalls I heard receding, but it was impossible. Several minutes went by, and I lay there, listening to the slight rustling of leaves as animals paced by and bugs chirped their late-night songs. Rather than ebbing, the fear began to increase. My bones grew stiff with the anxiety of not moving. I thought I would scream from the tension of it.

And then the lights turned off.

I was alone in the dark. I could hear my breath coming out in rasps as I struggled to contain my nerves. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t care if anyone caught me—I just couldn’t stay there like that for one more second. I launched my body up off the ground, not daring to look in any direction but the lake.

Like a child trying to outrun a nightmare, I all but flew through the rest of the woods, not looking once at George’s cabin, and dove headfirst into the water. Afraid that someone might hear me paddling, I instead gulped in a large mouthful of air and swam underwater in the direction of the box with the portal in it. I couldn’t see anything in the bleak darkness, of course. So I swam as far as I could before coming