I crawled through the panel and stood up in the small room, looking around curiously. Maybe it was a hideout built during the war or something. Maybe there used to be a witch living in this house who had to hide whenever the peasants came around. The possibilities were endless. I ran my hands along the three wooden walls, which were worn and smoothed from wear. Inevitably my eyes fell on the lever. It was nothing more than a small plank of wood attached to a rusty old cog, but what it did, I had no idea. Perhaps there was another secret room behind this one?
I reached out for it, the much smarter side of my brain telling me that it probably wasn’t a great idea to pull a lever without knowing what it did.
But I don’t listen to the smarter side of my brain nearly as much as I should…probably because it’s usually telling me to eat some celery and go for a jog. My hands found the old lever, and with a final guilty look back into my closet, I pushed down on it.
Yep, I’m an idiot.
The room suddenly plummeted downward, and I realized with a feeling of complete and utter stupidity that it wasn’t a room: it was an elevator. And it moved fast. My socked feet started floating off the floor as the elevator dropped like a stone. I frantically tried to grab onto something. My grasping hands found the lever, and I clutched it desperately and screamed as the elevator just kept falling. I tried to pull the lever up but it wouldn’t budge. I was trapped.
My panicked brain started to wonder if the elevator was even attached to anything, or if I was literally just plummeting down a hole. What if it went on forever? What if I smashed into a lake of lava? My body just kept rising higher and higher off the floor, and I gripped the lever, my knuckles turning white, and screamed until my voice was hoarse. I pictured Stache and my mom when they found the elevator shaft in my closet, when they realized what had happened, when they told Tom. My eyes started to water and then tears streamed freely from my face, heading up instead of down and soaking into my hair. It was all over. I was going to die. I remembered the warning carved into the panel: it’s not too late. I really wish they’d been a little more specific.
And then, suddenly, I saw light. White light.
I assumed I must have died, since any light under the earth would obviously be the fiery red of lava. There was no other explanation: I must have died. Except why was I still falling?
The light grew brighter and suddenly the shaft slipped away at the front of the elevator. The elevator only had three walls—the front was completely open. I wasn’t staring at endless rock anymore. I was staring at…a landscape. For a second, I forgot I was even falling. I just looked out in bewilderment as a massive green expanse opened up in front of me, stretching for miles in all directions and seemingly meeting distant, towering rocky walls on all sides. It didn’t make any sense: I saw what looked like homes and roads and even a brilliant blue lake shimmering in the light. But how was there light? I peered up, leaning out just a little to get a better view, and saw something shining far above, nestled against the ceiling of stone that stretched farther than should have been possible. None of it made any sense.
And then I looked down and saw that the beautiful green landscape was rushing toward me at breakneck speed. I was going to smash into the ground.
I screamed again, even more desperately than before, clawing at the wooden ceiling of the elevator to see if there was any way out. My body was still weightless, powerless, and the ground rushed ever closer. I was going to smash into it.
It happened slowly, so that I didn’t even really notice it at first. I started feeling heavier, and my kicking socked feet touched the ground, my grip on the lever loosening. The ground started to approach a bit more slowly, and I realized with a tinge of hope that the elevator might not be broken after all. In fact, I was soon gliding along at a comfortable clip, and when it finally touched down, it was just a gentle bump in the tall grass. I leaned against the elevator wall, unable to move. My entire body was shaking violently.
I found myself looking at a winding dirt pathway running out from the elevator, cutting across an emerald meadow of tall grass and tiny flitting butterflies. Squat farmhouses lined the pathway like patches of flowers, and in the distance a huge stone castle, white as ivory, perched on a rocky outcropping, bordering a quaint town and that crystal clear lake that glinted in the blazing light of whatever was up on the ceiling. I even think I saw a bird wheeling around overhead, though it looked abnormally large and blue.
But most notable of all was the little old man sitting in a rocking chair beside the elevator, smiling at me through a beard like a snow-covered thicket, tiny yellow stumps of teeth just visible through the brambles.
“So it was you,” he said thoughtfully. “Eldon won’t be happy.”
I stared at him for a moment before finally finding my voice. “What?”
His eyes were grey and stormy, not matching his frail appearance or smile. “You’re the one,” he said, looking me up and down. “Eldon said it had to be wrong. That the house had made a mistake and would fix it. But you’re here, and that means it’s you.” He chuckled. “The other ones are going to have a field day. And at such a time, too.”
I gingerly walked out of the
