They took their bikes quickly down the path, none of them daring to speak at all until they were at the backyard of one of the houses at the edge of town. Henderson was the first to speak up. “Anyone else expecting to wake up any time now?”
“I don’t know,” Murky said. “It doesn’t seem that weird to me.”
“The military locking down our town and a portal to another dimension full of ant people doesn’t seem weird to you?” Laura asked.
“Of course it’s weird,” Murky said. “Stuff like this usually doesn’t happen in Kettle Hollow.”
“Murky, stuff like this doesn’t usually happen anywhere,” Laura responded.
Murky shrugged. “I don’t know. I bet it does all the time and just no one talks about it.”
It was eerie passing by the various houses on the way to the center of town. Kettle Hollow was small enough that they knew almost every person by name, as well as who should be in which houses doing what at this time of the evening. Old Mrs. Harmsen should have been in her house with the television blaring as she watched The Cosby Show or Highway to Heaven. Annette Schuler should have been practicing her trumpet. Mr. Turnbull should have been closing up the pharmacy and harassing any kids who were dawdling by the magazine rack. But everything was dark and quiet except for the continued low rumble that emanated from the town’s center.
“Maybe we should check some of the houses,” Laura said. “Just in case anyone is still here.”
“What good would it do if they are?” Henderson asked.
“They might be able to come with us and help get everyone else back.”
“If we found another kid, then maybe,” Henderson said. “But if we found an adult, all they would try to do is stop us.”
Laura looked like she wanted to argue, but Murky could tell that she couldn’t convince herself that he was wrong.
“It would take too long to look anyway,” Jesse said. “Kettle Hollow may be small, but you heard Agent Larson. As soon as the military guys realize we’re poking around where they don’t want us to, they’re going to come for us. We need to get to that portal before they can stop us.”
The buzzing sound grew deeper the closer they got to the center of town, and occasional flashes of electricity arced up in the air from the main intersection. It seemed pretty obvious to all of them where the portal was. What surprised them though, was the sheer size of it. When Murky had heard the word “portal,” she’d confused it with a “port hole” and imagined it to be something small, like a little round window that they would barely be able to fit through. Instead what they found was a massive hole in the ground nearly thirty feet in diameter. It could have looked like a semi-natural phenomenon, a sink hole that might have collapsed open in the middle of the intersection, except for the edges of the portal, which had a static blue color and hurt Murky’s eyes to look at it. The edges of the hole were rotating fast in a clockwise fashion, like dyed water going down a drain, except the border was only half a foot wide before showing the hole beyond.
“It looks like a swirly,” Jesse muttered.
“A what?” Murky asked.
“A swirly,” Henderson said. “It’s when someone dunks his head in a toilet and flushes it.”
“Um, I don’t think the swirly itself looks like this, just the water when it flushes,” Laura said.
“Says someone who’s never had her head stuck in the middle of one,” Jesse muttered.
Beyond the edge of the portal, right where the town’s lone stoplights should have been, there was a ragged edge of rock followed by a steep drop off into darkness below. Along the edges there were a series of stairs carved into the stone. The stairs didn’t look like they had been there until recently, as they were rough and looked like they’d been carved hastily, but also they seemed to be at very strange angles and sizes, like they had not at all been designed for humans to walk on them. The stairs twisted and turned over various outcroppings as they went deeper down into the dark, but instead of being pitch black, the deepest depths of the hole had a haunting dark green glow.
“I wonder what’s causing that,” Laura said.
“Maybe the rocks have some kind of chemical reaction,” Jesse said. “Or maybe there’s something down there that’s bioluminescent.”
“I have absolutely no idea what that means,” Henderson said.
“Maybe we don’t have to do this after all,” Murky said. “Maybe we can go back and get them to change their minds.”
Jesse turned to frown at her. “Murky, have you ever known an adult to change their mind when they’re wrong?”
Murky shrugged. He had a point.
They all hesitated at the edge, none of them wanting to be the first to step over the strange border and begin the climb down those stone steps.
“Are we sure this is safe?” Murky asked.
“No,” Henderson said. “In fact, I’m pretty sure this is all the exact opposite of safe.”
“Hey, does anyone else hear that?” Laura asked.
“Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to hear it,” Jesse said. “That buzzing hum thing is rattling my teeth.”
“Not that,” Laura said. “I thought I heard…”
She didn’t need to finish that thought, because now they could all hear the clear sounds of engines
