Brady clutched my hand a little tighter. “You can go back if you want.”
The way he softened his voice as he said it made me realize that he meant the words not as a challenge, but as a gentle reminder that it wasn’t too late for me to forget about all this and go back to my life upstairs. My life without Brady.
I shook my head, although I doubted he could see it. “No.”
After all, if I went back upstairs, nothing would be any different. I’d still have the dilemma of what to do about Piper. I’d still have that haunting image of her on the train. I’d still have the voices of her parents on the news each night, begging me—me—to tell them where she was.
“I’m not leaving until you tell me why we’re here.”
“Okay,” he said, his body seeming to tense up and collapse a bit all at once. “It’s through here.”
We walked farther into the room, past the machinery. In front of us lay a dark, heavy door. Brady walked with the familiarity of someone traversing his own living room, and I wondered how many times he had been down here in the three years since Piper had found it.
Brady reached for a key hidden on top of the door frame and jammed it into the lock of the door. He jiggled it a bit and twisted it left and right until we heard a click.
“Someone made this in woodshop,” he explained. “It doesn’t fit perfectly.” I looked down and saw that the key was made out of wood. Then Brady pushed his full body weight into the door until it finally budged with a reluctant creak.
I held my breath as the door moved aside, clearing my view of . . . a hallway. Of course. What else would there be in this twisted place but yet another hallway? The long corridor was only slightly illuminated by some high-up storm windows that seemed to be caked in decades’ worth of leaves and dirt. But the light that remained was enough to show that this was a typical East Township walkway, changing course midpath, twisting one way and then the other as though it had been built to avoid hitting the trees in some imaginary forest. Only one thing set it apart. Along the wall on the right side, somebody had scrawled in black magic marker: Down down down.
Doorways along the hallway had long since been stripped of their doors, revealing that behind them lay nothing but brick walls. This was a common sight around the school. The story was that either the doorways had been intended to lead to rooms that never got built, or else Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory was back there somewhere. In either event, the brick walls were probably a good thing.
Finally, we reached one last doorway at the end of the hall. But this one had a door—a very common-looking door with a metal handle. When Brady pushed it open and flipped a switch on the wall, the view that greeted us immediately struck me as absurd. The room could have been my science lab.
It was clean and tidy with very little dust on anything. The tables had workstations, complete with microscopes and Bunsen burners. Lab coats hung neatly on little pegs along one wall, next to a giant blackboard covered with various equations and diagrams in faded white chalk, which spanned its length. It was all gibberish to me—lots of little circles and numbers. The only thing that seemed clear was a drawing near the middle of the board which showed a small circle being bombarded from all sides by long arrows; it looked like the sun being attacked by its own rays.
The room was timeless. It had no computers, but other than that, there was nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the schoolrooms. Yet there was one thing in it that made no sense to me, because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was doing there.
It was a tent. A very small army-green tent that almost looked like a mock-up of what a real tent would be. It was maybe three square feet, but taller than Brady.
Brady motioned to it.
I got angry then. “Brady, what is this? Is this a game or something? I’m not going to keep going in circles . . .”
“Just go in. I promise, that’s the end of it.”
I looked down at our hands, still entwined. He let go of me then, and I felt like a sinking ship whose life raft had just come untethered. One thought made my legs move—Piper McMahon was not afraid.
I walked over to the tent, took a deep breath, and pulled back the flaps.
Inside was a hole in the ground, nothing more. And a closer inspection of that hole revealed a spiral staircase, twisting its way even farther into the earth.
My heart was thumping. How much farther down could I go? Where would it end? Down, down, down—into the world below. And suddenly I knew. I knew what DW stood for. It was Down World. How many kids knew about this? How many had been through this science lab, into this tent?
I descended until my feet hit solid ground, and a slight purplish light emanated around me, almost magically. I took a few steps forward, gulping back a bitter taste in my mouth. And then I saw the doors.
There were three of them, all standing equally before me. And they each had a wooden sign hanging on them, letters burned into the wood, the words taunting me with their innocent simplicity: Yesterday,
