Across the River Styx: The Down World Journals

Chapter 7

DAVE

Okay, something happened, and I don't know what to do. I mean, I'm really kind of freaking out right now. I don't want to make a big deal of it, but I also think it might be a big deal. Like, a really fuckin' big deal.

Jesus, I sound crazy.

So, last night, I was hanging out over at John's place. We weren't doing anything, just eating pizza, playing some Legend of Zelda or whatever. And he says, "Let's head over the school."

Now I knew what he meant, of course. "Head over to the school" means the doors. But we never—and I mean never—just do that without planning it first. I mean, there's a whole ritual to it. All of us have to agree on it, and we meet at the old grounds first to do the blessing or whatever it is Sage does. She's kind of superstitious about stuff like that. But you know what? We've been doing that ritual for almost a year now, ever since Rain first discovered those doors, and we haven't been hurt yet. So Sage can go ahead and say whatever voodoo witchy shit she wants to say if it keeps us safe. That's all I'm saying.

We go in twos, every time, and we take turns. Like, it wasn't even my turn because I had just gone the weekend before with Jenny. (Yesterday door to some 1970s mall, total drag. Like, NOTHING happened. We didn't even make out.)

So when John said we should head to the school, I thought he was joking. I looked at the clock, and it was already midnight. Way too late to start anything. I said, "Very funny, dude," and reached for some more pizza. And he said, "I'm not joking." And then he leaned in, and he got that look in his eye he gets when he's about to start some shit—you know the look. That kind of evil, Christian Slater look where one eyebrow goes up and he smiles like he's the devil or something. Like, sometimes I wonder if that dude is crazy.

Anyway, he got the look, and he said, "I want to show you something. But you have to be cool about it."

I can't even tell you for sure what happened next. One second, I'm saying, "No way, let's just stay here," and the next thing I know, I'm on my bike and we're halfway to the school. And it's a cold night, mind you. Like, it's almost Halloween. My fingers are freezing the whole time, and I'm just muttering to myself that I need to stop hanging out with John. The dude is nuts. Too bad he's my best friend, so I'll probably never do anything about it.

So we get there, and John takes out the key he had made to the emergency exit behind the gym. (That's another thing I'm starting to wonder about—like, where the hell did he get that key? He said he "knew a guy" who could do things like that, but it's starting to feel suspicious like all John's stories. What 17-year-old "knows a guy" who's really into breaking and entering?) Anyway, that's not the point.

The point is, we get down the boiler room, right? And we're walking down that long, twisting hallway that leads to the science room. Moonlight is coming in from those little windows that line the tops of the walls, and I swear I hear an owl hooting off in the distance somewhere like we're in "Escape to Witch Mountain" or something. And I'll just admit this now—I get scared. Like, really scared. I don't know why. It was like something felt wrong deep inside my bones.

And John is just walking calmly, and he says to me—this is how he starts it—he says, "You can't tell the others. Especially not the girls. And especially not Rain."

I swear, the way he says it makes me shiver, like suddenly my bones are ice. And I say, "Tell them what?"

He doesn't even look at me, just keeps walking. But as he's opening the door to the science lab, he says, "What you're about to see."

So there's something you need to know about the doors, right? There's three of them, of course. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. But here's the thing—Tomorrow is locked. It's always been locked, near as I can tell. Like, it just doesn't open. Rain is the one that put the signs on the doors, and I asked her once: "How do you know where the third door leads? It's locked."

And she said, "My sister told me."

So I said, "Wait, you have a sister?" Because I've been over to Rain's house a dozen times, and I've never met any sister.

Anyway, we get down to the little room with the three doors, right? And the Tomorrow door—it's glowing. It's glowing with that little yellow light that tells me someone's been through it recently.

"Holy shit," I said. "How did you get it open?"

John is silent for a second, just staring at this door like even he's freaked out by it. And that's how I know that whatever's behind that door is pretty heavy shit. So I said, "Are you the one who went through it? Is that why it's glowing?"

And he said, "Yeah."

Okay, so now we're just standing there like two assholes staring a urinal or something. And so after a minute, I'm like, "Dude, are we going through it or what?"

And I swear to you—hand to God—John took the deepest breath I've ever heard. His teeth rattled with it. So I'm getting really, truly freaked out now, right? I look at him and I just say, "If you are fucking with me right now—" But before I can even finish, he says, "I'm not."

Then he takes a step forward and he looks in that little eye hole up above the handle that all the doors have. (I seriously still don't understand why they have eye holes. You can never see anything inside them, it's just dark.) But he looks in it anyway, and then he nods.

"Let's go," he says, and before I know it, he's pushing the door open.

Just as we're about to cross the threshold into the yellow light, I say, "John, we don't have a token." And he says, "It doesn't matter." So, of course, I'm like, "What do you mean it doesn't matter? Of course it does." He swallows hard, and he says, "It always leads to the same place."

Then he puts his hand on my back and pushes me in front of him. For about a second, I'm afraid he's not gonna come with me—that he's just going to shove me in and leave me there. But when we get to the other side, I see that he's crossed over too.

Of course, it's hard to see that, because there's this weird yellow dust everywhere. I mean, EVERYWHERE. It's blowing in the wind, it's all over the ground, it's whipping us in the eyes. There's nothing else around. Like, nothing. Everything is just... well, dust.

And John, he grabs my sleeve and he pulls me over a few feet to what I now see is the side of a road. There's a telephone pole in front of us. I'm covering my eyes, of course, trying to keep the dust out of it. And I open my mouth to say, "What the hell? Where are we?" But I can't even talk because of the dust in my face.

Then John, he points to the telephone pole, and just as he does, the dust dies down. It's almost like someone turns off a wind machine. Everything gets really still and quiet. Eerily quiet. I've never heard quiet like that.

And that's when I can finally make out the poster on the telephone pole. It's a large poster that says, "In Memorium." Underneath that, it's a name I don't know: Dr. Marina something or other. And it says something like, "Our savior, our guiding light." It goes on about some invention or something that this doctor discovered, and then it says, "If you have any information about the murder of Dr..." I don't know, I don't read the rest.

I'm too busy at this point staring at the picture on the poster. And this picture—I swear to you, I am not making this up—this picture is of a woman whose face is so familiar to me that I almost gasp. John reaches out and touches her face, and I lean in closer to get a better look.

Because the woman in the picture looks EXACTLY like Rain.

A million questions explode into my head, but I don't get to ask any of them. John just grabs my arm and starts leading us back, swirling the yellow color away from us, until we're back in the little room with the three doors.

"Was that—" I start to ask.

But John has already turned around and started to head back up the spiral staircase. So I run after him as fast as I can, but he doesn't say another word the whole way home.