Beyond the Doors Page 7

  Because it was covered with dazzling sparks of blue energy.

  “Told you,” stated a defiant Sydney, pushing her way past him.

  “Huh,” he answered.

  “Wow!” exclaimed Alexa. “Look at the door! So cool!”

  Zack did not find it cool. Truth be told, Zack found it terrifying.

  “She just stepped right out of this?” asked Janice, circling the platform. “You’re sure?”

  “Swear to God,” answered Sydney, approaching reverently.

  “But…” Zack’s voice caught in his throat. He swallowed and tried again. “But it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s just standing in the middle of the room.”

  “Like I said. A portal to another world.”

  The four children soon found themselves standing in a line at the foot of the platform, eyeing the slightly ominous door with varying mixtures of wonder and apprehension.

  Finally, Sydney, who leaned more toward the wonder side of things, stepped up onto the platform. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” said Janice. Zack noted with satisfaction that, faced with an actual door that was actually covered in actual blue lightning, his older sister didn’t seem so gung ho on her idea. “That actually looks kind of creepy.”

  Zack smugly crossed his arms. “As I said, not a good idea.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Janice shook the caution away and glared at him. “You mean it’s not a Zack idea,” she said. “It’s a Janice idea.”

  She marched up to the door, reached out, and grabbed the chunky glass doorknob.

  The instant her hand touched the glass, the random sizzles of energy focused their wrath on the knob and, by extension, Janice’s hand. There was a sudden, high-pitched, zaplike sound as Janice gave a yelp and was shot backward, tumbling off the platform.

  “Janice!” cried Zack, instantly dropping any pretense of annoyance and rushing to his sister’s side.

  “Gah! Eeuaahh! Ow!” Janice sat on her rump, shaking her hand in the air as if swatting an annoying mosquito away from her face.

  “What happened? Can you feel your hand? Did you lose any fingers?”

  “I’m fine, Zack!” she sputtered, despite faint wafts of smoke rising from her palm claiming otherwise. “It was the biggest static electricity shock I’ve ever felt, is all.” A hush fell over the children until Janice burst into a chuckle, adding, “Did you just ask if I’d lost any fingers? Seriously?”

  Zack blushed as the others shared a smile.

  “Aunt Gladys wore gloves,” remembered Alexa.

  Sydney snapped her fingers and ran to the archaic bank of computers. “Gloves!” She held up Aunt Gladys’s rust-colored rubber gloves that had been resting on the chair.

  “Wait a sec,” said Zack, standing. “Janice just got zapped. Let’s stop and think—”

  “Not gonna happen,” replied Sydney, shoving the gloves over her hands.

  Zack could only watch, his breath caught in his throat, as Sydney approached the door, reached out a gloved hand, and grabbed the knob.

  Once again the blue sparks attacked the knob with a vengeance.

  Janice gasped. Zack cringed. Alexa shrieked.

  Sydney turned the knob without a care in the world. “It’s fine,” she said. “I don’t feel a thing through the gloves.”

  Zack’s momentary relief at his sister’s well-being quickly shifted to alarm as Sydney yanked the door wide, releasing a burst of white light that nearly blinded him. Everyone turned and covered their eyes from the relentless assault of brilliance blaring into their pupils.

  “Close the door!” yelled Zack.

  “Don’t be a wuss, Zack!” Sydney yelled back.

  “This is a bad idea!”

  “It’s the best idea I’ve ever had!”

  His eyes acclimating to the intense glare, Zack peeked through his fingers at his middle sister. “Please!” he begged. “Close the door!”

  But Sydney did not close the door.

  She walked through it.

  “Sydney!” cried Zack, panic threatening to consume him.

  “Sydney?” called Janice from the floor.

  “Sydney?” echoed Alexa, unconsciously stepping away from the open door.

  Sydney did not answer. Sydney was no longer in the room.

  “Did she really just vanish?” asked Janice, struggling to her feet.

  “Sydney?” Alexa’s voice was catching, and Zack recognized the start of a meltdown.

  A jumble of emotions poured into his head, momentarily paralyzing him with indecision. Then, through it all, a single thought swam to the surface.

  My sister’s in trouble.

  Nothing else mattered.

  Before his rational mind had a chance to talk him out of it, Zack dashed into the light.

  Janice watched Zack follow Sydney into the totally creepy wall of white, feeling as if she’d just been punched in the gut. Where were they? Were they dead? She had led them into this room, made this happen—it was all her fault. What had she been thinking?

  “Where are they?” asked a cowed Alexa, shuffling up to her big sister.

  “I…I…” Words refused to come. Thoughts refused to come. She could only stand and stare through squinting eyes at the impossible ocean of stark white light pouring out the door.

  “Janny? Make them come back,” pleaded Alexa.

  Janice shook her head, trying to come to grips with what had just happened. She had seen Sydney and Zack go through the door. They were gone. She didn’t want that to be possible. She couldn’t handle a world where that was possible.

  “Janny?” Alexa’s voice begged Janice for comfort.

  But Janice had none to give.

  Suddenly, Sydney stepped back out of the light, eyes wide with wonder. “You’ve got to see this!” She hopped right back through the open door before Janice or Alexa could blink.

  “Did you—?” started Janice anxiously.

  “Was that—?” started Alexa excitedly at the same time.

  Heart in her throat, Janice allowed her little sister to grab her hand and pull her through the door.

  It was unlike any doorway Janice had ever experienced.

  As she passed through, her skin got all tingly, the hairs on her arms stood straight up, her head felt fuzzy, and her vision blurred for the briefest of moments. Then she was through and she stopped in her tracks, flabbergasted at what she saw.

  They were standing in a large room decorated in the rococo style of the eighteenth century with big chandeliers, thick rugs, mirrors on the walls, and furniture with lots of curly gold knobs. The walls were also covered with impressive portraits of both men and women in fancy ruffles between floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with old-looking books. The place struck Janice as some sort of stuffy, lived-in museum.

  “Whoa,” said Alexa.

  “I know, right?” said Sydney. “How awesome is this?”

  Janice had to admit it was pretty awesome. Stepping farther into the room, she tried to comprehend what she was seeing. It wasn’t the scaffold-filled room in Aunt Gladys’s house, that was for sure. But they couldn’t really be here, wherever here was. Could they?

  “Why’s everything look all old?” asked Alexa.

  Janice was about to explain how the room was obviously made up in a style from long past, when she realized her sister wasn’t talking about the furniture. Everything in the room had a yellowish hue to it, like she was looking through a filter. It was creepy with a capital C.

  “All right,” she said. “We went through the door. Can we go back now?”

  “Are you kidding?” asked Sydney, putting her hands on her hips. “We step through a magic door into this impossible world and you want to turn tail and run home?”

  “ ‘Magic door’! ‘Impossible world’!” emphasized Janice. “Aunt Gladys warned us to keep out of her room, and now we know why!”

  “This was your idea,” reminded Zack.

  “And it was a bad one! Why
did you listen to me?”

  “You’re afraid,” accused Sydney.

  “You bet I am! And you should be, too!” Janice turned and grabbed the handle of the door they’d just gone through—a door she didn’t remember closing. “Tomorrow morning we can corner Aunt Gladys and make her tell us what’s going on, but right now we need to—”

  She pulled the door open and stopped.

  Instead of a bright white light or tons of scaffolding, the door opened into an even larger room. Equally ornate, equally old, equally yellowish.

  The biggest difference between the two rooms was the butler currently setting a tea tray down on a side table next to a very plush sofa.

  Janice gasped. Her brother and sisters gasped. The butler looked up, saw the children, and gasped, dropping his tray. The tea set balanced on the tray did not gasp, choosing instead to crash to the ground and shatter into tiny shards of fine china.

  “Who are you?” asked Janice with what she realized was most likely a remarkable amount of stupidity.

  “Redcoats!” screamed the butler, turning and running out of the room. “Redcoats in the parlor!” He waved his hands in the air as he ran, making him look like a poorly drawn cartoon character.

  Sydney quickly jumped forward and slammed the door closed.

  “What are you doing?” asked Janice.

  She held up her still-gloved hands. “You need to open it with these, dummy.” She grabbed the handle and yanked it open, only to find the exact same room as before—minus the butler, who they could still hear yelling “Redcoats!” off in the distance.

  “Huh,” muttered Sydney.

  “I don’t understand,” said Alexa. “Where’s Aunt Gladys’s house?”

  “I told you guys this was a bad idea,” blurted Zack. “Are you happy now, Janice?”

  Janice did not respond. Point of fact, Janice was not happy and had not been happy since she had seen the impossible blue energy whipping about the door on the platform in the first place. However, the reason Janice did not respond to her brother’s question was because something the butler had said had tickled a memory, and she was very carefully scrunching her eyes together in a determined effort to draw it out. “Redcoats,” she mumbled. “Redcoats.”

  “What did he mean by that?” asked Sydney. “We’re not wearing any coats.”

  Janice knew that phrase. She’d heard it recently. Where? Back at school? Why would she remember anything from school? It referred to someone, or a group of someones. What had she been studying back at school? Not math. Not science. Not English. Social studies. That was it. Something in social studies. They’d been reading about the American Revolution—

  Her eyes went wide.

  “The British!” she cried.

  “He didn’t sound British,” said Zack.

  Janice opened her mouth to explain that redcoats was what American soldiers had called the British during the American Revolution, when three angry-looking men ran into the opposite room and aimed three angry-looking muskets at the children.

  “Hands up, British spies!” yelled the most angry-looking of the men.

  Alexa screamed and ran from the door.

  “Stop!” yelled the soldier.

  “Go!” yelled Zack, slamming the door closed as all four Rothbaum children fled into the hallway.

  Zack quickly looked both ways down the corridor. To the right, the hallway darkened before turning a corner, while light poured in from the left. “This way!” he yelled, taking a few steps to the right.

  “No!” shouted Janice, wary of the darkness. “This way!” She grabbed Alexa’s hand and ran to the left. Sydney quickly followed, leaving a frustrated Zack to bring up the rear. In moments, the siblings found themselves atop a grand, sweeping staircase leading down into a massive, two-story entrance hall. Sunlight blazed in through multiple floor-to-ceiling windows, shining off the ends of the muskets clutched by two more soldiers hurrying up the stairs toward them.

  “Halt, you redcoats!” shouted one of the soldiers.

  “Why do they think we’re British?” asked Sydney.

  Janice had no idea, but before she could admit this, the children heard the sound of their pursuers bursting through the door behind them, cutting off their escape.

  Oh no, thought Janice. We’re trapped! What was I thinking, trying to lead?

  “What do we do, Janny?” asked an increasingly frightened Alexa. “Janny?”

  “We…um…I…” sputtered Janice, her mind shutting down in the face of overwhelming responsibility.

  “Are you halting?” asked the soldier. “That would be very helpful indeed.”

  Frozen with indecision as she was, halting was as good a description as any for what Janice was doing. Luckily, she was un-halted by an unlikely source. “Follow me!” cried Sydney, vaulting herself onto the winding banister before anyone could stop her and zipping down past the approaching soldiers with a whoop of glee.

  “Careful!” said the soldier, fumbling with his musket. “You’ll fall and hurt yourself before we have a chance to shoot you!”

  “Come on!” urged Zack, picking up Alexa and leaping onto the banister. As the littlest Rothbaum screamed in a mixture of terror and glee, the two of them followed Sydney to the ground floor.

  At the top of the stairs, Janice hesitated. She was never the most graceful individual—what if she fell? A two-story drop could break an arm or leg.

  “May we shoot the spies, sir?” came a call from behind.

  “By all means!” answered the sir.

  On the other hand…Janice climbed up and let gravity propel her down. One of the soldiers on the stairs, by now ready for this trick, reached out to grab her. But a well-placed shoe thrown from below knocked him away, allowing Janice to reach the bottom unharmed.

  “Look out!” shouted the shoe-battered soldier. “They’re armed with footwear!”

  “Dear God, no!” shouted another soldier.

  “Thanks, Sydney!” said Janice upon reaching the ground.

  “You owe me a shoe!” her sister snapped back with just the hint of a grin.

  “This way!” called Zack, shoving the front door open to allow all four children to escape into the outside air.

  Before them stood an encampment of battered tents, with bedraggled men sitting randomly on the ground in various states of boredom. Other, more official-looking men rushed from one tent to another on what looked like very important business. As inside, the entire scene seemed overlaid with a dry, dusty coat of yellowish gray.

  “Where are we?” asked Janice.

  “More accurately, when are we? And how do we get home?” added Zack.

  Suddenly, the doors were forced open and the five soldiers ran out in a heady rush. “Redcoat spies!” they cried as one. “Get them!”

  “That’s getting old,” growled Sydney.

  “To the tents!” suggested Janice.

  As one, the children rushed down into the sea of tents. They twisted their way through a labyrinth of yellowing gray canvas, zigzagging back and forth to throw off their pursuers. Luckily—and, Janice thought, oddly—none of the other soldiers they passed seemed interested in joining the chase. As they ran, Janice had the idea of ducking into one of the many tents and letting the soldiers run past them, but she could never find a way inside.

  “Where are we going?” asked Sydney in midstride.

  “Away from the guns!” answered Janice.

  “My legs are tired!” warned Alexa. Zack took her hand to hurry her along.

  “We’re not going to lose them in here!” shouted Zack.

  “You got a better idea?”

  Before he could answer, a strange old man popped out of one of the canvas tents directly in their path, forcing the children to skid to a halt.

  “You can’t be here!” he snapped.

  “We’re not spies!” pleaded Janice.

  “Of course not! Your knob! Quickly!”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Sydney. />
  “You don’t…? Dog-eared dumplings! Of all the…” The old man’s face turned red, and he sputtered unintelligibly as if unable to find the right word.

  “Why aren’t you old?” asked Alexa.

  Janice’s initial reaction was to point out that the man in front of them looked quite old indeed, but she then realized what her little sister had meant.

  He’s not yellow.

  “Halt, redcoats! There’s no escape! We have you surrounded!” The soldier glared at them over the barrel of his musket. “And don’t even think about reaching for your shoes.”

  With military precision, a circle of American Revolution–era soldiers surrounded the four children, aimed their muskets, and did their best to look threatening.

  “Don’t shoot!” begged Janice, raising her arms. The others quickly did the same.

  “Apprehend them!” ordered the soldier who seemed to be the leader. “Take them down to the dungeon! The really nasty one, not the fun one!”

  “We’re not spies! We’re not British! Tell them!” cried Janice, turning back to the old man. “Tell them we’re not—”

  The old man was gone.

  The dungeon stank to high heaven.

  It was muddy and gross and nasty, and Sydney was pretty sure somebody had gone to the bathroom in one corner pretty recently.

  Brooding in the back with her knees tucked up under her arms and her unshod foot raised slightly in the air, she tried to figure out how they’d gotten here and, more important, if it was her fault. She tended to get blamed for a lot of bad things that happened, and while most of the time the accusations were spot on, this time she wasn’t so sure.

  “I wanna go home.”

  Poor Alexa was cracking. Sydney figured the only thing keeping her little sister in one emotional piece was the tight grip she had on Zack’s arm. Not that Sydney blamed her. She was pretty sure there was a meltdown in her own future if something didn’t happen soon to turn this little adventure around.