Down World by Rebecca Phelps (best new books to read .txt) 📕

My face must have revealed my shock, or maybe it revealed that I didn’t believe her.

“It wasn’t an affair. Don’t worry. Just old friends. Talking about old times. But John had asked her to bring something. She refused at first. They fought about it. And he told her if she did this one last thing, it would be the end. The real end.”

“What did she bring?”

“It’s a kind of a key,” Sage said. “One that John had built years before. No one knew about it but Rain. Sorry, Ana.”

“A key that builds a portal?” I asked. It was getting very late and we had been talking for so long that despite myself, I felt my eyelids growing heavy. It was all so much, too much to take in. All these things my mother had done. It was like she was talking about a person I had never met.

“A key that builds a portal,” Sage conceded. “I thought John was done with all that. I thought he had moved on, away from the world down below, away from your mother. But I was wrong. And when I saw what she had brought, I knew. I knew that it would never be over. Not for us. And I suppose I also knew that John would never love me the way he had loved your mother.”

“Where are Dave and Jenny?” I asked, thinking of that magical door lurking beneath the surface of the lake, and imagining it swallowing them whole. They won’t come out.

“They left years ago. I don’t know where they are. Now it’s late,” Sage said, taking away my dinner tray. “Get some sleep.”

She stood and turned off my bedside lamp, revealing how dark the nights were here in the middle of nowhere. Slowly a bit of starlight started to glow through the drawn curtains, and I was looking at it as I finally acquiesced to the sleep that my body seemed to crave.

As Sage tiptoed out of the room, one last question escaped my lips. “Is her name really Rain?”

But she was already gone.

CHAPTER 13

I woke before dawn, engulfed in blackness. The quiet was deafening, and I had no idea what time it was. Maybe 3 a.m., maybe 4 a.m. I tried to relax my body and go back to sleep, but then I heard a soft rapping on the door. Was that what had woken me up? Did I hear it in my dream?

Another round of rapping came, accompanied by Brady’s voice, whispering with an urgency that made me forget for a moment that I was too embarrassed to talk to him.

I stood to open the door, growing worried about what could possibly be so important that he would wake me up so early for it. I cracked it open, the bright light of the hallway making me squint. I still wasn’t entirely awake and I could feel myself shrinking away from the world outside.

“I have to come in.”

I was glad to close the door behind us, shutting out the harsh lights and bringing him into the safe space of the quiet room. But he immediately turned on a lamp.

“What’s going on?” I asked, waking up even more as the look on his face confirmed that something was indeed quite wrong.

“You got a phone call,” he said, holding up his cell phone.

“Okay.” My mind was racing. Nobody knew to reach me on Brady’s cell phone. I rubbed my eyes, the thoughts processing all at once. “Who?”

“Your dad. I didn’t answer. He didn’t leave a message. But I saw your home number come up on the ID.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, Marina. I didn’t know what to do.”

“How did he . . .”

“He must have traced the source of the emails. Or, I don’t know, would your friend Christy have told him?”

I caught my breath, thinking very clearly now. Brady was right—there were only a handful of options. One was that he had traced the emails. My dad was a genius when it came to computers, but I was pretty sure even he wouldn’t have the technology to do something like that. But the police would. Oh God, were the police involved?

“Christy wouldn’t have told him,” I said, talking more to myself than to Brady.

“Even if there were an emergency?”

I looked at Brady, and I had never seen him so worried. “What emergency?”

“Your mother?”

“Kieren would have called if she were back.”

“What if he doesn’t know?”

“Just stop!” I shouted. “I’m sorry, but please stop. I have to think.”

I started to pace, and Brady sat down on the edge of the desk, staring at his phone again as though somewhere inside of it all the answers lay hiding.

Brady’s phone beeped. I ran over to look at it.

It was a text from my dad: I know where you are.

I grabbed the phone out of his hands and stared at it while Brady leaned over my shoulder.

Another text came a second later: Stay there. I’m on my way, crossing the Oregon border now.

Brady muttered something under his breath that I didn’t catch. My eyes were fixed on the phone, and the message that seemed too awful to be true.

My heart sank. If my dad came here to take me home, then that would be the end of it. We had officially failed. And I had humiliated myself in front of Brady. And for what?

“It’s over,” I said. “It’s all over. We lose.”

Brady looked up from his phone. “What do you mean, ‘we lose’?”

“Well, we failed, didn’t we? We didn’t save anybody. My dad will be here in the morning to take me home, and that’ll be the end of it. I just made everything worse.”

“That’s not true. Listen, things couldn’t be any worse than they were before. And when we get back home, we can try the doors again. I’m sure they’ll work this time—”

“Stop!” I shouted, surprised by my own anger.

“What?”

“Just stop making things up, Brady! God, you lie about everything. I’m not a child and I’m not