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

Inside was a quaint little bedroom, complete with a small kitchenette. Standing in front of the little makeshift stovetop, a large wooden cooking spoon in his hand, was a young man with a beard, wearing an old tattered pair of sweatpants that cut off at his shins. And I almost didn’t recognize him until I looked into his eyes, and saw that they hadn’t changed a bit in four years.

My brother looked at me, and it took him a moment to process what he was seeing. When he did, the look that came over his handsome new face was probably somewhat akin to my expression when I heard that he had died.

“No,” was all he said. His shoulders slumped and he turned away from me, throwing the spoon down on the floor.

“Baby?” Piper asked, her voice tentative, obviously aware that something was very wrong.

Robbie seemed to go a bit crazy then, and all Piper and I could do was stand and watch as he began to kick the wall of the train car with all his might. He kicked and kicked until he managed to splinter the wood by his side. And when he was done, he collapsed down into a heap on the ground. I watched as he buried his head against the wall and began to mutter. For a horrible moment, I wondered if his years on this train had made him completely lose his mind.

“Robbie?” I asked, hearing the crack in my own voice.

He turned and pressed his back against the wall, looking at me and flinching from what I imagine was the splintered wood scraping his back. Then he suddenly laughed.

“Sorry,” he said. “That was dramatic, huh?”

Piper laughed a bit, covering her mouth immediately.

“It’s just this damn train. It claims another.”

Piper offered me a half smile. She reached out her hand, urging me to come and meet her in the middle of the car. “It’s okay,” she said. “He’s better now.”

I approached Piper slowly, my eyes on my brother, who had yet to actually say anything to me.

When I reached her by the bed, she put her arm around my shoulder. She had a warmer and more generous energy about her than I had expected, and I understood at once what Brady must have missed about her, aside from her obvious beauty.

Brady. He went home to find Piper. But he wouldn’t find her there.

“Sorry,” Robbie said, still sitting on the floor. “How rude. Piper, this is my sister, Marina. M, this is Piper. Or do you two already know each other?”

Piper looked at me and shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

I shook my head as well. We had never met.

“Robbie?” I asked again, waiting for him to acknowledge me.

Robbie stared dead-eyed for a moment, still processing that I was there on the train with him, I imagine. And most likely thinking—as I was, of course—that now our parents had lost two children.

He held out his hands to me at last, and it was only a flash before I threw myself down to the floor and into his arms. Before I knew it, I felt Piper next to us, wrapping us both up into what had become a big group hug.

“This is beautiful,” she said. “I always wanted a sister.”

When Robbie and I were very little, our parents took us to explore a coal mine. It was part of some tourist trap on the road to something else, a novelty my father had read about in the back of a magazine. He had always been a scientist at heart, and I suspect he thought it would be one of those fabulously educational pit stops that peppered our childhood. Children, this is where coal comes from. This is how we power the oven.

I was probably about six at the time, which would have made Robbie eight. I don’t remember much about it, of course—part of the seamless blur of childhood. But I remember how it felt.

It was dark, naturally. Very dark. And the company that led the tours had purposely kept it that way in an apparent effort to recreate the experience of the first miners who had ventured into it. Only a few lamps hanging from chains lit the way down, down, down, into the depths of the place.

People giggled, and people talked. And their voices echoed, and reverberated, and eventually died down, swallowed by the giant darkness around us. And I remember thinking, even then, that they were only talking to cover the void. Because the silence as we went deeper and deeper started to make the skin crawl.

It grew cold, and the air grew still. But we kept going down. I held my father’s hand, and he rattled on at first about stalactites and stalagmites and the process of mining coal and converting it to energy. But after a while, even he grew silent.

I stopped to watch some water trickle over the black rock. In the dim light, it was only visible as an occasional flash of yellow, pulsating its way downward. And when I looked up, somehow and in some way, I was alone.

The group had moved on and I hadn’t noticed. I guess my father, wrapped up in the experience, playing explorer, had assumed I was still by his side. And my mother, who I’m sure had only taken the trip to humor my father, was obliviously walking, probably swirling in a sea of thoughts.

The silence was deafening. The quiet of it, the hum of nothing, made the eardrums ache. It was a feeling I wouldn’t experience again until almost a decade later, following Brady into the boiler room.

Silence creates a void. Silence begs to be filled.

I stood in the dark, feeling the great chill of solitude take over my bones, letting the silence claim me. I was scared, of course. I was terrified. But I was fascinated too. It was the first time I felt the enormity