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

“Do you have any money?” asked Robbie.

I bowed my head, thinking of the time I had stolen the hundred-dollar bill from the cash register for Brady. But something told me that the kind of tickets they sold in the stations weren’t what we needed. This wasn’t a normal train, and it didn’t need normal currency.

I checked my pockets, and of course all I found there was Kieren’s flattened penny.

“Not really.”

That’s when the train did something odd. It sped up, taking the next curve at such velocity that the whole car tilted to the side and for a moment I thought we might tip over. I grabbed the wall, bracing myself, but we made the turn and straightened up again.

Then we entered a tunnel and everything grew very dark. Only intermittent flashes of light speared their way into the car through the windows as we would occasionally pass openings in the tunnel, only to be plunged into the darkness again.

“What’s happening?” Piper asked, and for the first time, I actually heard fear in her voice.

“I don’t know,” Robbie said.

We all stood frozen in our spots, not sure what we were supposed to do. Something was happening, but clearly none of us knew what.

The train continued to chug along, its rhythms steadily increasing and the tunnel seeming to never end.

And then we heard the footsteps. At first, I thought it was more banging from the train itself as it shot its way through the tunnel, but then the pat-pat, pat-pat of heavy boots hitting the wood planks of the floors became undeniable.

Someone was coming this way, and getting closer.

I moved towards the bed, away from the lounge car where the footsteps were growing louder. And finally, with nowhere left to go, I sat next to my brother, feeling his hand on my shoulder. My heart was pounding out of my chest as the door to the car opened.

The conductor stood there, staring down at us with his skeletal eyes and a face completely devoid of emotion. An eternity seemed to pass while we all sat there, and I could hear the breath catching in Piper’s throat. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her bury her head in Robbie’s arm. I felt like the Angel of Death had come to claim us, but I knew I had to stay strong.

“Tickets, please,” was all he said.

Robbie gulped in a deep breath, and I looked to him to judge by his reaction if this had ever happened before. The answer, clearly, was no.

“We don’t have any . . . ,” he began.

“Here,” I said, standing and thrusting out my hand. “Here you go.” I held out Kieren’s penny, and the conductor’s eyes fell to meet it.

He took another step towards me, and I wasn’t sure if my legs would be able to hold me up. But my knees stayed locked, and I held my ground.

The conductor reached out one of his bony hands, and I could see the coin shaking in my palm at the sight of his long stick-like fingers touching mine.

He took the penny out of my hand and put it in his pocket.

“Where do you want to go?”

I looked back at Robbie and Piper, sitting together on the bed, their eyes glued on me and clearly having no idea what was happening.

“Home,” I said. “Take us home.”

The conductor continued to stare at me for a moment, his deeply set eyes almost hollow in their emptiness.

And then he nodded, and he left the car. A moment passed in which none of us spoke.

But after that moment, the train slowed down, and it left the tunnel, shedding a burst of light into the car.

The train pulled through many more stations that day, and it would slow down as it passed through, but it didn’t stop. I began to realize, after a while, that most of the places we pulled through were indistinguishable from each other. Most planes, I suspected, weren’t really that different from one another. People went to work, they took their kids to school. College kids with large backpacks would wait together in clumps, off on some summer camping trip or on their way to study abroad somewhere.

Sometimes we would pass through stations where the fashions were different, like in the strange 1950s-inspired world where my mother was, apparently, some sort of political figure who ran a fancy hotel.

We passed through a place where half the women were wearing corsets outside their clothes, and another where the men all had their heads shaved, while the women had very long hair that they seemed not to have cut in years.

We passed through an empty station. Not even an alley cat was waiting for the train there, and I wondered if the station was closed, or something horrible had happened to all the people.

And finally, after the long day and another night had passed, the train chugged its way onto a small platform with a little rundown station next to it, covered almost completely in ivy.

None of us recognized it at first, and probably wouldn’t have thought much of it had the train not pulled to a stop.

I looked at Robbie, whose blank eyes were staring out the window like a child seeing a distant uncle that he had no memory of and didn’t want to hug. Piper seemed distracted, reading something in a large book, and barely even looked up.

“Guys,” I said, standing to get a better look and finally recognizing small things, like the way the awning that hung overhead had a small crack in it, and the way the shadows fell on the stairs leading to the platform. “I think we’re here.”

We all stood and looked out together, Robbie beginning to shake his head. “No, this can’t be it.”

“It is it,” I insisted. “Can’t you tell?”

“It’s too small,” he almost muttered, and I could see him regressing back into himself, becoming once again the child he had been