The Slither Sisters

FIVE





“You’re crazy!” Glenn said. “You want to follow them?”

“I want to try,” Robert said. “Before the gate closes. Let’s see if we can cross over.”

“You don’t even know how to swim!” Glenn exclaimed.

Technically, this wasn’t true. Robert could swim but had never learned how to swim properly, so his arms and legs tired quickly. But that wouldn’t be an issue this morning. “It’s just ten feet to the bottom,” he said. “Anyone can sink ten feet.”

“What about a bathing suit?”

“There’s no time to change.”

Robert stashed his backpack behind the bleachers. Pip and Squeak were still waking up, and he ordered them to sit tight. “We’ll get lunch when I’m back,” he explained.

Then he jumped into the pool, jeans and sweatshirt and all. As his clothes soaked up water, it felt like he had gained an extra twenty pounds of body weight.

Glenn yanked off his boots and tossed them under the bleachers. “I’ve been meaning to wash these clothes, anyway,” he said. “You coming, Karina?”

“Of course,” she shrugged. “You guys wouldn’t last five minutes on the other side without me.”

Glenn cannonballed into the pool, splashing giant waves over the sides. But Karina dove into the water without making a splash or even a ripple. It was one of the weirdest things Robert had ever seen: instead of swimming in the water, she was somehow swimming between it. And when she rose to the surface, her face and hair were completely dry.

“Everybody ready?” Robert asked.

“Let’s go,” Glenn said.

Karina nodded. “Last one to the gate is a rotten egg!”

She plunged beneath the water, leading the way, down, down, down to the bottom of the pool. Glenn followed, then Robert. The extra weight of their clothes helped them sink quickly.

Robert descended headfirst, searching the bottom of the pool for signs of a gate. On dry land, they were easy to recognize—whirling vortexes that hovered in the air. Underwater, they were proving harder to spot. Underwater, everything was whirling.

Soon Robert realized he had a bigger problem. The pool was supposed to have a maximum depth of ten feet. Karina and Glenn and Robert should have reached bottom in a few seconds, but somehow the tiled floor remained just a few inches beyond their fingertips. They seemed to be going lower and lower without getting anywhere.

When Robert finally paused to look up, he realized they had descended into a sort of canyon. The sunlit surface of the pool was now fifty feet above—and he was still sinking. The water was turning darker and darker.



Robert wanted to call out to his friends and make them stop. Going deeper seemed like a terrible idea. What if the pool had no bottom? What if it stretched into infinity?

But turning back wasn’t an option. Robert tried but found his clothes were too heavy; his arms and legs were too weak. The best he could manage was treading water—keeping himself from falling farther. He paddled his arms and legs, venting bubbles through his nose, wasting precious energy and air. His muscles were going numb. His lungs were nearly empty.

“Guys!” he yelled. Underwater the word was just a muffled noise. Glenn and Karina didn’t look back, and Robert realized he had made an incredibly stupid mistake. The silent scream had depleted the last of his air, and the edges of his vision were blurring. He was now seconds away from drowning.

He reached toward his friends, wishing they would turn around, wishing they would see he needed help.

And then Karina disappeared into darkness.

But, no—Robert could still see the wall beyond her. Somehow she had vanished through the wall.

She had found the gate!

A moment later, Glenn disappeared, too.

Robert summoned the last of his energy, forcing his exhausted muscles to work just a little harder. There was a pressure in the gate that drew him in, flushing his body through to the next dimension. In an instant, the water turned from dark black to sunny bright green, and Robert suddenly realized he could stand.

His head broke the surface of the water and Robert choked on his first gasp of air. He opened his eyes but couldn’t see; his face was covered with some sort of muck. He flailed about in the water, coughing and wheezing, until Glenn scooped one arm under his shoulder, holding him steady.

“Take it easy,” he said. “Just breathe.”

Robert rinsed the muck away from his eyes. He and Glenn were standing up to their necks in a small outdoor pond. Glenn’s hair, face, and shoulders were covered with slime. Floating on the surface of the water was a fuzzy carpet of bright green algae. Robert could feel the stuff in his hair, in his ears, on his lips. He spat several times into the water. “This is disgusting!”

“Don’t blame me,” Glenn said. “This was your idea.”

Together they trudged to the edge of the pond. In front of them was a large four-story home. Robert recognized it from newspaper photographs as the Tillinghast Mansion. Even though they had crossed into another dimension that was some thirty years earlier, the time of day hadn’t changed. The sun was directly overhead. It couldn’t have been much past noon.

Karina was already out of the pond, crouching behind some shrubbery. Somehow she was still dry—she’d swum through the water without getting wet. “Come over here,” she said. “Before someone sees you.” Robert crawled out onto the grass, covered in slime, and collapsed. Karina wrinkled her nose. “You smell awful.”

“I feel awful,” he said.

“We’ll rest a few minutes,” Glenn said. “Give you a chance to catch your breath. Then we’ll go back.”

“Back?”

“Through the water.”

Robert shook his head. Swimming down through the pool had been hard enough. But swimming up? “I can’t. We have to find a different gate.”

Glenn laughed. “How are we going to do that? You want to knock on the door and ask Tillinghast for help?”

Robert studied the mansion, searching the windows for signs of life: Nothing. No faces in the windows. No cars in the driveway. And certainly no sign of Sarah or Sylvia Price. The place appeared deserted.

“Maybe no one’s here,” Robert whispered.

“Someone’s always here,” Karina said.

“Someone’s definitely here,” Glenn said. “When I look at this house, I can feel it looking back at me.”

They spent the next few minutes debating their options. Glenn insisted on going back in the water. He said it was only a matter of time before someone—or something—from the mansion spotted them. And tried to eat them. “Do you remember the giant spider?” he asked.

“I remember,” Robert said. The last time they sneaked into Tillinghast Mansion, they were nearly eaten by an enormous hungry spider and thousands of her spiderlings.

But as much as Robert hated giant bugs, he was even more afraid about going back into the water. He’d just come within moments of drowning and he was still dripping wet. He would rather take his chances inside the house.

“Let’s just peek through the windows,” Robert said. “Maybe we’ll see a gate.”

“That’s pretty unlikely,” Glenn said, turning to Karina. “Isn’t it?”

They both looked to Karina to make the decision. As often happened, she would have the tiebreaking vote. She stood up and walked toward the front door. “We’ve come this far, we might as well take a peek.”

“Wait for me,” Robert said.

“Fine,” Glenn said, scrambling after them, “but if we see one spiderweb I’m jumping back in this water and leaving you here.”