“No,” he finally admitted, sighing deeply. “If anything, it felt happy, like it really wanted to be here. It just freaked me out because I wasn’t expecting it.”
Not that I even belong here, he thought. Since I didn’t really take the stupid test, and you’re all crazy to listen to me at all, let alone hang on my every word. But even he had to admit that he had seen the portal—and that he had felt the thing on the other side, wanting to come through. Whatever was happening here, he was a part of it, whether he had expected to be or not.
“Then I say we try it,” Mac declared, and this time nobody, not even Rush, tried to say they shouldn’t.
34
Experiment
In one of the cupboards, Kaitlyn found a piece of white chalk she could use to draw on the gray concrete floor of the workshop.
“I hope the color doesn’t matter. There isn’t any blue in here,” she said, but she wasn’t talking to anyone in particular.
“We’ll just have to use what we have,” Mackenzie replied. “Either it will work, or it won’t.”
Kaitlyn nodded, but then she frowned. “We don’t have the book either,” she pointed out. “I have to see the picture to get the runes again.”
“I can show you,” Sketch said. “Were there any pencils with the chalk? And some paper?”
“I don’t know about paper,” Kaitlyn said, “but there are plenty of pencils. Here.” She pulled a handful of assorted pencils out of the cabinet and handed them to Sketch, who started looking through them.
“Check in those drawers for paper,” Kaitlyn said to Sam, who was standing closest to the work table. “There isn’t any in the cabinets. Or, at least, there wasn’t a couple days ago. The table’s our best bet.”
Sam nodded and started opening the drawers that were set into the edge of the work table. In the third one she opened, she found a yellow pad of lined paper.
“Is this OK?” she asked, holding it up for Sketch to examine.
“Yeah, that’s good.”
Sketch took the pad from Sam and climbed a half-step up onto one of the industrial, metal stools, using the rung that circled the bottom of the stool to reach the seat, which was just a little bit high for him. Hunching over the table, he started drawing on the pad, and the others crowded around him, watching as the gryphon gradually appeared on the page—only in black and white instead of full color.
He didn’t want to take all night at it, so he skipped most of the detail work, outlining the creature instead and only filling in the most important aspects of its features: its curved beak, its front talons, its rear claws, a suggestion of feathers.
“Damn, Sketch,” Rush muttered.
“What?” he asked.
“That’s just really, really good.”
“Yeah,” Kaitlyn agreed. “That’s amazing.”
Sketch looked up at them shyly.
“Thanks,” he said. “Here. Is this good enough?”
He handed the page to Kaitlyn, who took it carefully and placed it in front of her on the table.
“I see it,” she confirmed. “This works.”
“OK,” Sketch said, and he put his pencil back down on the table.
“We’ll have to wash the chalk off the floor when we’re done,” Kaitlyn said, looking around at everyone. “But it should come off fine, I think?”
“Maybe test it, just to be sure,” Mackenzie suggested.
“Yeah, OK.” Kaitlyn drew a tiny line on the floor with the chalk and then walked over to a sink in the rear of the central bay, wetting a rag that hung over the side and bringing it back to the place where she had marked the floor. The chalk came away easily.
“It works,” Kaitlyn announced. “And it looks like it’s drying pretty quickly. Even if we leave the floor wet, it’ll be dry way before morning.”
“Good,” Mackenzie said. “OK. You ready?”
“I think so.”
“Let’s go, then.”
Kaitlyn drew a circle in the center of the left-hand bay, which was the one with the most room since it didn’t have either the table or the lawnmowers in the middle of it. Sam sat down in the circle, Mackenzie walked to the place where it felt like the runes should begin, and Kaitlyn followed her, kneeling down on the floor and raising her chalk, looking to Sam when she was ready.
“OK, Sam,” Mackenzie said, nodding at her. “We’re good. Count us in.”
Sam took a deep breath and then exhaled it slowly, trying to concentrate.
“Here we go,” she said. “One… two… one, two, three, four.”
They began the process in unison, Daniel humming softly but with more certainty—partly because this was now the third time they had done this together, but also because the workshop felt like a much more inviting and natural space than the strange white room in the basement.
As Kaitlyn moved from one rune to another under Sam’s direction, Rush began to feel the same odd sensation he had before, like a buildup of electricity in the air. Prepared for it this time, he didn’t back away, taking a moment instead to explore it. He soon realized that he didn’t feel it in his skin, as he had first believed, but rather in the pit of his stomach. It was internal, not external, but it spread to his extremities so completely that it was difficult, at first, to tell the difference.
When Kaitlyn completed the final rune, Sam suddenly opened her arms in the air above her head, and again the dark void appeared.
“You see that?” Sketch whispered to Rush.
“Yeah,” Rush whispered back. “And I feel it again, too.”
He could sense the creature on the other side of the portal just as clearly as he had before. He felt it clawing its way toward him, trying to crawl into the gap between them from the moment it appeared, when the tiny void was still nothing more than a pinprick in the space above Sam’s head. But soon enough, the portal began to grow—to the size of a golf ball, and then a baseball, and then a softball.
Rush felt it as the thing on the other side managed to thrust its head into the tunnel, even though Rush couldn’t see it yet, so he realized that the portal itself must have some depth to it. The creature pushed its shoulders through next, and Rush encountered the strangest sensation he had ever experienced, as he felt wings that he didn’t have, brushing their downy resilience along the tunnel walls. Finally, the tunnel opened just a little more, and Rush could feel the creature’s hopefulness as it forced the rest of its body into the portal, could sense its intense yearning to reach him, even as he himself felt drawn to it, just as before.
But this time, Rush was prepared. He did not make a sound. He did not step back from the portal. And with one final, heroic thrust, the creature surged through the tunnel, as though the resistance that had previously met it now suddenly dropped away, and it exploded out the other side, flying through the air straight at Rush, crashing into his chest, and knocking him to the ground.
35
A Night Out