The Secret Runners, page 11
“It could be the past,” Hattie said.
“It could alternate between the past and the future…,” Dane said. “Every time we open the portal, it might be opening up randomly to a different time.”
“But what about the trash heap?” Bo pointed out. “It only ever grows. It doesn’t disappear or get smaller. Stuff only gets added to it. I don’t think it’s random.”
I recalled finding the well concealed in the thicket behind the Swedish Cottage. It was definitely here in our present-day New York.
“Seriously, we don’t know what the hell it is,” Verity said, “let alone when the hell it is. Except for that one time Bo shimmied up to the top of the well, looked around for a minute, and saw the city in ruins, none of us has ever gone out into the world up there.”
“What about that bald man I saw up the well?” I said. “The one who laughed at me.”
Bo shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Have you seen him before?”
Hattie said, “A couple of times. Sometimes he wears a hoodie. I call him Mr. Insane.”
Misty said, “We have no idea who he is, but he makes it a hell of a ride, doesn’t he?”
I blinked hard, taking it all in.
“How did you discover it?” I asked.
“We didn’t,” Misty said. “It got passed down to us.”
“What do you mean?”
Misty held up her necklace, which now had its amber gem clipped back into its figure-eight centerpiece.
“A long time ago, my great-grandmother gave this necklace and another one just like it to my grandmother, who gave them to my mom when she turned fifteen. My mom still keeps one necklace with a similar gem in it herself, while she gave this one to Chastity and me. We share it.”
“Where did the gems come from?” I asked.
“You know about the Manhattan Purchase?”
“Of course.”
“Remember the colored glass beads that the Indians took from the Dutch in exchange for the island? They weren’t just any old beads, and they sure weren’t worth twenty-four bucks. Some say that the Dutch had stolen them from the Indians and were returning them. To get them back, the Indians offered the Dutch the entire island of Manhattan. In any case, those beads somehow made their way to the Mayflower settlers in New England: our ancestors. Two amber ones—these two gems—came to my family.”
Misty shrugged. “Obviously, it’s all pretty strange to begin with, but there are a couple of extra things about the portal that are super weird. First, it only works between December and April. Why? We don’t know. And second, it won’t allow anyone younger than fifteen or older than eighteen to pass through it. It knows how old you are. Once you turn eighteen, it won’t let you pass. The light barrier just won’t let you through, in the same way it won’t let you go back out through the entrance.”
Chastity said, “Which is why the gems get passed down from generation to generation. After you turn eighteen, you can’t enter the tunnel anymore. So my mom, like her mom before her—and her mom before her—ran between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. After that, she kept the gems and waited until she had children. When we were old enough, she brought us to the two private gardens and showed us how it worked.”
“Your family owns the two conservancy gardens?” I asked.
Misty stood up and went over to her bookshelf. “Our family and a couple of other Mayflower families. Those gardens are held in a very old trust that predates the building of the park and which the Met and the natural history museum wish they could break open, but that isn’t going to happen, not while I’m alive or while any of our future kids are.”
As she spoke, Misty pulled a fat hardback book from the bookshelf, a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
I was wondering what she was doing—why grab a classic novel in the middle of a conversation?—when she opened the book and I saw that its pages had been hollowed out.
A rectangular void had been cut into the core of the book.
And suddenly Misty’s choice of book became clear to me: War and Peace was long, so it was thick enough to conceal the necklace inside it.
Misty placed her figure-eight necklace inside the book, then snapped the book shut and placed it back on the shelf.
Misty smiled. “It’s a trick my mom taught me. Thieves always rifle through your drawers, and they can open any safe these days. Mom told me about one rich guy who had a wall safe: while he was away in the Bahamas, some thieves used a jackhammer to rip the whole thing out of the wall. It took them an entire day, but they did it. This is better. Seriously, there aren’t many thieves out there who are going to check out War and Peace during a robbery, are there?”
“Good point,” I said.
“As my mom told me, you just have to pick a book that you hate enough to cut the middle out of,” Misty said.
Everyone laughed.
“You know, it’s funny,” Chastity said sadly when the laughter had died down. “I’m going to be eighteen in June, so these’ll be my last runs. After that, the portal won’t let me through. I have to admit, though, I’m sorta done with running. Over it. It’s been fun, but I’m happy to pass it on to you guys, the next generation, so to speak.”
She nodded solemnly to the group, and they nodded back.
Red grimaced. “Hey, in three weeks, the whole world might fizzle out, so we may as well enjoy ourselves.”
“Too true.” Misty turned to face me. “I mean, whatever happens on March 17, you have to admit, this was a total rush.”
THE LAST DAYS OF FEBRUARY
I found it very hard to concentrate on anything the next week. My mind kept drifting back to the run, fixating on the tiny details.
The knee-high stone pyramid.
The rows of carved skulls.
The cave paintings of priests holding colored gems and men running from dogs—or were they wolves?
The mysterious trash heap.
My pink kangaroo toy, Hoppy, with the note in her pouch: He is waiting for you.
And, of course, the cackling bald figure at the top of the well who had called, “Hello, pretty girl!”
He was the worst part of it.
He invaded my dreams.
Three times that week, I woke up shouting and breathless, gasping for air and drenched in sweat. His evil laugh echoed in my head.
* * *
—
St. Patrick’s Day was now only a month away, and in some parts of the world edginess was beginning to show: there were protests in France (what they were protesting against, I didn’t quite know; I was pretty sure the gamma cloud wasn’t listening) and mass prayer events in Mecca, Jerusalem, and Rome.
In the States, we did what we always did: repressed our darkest fears and kept buying shit. Apart from a spattering of more hate crimes and some news reports criticizing the president and key members of Congress for their plan to hide in a secret underground facility during the gamma cloud (“I’m not doing it by choice,” the president said. “I’m doing it for America.”), it was, at least for the moment, life and business as usual in America.
In my corner of New York City, that meant everyone was talking about the East Side Cotillion. It would take place on Saturday, March 3, whether the world ended a couple of weeks later or not.
This entailed a flurry of last-minute activity for Misty: final dress fittings, personal training sessions, lettuce-only meals, formal afternoon teas, rehearsals, two evening soirees, and lots of gossip.
Misty had asked Bo to be her primary escort. Her other cavalier, she said, was “some pleb boy from the military academy who I was forced to invite.” The result, however, was that Bo was required to attend several pre-cotillion events with her.
After the kiss I’d shared with him, I must admit I was a little jealous. And at school, in the presence of our friends—were they really my friends now?—Bo kept a careful distance from me.
No matter how hard I tried to justify it all in my mind (I mean, Misty had asked him to the cotillion) and to not be “that girl”—stupid, needy, and boy-dependent—I still felt a little hurt and confused.
In the end, I figured it was due to Misty. Bo knew of her crush on him—knew how possessive she could be—and didn’t want to complicate things before the cotillion. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, rationalizing that he was keeping his distance so as not to make things difficult for me with Misty.
I hoped to see him at the Met again after school, if only to discuss the run on the weekend, but he was called away on cotillion and Head Boy duties every afternoon that week.
I did, however, encounter one new individual.
Mrs. Starley Collins, Misty and Chastity’s—and Oz’s—mother.
I literally bumped into her in front of the San Remo one morning on my way to school—or more precisely, she bumped into me.
I was coming out the front doors when Mrs. Collins, walking backward and scanning the street for her limo, accidentally tripped into me.
She was, quite simply, the prototype for Chastity and Misty: blond, blue-eyed, and, for a woman in her early fifties, impressively fit and slim, almost as buff as my mother. In the early hours of each morning, the StairMasters of the San Remo must have been working overtime.
“I’m so sorry—” she blurted. “Oh,” she cut herself off, recognizing me. “You’re the new girl. Skye, right?”
“Yes, Mrs. Collins,” I said. Of course, I’d seen her before, but we had never spoken.
“Call me Starley, darling. I feel like an old woman when someone calls me Mrs. Collins.” She leaned closer, smiling knowingly. “Misty told me you’ve joined her running club.”
I returned the smile. “Yes, ma’am. On the weekend.”
“They do run in a very interesting place, don’t they?”
“They do,” I said, enjoying the cryptic nature of the conversation. Secret clubs will do that to you.
“Beats doing laps around the reservoir with the peasants. I remember when I ran, way back when,” she said wistfully and a little too dramatically.
At that moment, her limo pulled up, the driver leaping to open the door. “Well, I’m simply charmed to make your acquaintance, Skye. I have to go and join Misty at a fitting. The cotillion is on Saturday, and I want to make sure my Misty makes an impact.”
She slid into the limo, and as the driver closed the door, I heard her say to him, “You’re fucking late, asshole. You were supposed to be here at eight.”
I checked my watch. It was 8:03 a.m.
* * *
—
On the Friday of that week—February 23—I left school on my own.
I ventured to the Met, pretty certain that Bo wouldn’t be there, and sure enough he wasn’t.
I sighed but sat down anyway near the Temple of Dendur and opened one of my books. I’d been reading for an hour or so when abruptly someone put their hands over my eyes from behind.
“Guess who?”
It was Bo.
I smiled broadly, every nerve inside me suddenly alive. “I thought you’d have other things to do besides studying.”
“Not anymore. My evening function got canceled. And I didn’t come here to study.”
He opened his right hand to reveal Misty’s necklace with the amber gem in it.
“I borrowed this from Misty. Wanna go for a run right now? Just the two of us?”
PRIVATE RUN
The sun was setting as Bo led me down the side of the Met and into the hidden conservancy garden near the Transverse.
Even in daylight, it was hard to get to. A fence and a dense cluster of bushes shrouded the garden from public view: you could walk past it every day and never know it was there. The sunken hatch at the farthest end of the private garden might as well have been a myth.
By any standard, it was a sublime time to be in Central Park: the leaves of the trees lit by the dying light of the sun. They shot movies here at this time of day. Romantic stuff.
I couldn’t believe we were doing this.
Together. Just the two of us.
My heart thumped loudly inside my head. I was giddy at both the prospect of doing another run and doing it alone with Bo.
All those confused feelings I’d had about him keeping his distance from me in order to save me from Misty were washed away. He could have done this run with any of the runners—especially Misty—and he had chosen to do it with me.
Arriving in the underground entrance chamber—evidently he had also got the keys to all the locks from Misty—Bo placed the gemstone on the low pyramid, and the rippling curtain of light appeared.
“You ready?” he asked.
Even though I was still in my school uniform, he wore jeans, sneakers, and a shell jacket. I noticed then that he also had a backpack.
“You bet,” I replied, looking from the backpack to his eyes.
Then we stepped through the light barrier together.
SECOND RUN
Even though it was only my second time inside the tunnel, it felt like my third. I think I’d mentally appropriated Red’s initial run as my own.
And this run was actually more of a walk. It was not the late-night scramble that my first one had been with the larger group.
After he removed the gem from the little pyramid and extinguished the curtain of light behind us, Bo lingered near the entrance and took photos of the ancient carvings and drawings.
“I’ll share all these photos with you later,” he said. “I want to look them up afterward. See if I can figure out what this place actually is.”
There it was again, that curiosity. It was one thing to run through here for cheap thrills, but, like me, Bo wanted to know what it was we were actually running through.
He peered at the cave paintings of the priests holding their colored gems and the young men running from the dogs.
“I’ve been thinking about these paintings. Did some more research,” he said. “I don’t know about the guys holding the jewels, but these images of the running men resemble paintings found in some Mayan ruins in Guatemala. Those paintings are thought to represent initiation ceremonies for young warriors: the would-be warriors had to outrun a pack of wolves through a narrow canyon or tunnel. I wonder if running through this tunnel—in another time, chased by wolves, with only one way in and one way out—was an initiation ritual of some kind. A test of nerves for teen boys. After all, only young people can enter it.”
“Not a bad theory.”
“I haven’t even gotten started,” Bo said.
“What do you mean?”
“I want to see what’s up there.”
“You want to go outside?” I said, alarmed.
“Don’t you? Don’t you want to know what’s out there?”
I thought of the cackling bald man, but I had to admit, I did want to know.
I nodded silently.
We were still near the entrance portal. I looked back into the entry cave and saw the dust-covered ladder leading up out of it.
“Do we go up that way?” I asked.
Bo shook his head. “We can’t. We checked it on one of our first runs. In this time or dimension, something heavy has been placed on top of the hatch up there. Dane, Griff, and I couldn’t get it open, no matter how hard we pushed. It’s the same with the hatch at the other end of the tunnel. We’ll have to go out through the well hole.”
A short while later, we came to the trash heap under the well hole, and I saw the full extent of Bo’s preparation.
He extracted from his backpack a long nylon rope with knots along its length and a triple-pronged steel hook at one end: a grappling hook.
Bo straddled the top of the trash heap, his feet sliding awkwardly against the accumulated litter as he tried to get a stable footing, and then he began throwing the hook up into the well shaft.
It took five attempts—it wasn’t an easy throw, even for an athlete like Bo, and every time the hook clattered loudly against the upper rim of the well and fell back, I thought of the bald man hearing it.
Then, with a soft whack, the hook caught hold of the rim and didn’t fall back.
Bo tested it. It held his weight.
He looked at me with an excited smile. “Let’s see what’s up there.”
He must have seen my hesitation, because right then he paused and stepped over to me. He held me close in his arms, leaned down, and kissed me tenderly on the lips.
If our first kiss had been quick, spontaneous, and uncertain, our second one was confident, assured, and unhurried. Damn, it was good. I could definitely get used to kissing Bo Bradford.
After a pleasantly long time, we separated.
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Trust me.”
Then he turned, grabbed the rope, and began climbing it, hand over hand, gripping the knots along its length. Within moments, he had clambered up and out of the tunnel. I watched him go all the way up the well until I saw his feet disappear over the outside rim.
And suddenly I was wholly alone in the tunnel and I didn’t like it.
It was almost as if I could hear ancient voices screaming.
I looked at the trash heap and noticed that Hoppy the Happy Kangaroo was still there.
I didn’t want to stay there by myself, so I grabbed the first big knot on Bo’s rope and hauled myself quickly up.
If the tunnel was claustrophobic, the well was doubly so.
I only just fit inside it. The slick brick walls closed in tightly around me, with barely a few inches to spare on either side.
At length, I reached the top, where Bo was waiting with an outstretched arm, and he pulled me up the last two feet.
