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4

When I heard the otter call for help, I hesitated.

When I saw the doorway of the Portland Loo open into this long marble hallway, I hesitated.

But this time, staring at the wall of empty blackness at the end of that marble hallway, I didn’t even pause.

Vasco swept out his arm wide, and I stepped right though as though it was a curtain that would part for me.

It didn’t.

Passing through that shaft of darkness only took one, single step. But it was a step that seemed to take forever.

My raised foot touched the blackness. Pressed forward, and immediately…

It wasn’t that there was resistance, per se. More like it was surface tension. Like I was stepping into pudding.

My foot pressed forward, and the rest of me followed. I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to. The moment my foot started its way through that sheet of blackness, the rest of me followed. I don’t even think my muscles were involved anymore.

It was more like, touching the blackness had been my idea, but touching it meant coming through it. No backing out. No changing my mind.

And yet, moving through it wasn’t fast, either.

My foot proceeded at the approximate speed of a decrepit snail. And yet it continued forward. My leg right behind it. My hand, too.

With my hand came more sensation. Cool. Gelatinous. I really did feel as though I was passing through pudding now.

All the way to my knee and arm.

All the way to my hip and shoulder.

Thirty seconds. Thirty years. I had no idea how long it too just to get that far. My hip and shoulder touching the blackness.

My nose too. I’m pretty sure I felt that weird, chilly pressure on the tip of my nose.

But that was as far as I had to get. My foot touched down on the other side—

—and just like that, I was through.

And what I saw…

I was standing at the edge of a gigantic crystal cavern. Quartz maybe, if quartz came in pretty much every color of the rainbow, including all the little shades in between.

The floor beneath my sneakers was that sort of generic, white crystal that I thought of when I thought of quartz. Albeit giving off a soft, white glow.

The walls though. I was standing at the darkest shade of red, and I could trace the pattern of the rainbow with my eyes all along the outer edge of this cavern. The very walls all seemed to glow their color from some light source inside them, all the way up to where the colors came together in a single black, glowing circle in the center of the dome high above.

And it was high, the apex of that ceiling. Easily three hundred, maybe five hundred feet up.

A quick assessment with my eyes told me that it was at least that far across this cavern too.

Not that I could have walked straight across it.

No, the cavern descended in striated levels before me. And to guess from the little I could see, each level had walls about twenty feet high, repeating the color pattern in the opposite direction of the level above it.

The floor of this level — and so probably the same for each level — was maybe fifty feet across. Even though I could hear echoes of noises that sounded like they might have been speech coming from the lower levels, I couldn’t really see any movement or life yet.

Well, that wasn’t quite true. I could see bats flitting around up high above. Yellowish, with black wings. Huge. Fruit bats maybe? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t used to the idea of bats being so big. Or that happy anywhere there was that much light.

Bats in the Portland area, they were pretty much like bats down in the Bay Area — night dwellers, coming out to feast on the insects.

But the bats up above. They seemed to be flying for some kind of purpose other than eating. And when they reached spots on the walls, they vanished.

Watching one vanish made me jump.

“It’s all right,” Vasco said…

…from in front of me. He was in front of me. One hand raised as though he needed to calm me.

Maybe he did. I’d been standing here all of a handful of seconds maybe. He hadn’t walked past me. I knew it. I would have seen the movement out of the corners of my eye, at the very least.

And yet Vasco was right in front of me, as though he’d gone through the portal first.

Well, him and Magellan, who was standing next to Vasco, tail going like he was so very excited that we were finally here.

Magellan yipped happily.

“Give him a moment to adjust, Magellan,” Vasco said. “Then he’ll ask, I’m sure.”

“Ask what?” I said, shaking my head. “I have so many questions I don’t even know where to start anymore.”

“Not much of a surprise. You’ve been through quite a bit today.” Vasco chuckled. “Magellan here, though, he thinks your first question is how we got here ahead of you. And I admit, I’m tempted to address it first.”

“Oh, let’s,” I said, with feeling.

“Simple. Every portal is different. Distinctive in some way. You wouldn’t know that yet. No way that experiencing two is enough to get you going the right direction.”

“Portal? What do you mean? I know ‘portal’ basically means ‘door’ but—”

“Very good,” Vasco said, giving me a smile that Magellan supported with another happy bark. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You felt a … slowing, didn’t you? A sense that passing through was taking longer than it should have?”

“Oh, the last year or two of that step just seemed to fly by.”

“Years. Heh. That’s good. Watch for that if you go into Faerie.”

“Faerie?”

“But for now,” Vasco said quickly, one hand coming up again like I was a spooked horse, “let’s stick to that portal you just walked through. The reason it felt so slow was that it was warded. Remember that. Warded portals feel slow. It’s because the ward is assessing you and deciding whether or not to let you in.”

I blinked at him. “Are you saying that the archway behind me” — I jerked my thumb, but did a double-take when I saw solid crystal where I’d expected an archway.

“Finish your question,” Vasco said in a soothing tone. “It will make you feel better.”

I tapped the solid crystal wall. Shook my head. Sighed. Turned back to Vasco.

Magellan barked encouragingly, and I remembered what I’d been in the middle of asking.

I almost lost another moment wondering if I’d just understood the bark of a dog, but shook my head and focused on the question I’d already started.

“The archway decided whether or not I got to walk through it?”

“Not the archway,” Vasco said. “The portal. Specifically the wards we’d set up on the portal. Which was how Magellan and I got here before you, even though we entered after you. The wards know us, of course, so the portal whisked us right through.”

I blinked at that. Tried to make sense of it. But I’d felt his presence behind me while my foot took that eternal journey through the … though the portal.

That meant that there had to have been some point when I wasn’t in that hallway, so Vasco and Magellan could enter without passing me. And yet, I couldn’t have been through and in here yet, because they stepped in before I could.

“Breathe,” Vasco said gently. “It helps to breathe. This is a lot to adjust to.”

I nodded. Drew slow, deep breaths of the rose-scented air. Realized I could still hear the gentle strains of that Mozart sonata.

Wait. Had the music and the fragrance carried through that archway? Or did the same source reach both?

I almost asked about that, but Vasco had more to say.

“To continue, the archway was just an archway, just like the doorway to that Portland Loo was just a doorway. Until I activated the portal.”

I frowned. “Where would the archway have led if you hadn’t activated it?”

Magellan barked a five-set.

“Exactly, Magellan. He is quick.” Vasco clapped me on the shoulder. “Nowhere. It would have led right into a wall of shale, deep inside Mount Hood.”

“That hallway was inside Mount Hood?”

Mount Hood was miles from Portland. I didn’t know how many — something like twenty or thirty, I thought — but I knew I could see it looking east from I5 while driving through town.

Just exactly how many times was my jaw going to drop today? If this kept up, my mom would get proven right. I would end up catching a fly. Or something worse.

Who knew just what those bats down here lived on?

I shook my head to clear the terrible image of little insects crying for help in perfect English.

And all the while Vasco nodded. Smiling. Waiting for the question he knew was coming.

“Then where are we now?”

“Now,” Vasco said, sweeping one arm out wide to take in the whole of the crystal cavern. “Now we are in the very heart of Portal-land.”

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