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Bryce opened the door and stepped in. His breath misted, and the cold bit at his exposed skin, cutting through his gloves and pants.
Cole joined him. “What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know. Anything unusual.” Even as he spoke, his eyes scanned the huge freezer and picked up something on the floor ten meters away. As he approached, it resolved into a stainless steel trapdoor set flush with the concrete floor. He pulled on the inset ring, and the door rose smoothly on a hydraulic hinge, revealing a square hole that sank straight down through solid ice into blue darkness.
Without a word, Bryce started down the ladder fastened to the side. Twelve feet down his feet encountered a rubber mat, and a light came on, illuminating a small chamber with a single, small bench in the middle and a door in the opposite wall. He took two steps and leaned over to get a better look at the four objects that lay on the floor in front of the bench.
“Ice skates,” Cole said from right beside him.
“Yeah, the old-fashioned kind that strap on over your boots.” Bryce sat down and strapped on a pair, finding that they fit quite well, considering they seemed to be made mostly of ice. He went through the door and stepped out onto a hockey rink.
“This is really strange,” Cole said, pointing to the ceiling twenty-five feet above. “There’s no way we came down that far, and where’s the store?”
Before Bryce could reply, the rink tilted, and he found himself sliding toward the center line, which he now saw was a giant mirror, with his own reflection speeding toward him as the tilt increased. Logic said he should try to stop or turn aside, but as far as he was concerned, logic had gone out the window yesterday when a truck disappeared, and events so far today had not restored his faith in that discipline.
In the last instant, his certainty wavered, and he closed his eyes, bracing himself for an impact that never came. He opened his eyes and found himself in a round tunnel slanting down, so smooth and featureless the only indication of speed was the wind freezing his face. Over the rush of air, he heard Cole close behind him, but a fall now would be disastrous for both of them, so he didn’t dare turn his head to look. His only choice was to stay on his feet, enjoy the ride, and see where the tunnel took them.
After a period of time that could just as well have been a minute or an hour, he began to worry that his eyes might freeze in their sockets, but the tube leveled out, and he braked to a stop in spray of ice particles. He wiped his eyes and saw that he was on a frozen pond edged by leafless poplar trees under an intense blue sky.
Ice particles bounced off his legs as Cole stopped beside him, and they both turned around, but there was no sign of the tube.
“How do we get back?” Cole asked, looking up as the sky faded quickly to black and filled with way too many stars.
“I don’t even know if we can,” Bryce said, his voice coming out shakier than he expected. From the adrenaline, he told himself, though he wasn’t entirely convinced. “Right now I’d just like to know where we go from here.”
The moon suddenly shone its silver light down from high in the sky, as if someone had flicked a switch.
“Let’s try that door.”
Bryce turned around and saw a freestanding, wood-paneled door in the middle of the ice, where no door had been only moments ago. Shiny brass letters fastened with little brass screws read, “CTK.”
So many strange things had happened in the last two days that he accepted the sudden acceptance of the door without question. He skated to it, opened it and stepped through into what looked to him like a lawyer’s office, with dark wood paneling, shelves of leather-bound book, and a set of curtains that presumably covered a window.
Behind an expanse of teak, a big, black leather chair framed a little man with neat white hair and an immaculate gray suit. With his hands clasped together on the desk, he said, in a voice that managed to contain both a squeak and a rasp, “Welcome. Please take a seat.”
About Rik Hunik
