A Walk Through a Window Read online

  “Uh, Gabe? I don’t feel like playing hide and seek, okay?” she said, her voice sounding squeaky and scared to her own ears. She shifted a bit to one side and rolled up on her toes to see if visibility was any better higher up.

  It wasn’t.

  Her stomach twisted into a knot. Trust your instincts, her mother always said. If a situation feels wrong, it probably is.

  “Okay, this is just stupid.” Stupid and embarrassing. Her voice sounded small and wavering, but at least she still had a voice.

  Enough was enough. It was time to get scarce. “I’ll be back tomorrow for my skateboard,” she yelled into the misty room. “I’ll be bringing my brother, and he’s really big.”

  As soon as the words came out of her mouth, Darby cringed. An imaginary big brother? It had been a long time since she’d hauled him out. Must be a couple of years at least. One time she had run all the way home from school because some kids had stolen her bus pass. “My big brother will get you!” she’d yelled as she bolted onto Yonge Street. The kids just laughed. Probably the way Mr. Gabe the Mysterious was laughing now, wherever he was. “I’d better get that board back,” she muttered to herself.

  The mist had thickened so much she had to put her hands out to feel for the rocky surface of the window ledge. Bad enough to lose the skateboard. She didn’t want the stormy evening to catch her in the creepy old building. Nan would never let her out alone again.

  But something was wrong. More than wrong—weird. The stone windowsill had been right behind her. She had just hopped over it. She could still feel the spot where a sharp piece of rock had bitten into her palm as she climbed up onto it.

  Darby reached an arm straight out to feel for the window. Nothing.

  She shuffled her feet to one side about a foot. Still nothing. The wall should be there. I should have bumped into it by now, or at least grazed my knuckles. She shuffled sideways again.

  “Oh, come on,” she said aloud. First the storm and now the fog. What was with the weather in this place? But she’d freaked once and wasn’t about to do it again. Still, the fog had her completely turned around. Stepping carefully so as not to trip again, she flung her arms out wide and slid her feet side to side. The only sound was her own breathing. Finally, when she felt ready to scream—her hand brushed something.

  Not a rock windowsill. This surface was cold—so cold she yanked her hand away in surprise.

  In the second or two it took to get up the nerve to reach out again, the temperature fell sharply. Darby’s breath felt like ice crystals on her lips.

  Ice crystals?

  In summer?

  What was happening? She took a panicky step forward and sure enough—she bumped her head. Hard. Hard enough to knock her to her knees. And as her knees hit the ground, they crunched.

  Just as Darby figured out that the crunch was not breaking bones but rather the sound of frozen snow on the ground, she finally got what she had been waiting for. A light shone through the mist at last.

  With the snow under her knees came a realization. She must have fallen asleep. There’s no way this could be anything except a dream. The kind of dream where you find yourself in a place you’ve never been before and yet it seems somehow familiar.

  That had to be the explanation. There she was, on her hands and knees in some kind of crunchy snow in the middle of the summer, wisps of fog swirling and fading all around. The only thing to do was to head for the beam of sunlight that gleamed like a beacon ahead. The sun grew brighter and the air was suddenly sparkling like prisms—pretty painful on the eyes, but Darby had never been so happy to see daylight in her life.

  She crawled as fast as she could toward the source of the light. If there was a record for the fastest crawl through snow in cut-offs, Darby was determined to break it. The strangely glittering ceiling suddenly dropped, but after two head bumps in as many minutes, she just ducked down and beetled straight for the light.

  By the time Darby got up the nerve to lift her head again, she realized she had crawled nearly twenty feet past the end of whatever weird tunnel she’d been in. And when she did look up, she wished she hadn’t.

  Around her was a world of white.

  The sky was white. The ground was white. Darby had never seen so many shades of white; from blindingly bright, almost blue-white to a dull, flat white that pounded at her temples like visual static. Everything was white. Nothing was white. Everything was nothing; she couldn’t identify a single object.

  She staggered to her feet, one hand over the sore spot above her left eyebrow. First total darkness and then this? The whole dream scenario just wasn’t making sense. This all-white world had to be a result of the knocks she’d given her skull over the past few minutes. Darby remembered the time she’d smacked her head on the curb when she’d first tried out the skateboard. That had been kind of like this. She rubbed the sore spot again. Okay, the truth was that nothing has ever really been like this, but the sense that her brain no longer quite belonged in her body was the closest feeling she’d ever had to this sensation.

  That time, after the stars had cleared, her mother had plopped a helmet on her head and everything had been all right again, apart from a headache that lasted a day or two. But now there was no lecturing, helmet-bearing mother. There was no warm summer evening. Instead, there was cold. Deep, solid cold.

  Darby had a sudden longing for one of Nan’s geeky hand-knit sweaters. She touched her head again. It throbbed a bit but didn’t feel so bad, really. She took a quick look at her fingers, too. No blood.

  And yet everything was still white. She hugged herself tightly, tucked a hand under each arm and thought about the light. It had been a white light at the end of a tunnel. A chill penetrated her heart with the speed of a slicing icicle. Didn’t people claim to see a white light just before they died?

  She wiggled her eyebrows. Sure, there was no blood—on the outside. But what if all this was a hallucination brought on by bleeding in her brain?

  “Am I dead?” she whispered, and then jumped a little at the sound of her own voice. She hadn’t meant to speak aloud, but the fact she could had to mean she wasn’t dead.

  Didn’t it?

  “You’re not dead, Darby.”

  The voice, so close to her ear, made her jump again. It was Gabe. Darby felt faint with relief. She spun around.

  “Where are you?” she hissed, and then because she really wanted to know, “Where am I?”

  “You’ll see me soon enough. Just be patient, and watch for the helping hand.”

  What kind of answer was that? Darby made a mental note to find someone new to hang out with. Even Gramps was less weird than this guy.

  “Gabe?”

  No response.

  She could have kicked herself for not listening more closely to the location of his voice. Maybe reasoning with him would work. Or bribery.

  “Hey Gabe? Look, just take the skateboard if you want it.”

  Maybe that was a bad idea. She’d die for that skateboard.

  On the other hand, she remembered the light and the tunnel.

  “The board is yours, Gabe. Just get me out of here, wherever here is, okay?”

  No response, but as though borne on the wind or from a long way off, she heard the unmistakable sound of his laugh. And at last a figure materialized out of the wall of white around her. A small figure in what looked like a brown hoodie walked toward Darby with an awkward, wide-legged stance.

  Adrenaline surged through Darby and she raced toward the figure. Almost right away she could see it wasn’t Gabe. It was just some little kid, all wrapped up against the cold. All the same, she was so happy to see another human being, Darby thought the kid looked like an angel. As she moved closer, she could see so many layers of leather and fur on the small figure, she couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. Darby got within yelling distance, took a giant breath and then stopped dead. The dreamlike feeling came back in a big way. What if she couldn’t talk—couldn’t call for help? />
  Just then the kid looked straight at Darby for the first time. She could see little more than the eyes, but something about the walking style told her it was a little girl. The child raised a hand in greeting and Darby’s heart lifted in her chest. Even though this child was so much smaller, she could at least lead Darby to someone who could help.

  “I’m so glad you’ve found me. Where are we?” Darby babbled. The child didn’t reply immediately but instead did something very odd. With one hand, she reached up and pulled away the soft fur scarf obscuring her face. She took two steps closer.

  And sniffed.

  Darby instinctively stepped back. How weird was that? But things quickly got worse.

  She opened her mouth to speak again, but the child brushed past.

  “Atlée!” the child called, and Darby spun on her heel in the snow, trying to grab the child’s arm as she went past. “Mama!”

  “Look, kid,” Darby began, “I’m not your …”

  A large group of people was standing immediately behind her.

  Even after all that had happened in the last fifteen minutes or so, this was really disturbing. There must have been ten people there. How did ten people manage to sneak up on her like that? One of them stepped forward and the small child ran over to her.

  The people were all Darby’s size or even a bit shorter. Maybe a group of teens out playing in the snow? The one who stepped forward was talking to the little kid. Darby thought they must be babysitting or something, but if they had to take the little kid back home, they could take her, too. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she really wanted the company of an adult.

  “I cannot see her, Mama Atlée. I looked everywhere—I walked right to the breathing hole in the ice, but she is not there.”

  There was a low murmur of sound and several members of the group exchanged glances. The person the small child had spoken to bent down.

  “You must not do that again, Sha’achi. Not even for Nukum. I know you are a big girl now, but it is not safe to go away from the family group all by yourself. If you travel alone on the ice, the qallupilluq will come along and steal you from our family. Do you want them to pull you under the water? Grandmama Nukum will be back soon.”

  Darby tried to shake off the strange feeling of dread that had settled into her stomach. Why hadn’t the little child said anything about her? Even if the kid’s grandma was missing, surely a shivering girl in cut-offs standing with snow up to her skinny white knees would warrant some kind of comment.

  Darby stepped forward.

  “What is the bad smell, Atlée?” asked Sha’achi. She pulled the fur off her face and sniffed the air again. “It smells like the breath of the bears. Are the bears here, mama?”

  Darby shook her head in amazement. She’d been the subject of a few serious insults in her time, but no one had ever said she smelled like a bear.

  But she was anxious and desperate enough to swallow her pride. She took another step forward in the snow. “Um, excuse me. Could one of you help me? I have no idea where I am …”

  The person talking to the child stood up and pulled back her hood. Without the shelter of the encircling fur, her eyes creased against the brilliant light of the sun. “I do not know what the smell is, but it is not bears, little one,” she said, not responding to Darby at all. “Come back inside and take some food. You must eat before we journey.”

  The group encircled the small child protectively and moved away from Darby. She closed her eyes in despair. This was too much. She’d asked for help and they’d just ignored her? The whole situation was so bizarre, all she could do was follow her only hope for information. She scurried after them, trying to place each step in the footprints they left behind in the snow.

  In a moment, they began to disappear from sight and Darby wondered once again if she was seeing things. Then she realized they were dropping, one by one, into a low tunnel that led into the snow.

  Her tunnel!

  Darby picked up speed, slipping a little in the deep footprints, when she noticed that one person was standing apart from the others and had turned back to face her. The figure was slightly taller than the rest.

  She slowed her pace as the last of the others disappeared into the black mouth of the tunnel. Her eyes had better adjusted to the light, and she could now see how the snow banked behind the tunnel. The person standing to one side raised a hand and pulled off his hood—for Darby could now see he was male. He wore a carved bone tied with some kind of leather strip across his eyes for protection from the sun. As he pulled the bone away, she gasped in shock.

  It was Gabe.

  Before she could say a word, he put a hand up to his lips and gestured for her to be quiet. She found she had no words to say at that moment, anyway. He reached out and took her cold hand into his mittened one.

  “I know you have questions, Darby, but time is very short. Just know that all is as it should be and while I am beside you, you are safe.”

  “But,” she said, finding her voice at last, “why won’t they help me? Why don’t you? I want to go home.”

  He squeezed her hand. “You nearly are home, Darby. And they would help you with their very lives if they could. But you are not of their world and they do not really know you are here.”

  Darby shook her head in despair. This made no sense at all.

  “What on earth does that mean—not really? They either know I am here or they don’t. Which is it?” she peered closely into his face. It was such a relief to have someone to speak to—to touch. “Is this some kind of dream, Gabe?”

  “This time is for listening, Darby, and for watching. I know it all must seem strange, but you will learn and next time will be easier. Now take heed.”

  He pointed with one arm and shouted. “Nukum!”

  Immediately a rumble of voices came from the tunnel, and several of the people spilled back out onto the snow. Gabriel pulled his hood up and slipped on his eye covering. He joined several other members of the group as they hurriedly strapped snowshoes to their feet, lashing them to their soft boots with leather laces.

  Darby scanned the horizon, but apart from a small black dot in the distance, she could see nothing.

  “Gabe!” She struggled through the snow to where he was standing. “What are you doing?”

  She could just make out the flash of his smile inside the thick fur of his hood, but once again he ignored her and turned instead to the small child.

  “Sha’achi, you must take your mother inside and get everything ready for Nukum. She will surely be very hungry and thirsty after her long journey.”

  He stood up, looked straight into Darby’s eyes and inclined his head to indicate she was to go in the tunnel. Then he and a group of two or three others trudged off across the snow. The rest of the group slipped down into the dark hole.

  But Darby remembered that tunnel. And the memories were not good. She did not want to go back in there, so she stayed right where she was.

  Shading her eyes, she looked up. In a matter of those few moments, Gabe and his small party had travelled quite a distance across the sheet of snow. She was amazed at how quickly they could move on their snowshoes.

  She was alone again.

  Maybe it was the clear air, or more likely the pure rush of human contact, but Darby’s panic began to roll back a bit. Her brain started thinking again.

  Gabe’s strange words danced through her head. “You are not of this time,” he’d said. But how could that be? She patted her arms and gave herself a bit of a hug. She was definitely there. She was there and she was cold.

  And yet not that cold. Not as cold as she should be. She was wearing regulation summer wear: an old yellow T-shirt of her mother’s with a picture of Che Guevera on it, cut-off jean shorts and flip-flops. Correction: one flip-flop. She must have lost the other one in her scramble out of the tunnel.

  The whole interaction since she had emerged into the blindingly white day had taken maybe ten or fifteen
minutes. If she had been standing outside her Toronto house in December for this long, she’d have hypothermia by now. Sure, she was cold. But it was goose-bump-quality cold, not freezing-to-death–quality.

  But maybe a person couldn’t freeze to death when they were already dead.

  What other explanation could there be? The whole dream scenario didn’t stand up—she’d just had a conversation with Gabe. Not a logical conversation, but they had talked all the same. And there had been that tunnel with the white light …

  Yet, somehow, she just didn’t feel dead. Of course, she didn’t really have a basis for comparison. But her arms were covered in goose bumps and the spot over her eyebrow where she’d cracked her head the second time was very tender to the touch. And she couldn’t even begin to list all the ways this place was different from any sort of afterlife she had pictured.

  Darby looked down at her bare foot. Her toes were cold, but not freezing. In fact, the foot with the sandal felt just as cold as the foot standing in the snow. Gazing down, she noticed something else. Neither of her feet left marks in the snow. She was standing in a spot near the mouth of the tunnel where the snow was packed down by footprints, so she tried a little experiment. She took a step over to one side into a nearby snowdrift.

  Big mistake. The snow had frozen and was crusty on the surface, but as soon as she put her whole weight onto the drift, she sank in right up to her thighs. She flailed around in panic for a few minutes before managing to drag herself back up onto the packed surface. In a moment she was back on her feet, hands on her knees and gasping for breath. Strangely, the effort to get free had actually warmed her up a little.

  Once she had caught her breath, Darby glanced over to see if she’d actually made a snow angel with all her thrashing about.

  There was no mark in the snow.

  No sign of even a footprint, let alone evidence of a 110-pound girl flailing around for five minutes.

  Maybe dead people can’t make snow angels.

  Carefully staying on the packed area of snow, Darby started pacing. I should have listened to Gabe. If I went down in the tunnel, maybe I could get back home. But the mouth of the tunnel was so black in contrast to everything around it that she just couldn’t make herself do it. It was too much like crawling into her own grave.