A Walk Through a Window by KC Dyer Read Free Book Online Page A

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 justlaughed. 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 tobreak 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