فصل 22

A Night in Terror Tower - Chapter 22

“It—it’s daytime!” Eddie stammered.

But the bright sunlight wasn’t the only shock.

Everything had changed.

I felt as if I were watching a movie, and the scene had changed. And suddenly it was the next day—or the next week—and I was seeing an entirely different place.

I knew that only a few seconds had passed since Eddie and I had burst out of the hotel. But in that time, everything had changed.

We huddled close together and stared in one direction and then the next. We saw no cars. No buses. The street had vanished, replaced by a lumpy dirt road.

The tall buildings had disappeared, too. The road was dotted with small, white cottages with flat roofs and low, wooden shacks built without doors or windows.

A tall mound of straw stood beside the nearest cottage. Chickens clucked and strutted across the road or stood in front of cottages pecking in the dirt. A brown cow poked its head out from behind the mound of straw.

“What’s going on?” Eddie asked. “Where are we?”

“It’s like we stepped back in time,” I said in a hushed voice. “Eddie—look at the people.” Two men walked by carrying lines of slender, silvery fish. The men had thick beards and wild, unbrushed hair. They wore loose-fitting gray smocks that dragged along the ground.

Two women in long, brown dresses were on their knees, pulling up root-type vegetables with their hands. A man leading a scrawny horse, its bones sticking out at its rib cage, stopped to say something to the two women.

“They look a lot like the people in the hotel,” I told Eddie.

Thinking about the hotel made me turn around. “Oh, no!” I grabbed Eddie and made him turn around.

The hotel was gone.

In its place stood a long, low building built of brown stone. It appeared to be some sort of inn or meeting hall.

“I don’t understand this,” Eddie moaned. In the bright sunlight, he looked very pale. He scratched his dark brown hair. “Sue, we’ve got to get back to the hotel. I—I’m very mixed up.” “Me, too,” I confessed.

I took a few steps along the dirt road. It must have rained recently. The road was soft and muddy.

I could hear cows mooing nearby.

This is downtown London! I told myself. How can I hear cows in downtown London? Where are all the tall buildings? The cars and taxis and double-decker buses?

I heard someone whistling. A blond-haired boy, dressed in an outfit made of black and brown rags, appeared from behind the long building. He carried a bundle of sticks in his arms.

He seemed about my age. My shoes sank into the mud as I hurried across the road to him. “Hey—!” I called. “Hi!” He peered over the bundle of sticks at me. His blue eyes widened in surprise. His hair was long and unbrushed. It fluttered over his shoulders in the breeze. “Good day to you, miss,” he said. His accent was so strange, I could barely understand him.

“Good day,” I replied uncertainly.

“Are ye a traveler?” the boy asked, shifting the bundle onto his shoulder.

“Yes,” I replied. “But my brother and I are lost. We can’t find our hotel.”

He narrowed his blue eyes at me. He appeared to be thinking hard.

“Our hotel,” I repeated. “Can you tell us where it is? The Barclay?”

“Barclay?” he repeated the word. “Hotel?”

“Yes,” I said. I waited for him to reply. But he just stared back at me, squinting his blue eyes and frowning.

“I do not know those foreign words,” he said finally.

“Hotel?” I cried impatiently. “You know. A place where travelers stay?”

“Many stay at the abbey,” he replied. He pointed to the long, low building behind us.

“No. I mean—” I started. I could see that he didn’t understand me at all.

“I must be getting the wood along home,” the boy said. He nodded good-bye, lowered the bundle from his shoulder, and headed down the road.

“Eddie, that boy—” I said. “He doesn’t know what a hotel is! Do you believe—?” I turned back. “Eddie?”

Eddie was gone.