The weekend was a mess of anxiety and apprehension. I called Elia once on Saturday and on Sunday to check in on her and make sure she was okay; by the time I got her on the phone Sunday afternoon, she sounded pissed. "Look, it's sweet that you're all worried, but everyone's been calling me all day, all weekend. I'm fucking fine. I'll see you tomorrow." She hung up abruptly.
Jay was off hiking with her parents all day. I got a few of the others on the phone, but there were no solid theories on what we might have stumbled into. Elia wasn't talking much, and apparently was over all the phone calls she was getting. It was 1996, so there wasn't much information on the internet, or even much of an internet at all; still, I got a call at 6pm Sunday night from Shina, who hadn't been at the sleepover on Friday but had been since filled in on what happened.
"You got a sec?" she said when I took the phone from my mom.
"Yeah, we just finished eating. What's up?"
"Okay, so I've been keeping track of all the symbols that we've seen on the door. This afternoon I slipped into a chatroom on AOL called Esoterica. Usually it's just a lot of Wiccan fluff and throw back new age stuff from the 70's, but sometimes a few hard core occultists float through and spew nonsense for a while before being booted by a mod. I decided to scan in photos of that big symbol that Lauranne first saw in the middle of the door, and the other symbols that Elia remembered, and post them all to the room, just to see if anyone recognized anything or knew what it might be." I heard the shuffling of papers on the other end of the line. "Most of the conjecture didn't seem to go anywhere, but one guy, uh...user EnochLives77, he said some stuff that kind of made sense."
"EnochLives77?"
"Yeah." Shina sounded embarrassed. "This chat room was pretty intense. Like, people believing that they're vampires and stuff. That was definitely not the weirdest username I saw."
I sighed. "Okay, well what did Mister 77 have to say?"
"He said he recognized one of the symbols at the top of the door, the one that looked like spokes on a wheel; he said it was an old Sumerian sign called 'dingir' (she pronounced it like "danger" but with two i's) and that it meant, like...god, or deity. He said that if archeologists usually find it on plaques or carvings or whatever, and it comes before someone's name, then that means that person is some sort of deity or higher being."
"Sumerian?"
"Uh, like...the oldest civilization. Remember in History class, we did that whole...Mesopotamia thing, and we read Gilgamesh for two weeks?" Shina paused, adding, "Jay almost failed our final because she kept slipping her headphones in during the class readings? It was when she finally got Frogstomp, and she could barely function unless she listened to it at least twice a day."
"Oh, yeah. Jesus." I glanced over my shoulder to check and make sure my mom was still in the living room, and slipped into the hallway, dragging the phone chord with me. "How would anyone in a chat room know that?"
"Apparently they geek out hard over this stuff."
"Okay, so one of the marks on the door means...deity. Special super powered person. Did they say anything else?"
"Well, once we got on the Sumerian track, he mentioned that another symbol right below it could be one called..." More shuffling of papers in the background, and then Shina's voice butchering the pronunciation "...usbalkit. He said that some people are still arguing about the meaning of some of these words. This one sometimes means 'rebel' or 'revolt,' but it can also mean to like...turn something upside down, or reverse it. He said he wasn't sure, but that the second meaning would make more sense in this case."
"So...what, so the top of the door reads, 'god reverse?'"
"No. No, it would be more like, 'god upside-down,' or 'the upside-down god,' I guess."
Silence hung over the line. The quiet static of land-line dead air hissed faintly in my ear drums as my heart pounded. Finally, I spoke up. "But this is just from some dude in a chat room, right?"
"Yeah." Shina sounded uncertain. "Honestly, Kat, none of us know what the fuck we're really doing here. I think it was fun when we started but now I just feel like...I don't know, like we're way out of our depth. Even if what this guy is saying is totally whacko, what you guys described that happened on Friday night, I just...don't think we should play anymore."
"I don't either." I unwound the phone chord from around my finger; it has wound so tight that the tip of my index finger was starting to turn blue. "Okay, I have to go; I'll see you tomorrow. We'll talk about what you found out then with the others."
"Sweet dreams, Kit Kat."
"Ha! Bye Shina."
I was late to school. My alarm once again failed to wake me and my mom was pissed; she told me she wouldn't let me stay over at anyone's house anymore if it kept throwing off my sleep schedule. I told her that I had been sleeping badly; she blamed the computer, and too much TV, and whatever else she could muster up, before telling me that I had to lay off the pop from now on. I kissed her cheek and slid out of the car without a word, heading towards my second period class.
By lunch-time, I was already dragging. My stomach was queasy, so I didn't even get food, but I bought a huge 16 oz Jolt cola before finding the table my friends usually sat at.
Elia wasn't there.
"She's at home sick," Aubrey reported gravely. "Something about her stomach; her mom said she puked twice this morning."
We all stared at one another for a moment.
"Guys, this is getting really fucked up." I listlessly twisted and untwisted the cap on my plastic cola bottle.
"Yeah," Lauranne slipped a hand on my shoulder briefly. "I feel like we need to stop playing, but...I also feel like we need to un-do whatever the hell it is we just did, first." She absently rubbed her forehead. "I haven't been feeling well, either. Like, kind of sick..and I sleep like shit."
Surprisingly, everyone else started piping in; apparently no one in our group had gotten a solid night of shut-eye in the past week.
"Well, if you'd like to sleep even worse, than pay close attention." Shina then related what she had told me the previous evening. She had pulled out her copies of the symbols Lauranne and Elia had drawn and spread them out over the table, pointing to the ones she was referring to.
After she was done, everyone was pensive. "We have to help Elia. There's no way she's just conveniently sick after going through the black door." Aubrey was staring down at the symbols, brow furrowed.
"So...what do we do, exactly, to fix it?"
Everyone looked at Jay. She was chewing pensively on her lower lip, eyes thoughtful. "When we pulled her out, she was behind a door, and she couldn't see a way to get back to the clearing. Maybe we should try to send someone in and get back to the correct entry point. Maybe doing it the right way will set everything back to normal?"
Everyone thought about that for a moment. "And what if it doesn't?" Lauranne asked pointedly.
"Well, we don't have a better plan; we can't leave things the way they are. We broke the rules and I don't see how going back in could make it any worse at this point. But maybe we can make it better." Jay stabbed at the cafeteria spaghetti on her plate with her fork. "Anyone else have a better idea?"
Silence.
"Great. Then we're doing it."
Shina piped up. "So who's going to go in next?"
Everyone took that moment to study their lunch trays closely, avoiding eye contact with anyone else around the table.
"For fuck's sake," I said, exasperated. "I'll go in. We'll plan on tomorrow?"
Jay nodded. "Tomorrow, then."
That night I fell asleep over my homework twice; each time, faintly, I swear I could hear a low, far off rumbling, just at the edge of my hearing, with a slightly louder whop-whop-whop-whop layered over it. I'd wake up maybe 10 minutes after drifting off, my head splitting and my face crumpled forward against my textbook. The second time, when I awoke, I found I had drawn a small symbol in the corner of my spiral notebook paper: a single circle, with a long horizontal line across the top, and three smaller lines below.
The same symbol Lauranne had seen on the black door.
I felt that we were all spiraling; that Elia's current state would befall all of us if we just left things the way they were. I knew that if someone didn't do something, my own situation...and everyone else's...was only going to deteriorate.
Maybe there was no way out, really. But I decided that night as I settled in for a fitful round of sleep, that if this was my last time entering whatever realm we'd tapped into, then I'd try to make it count.