Oh, God, we did this to ourselves.
Jenny's heart was pounding wildly, out of control. The light was like needles stabbing into her eyes. She was light-headed, half blinded, but she could no longer look away from the wheel.
One final explosion of light-and the roaring became a tearing sound, like a huge tarpaulin ripping in giant hands. It made Jenny want to fall down, curl up, cover her ears.
And then it stopped.
Just like that. One moment agonizing light and deafening, screaming sound-the next moment perfect calm. The door was an oak door again. The wheel of runes was no longer spinning.
But, Jenny saw, it wasn't exactly the way it had been. Dagaz, the rune Jenny had drawn at the top, was now at two o'clock. As if the spinning wheel had overshot slightly before stopping. And the runes burned like sullen coals in the wood.
Jenny was breathing as hard as if she'd just run a race.
"We did it," Dee whispered. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth.
"Did we?" Michael asked huskily.
There was only one way to tell. Jenny gave herself a moment, then slowly reached for the doorknob.
She could feel her pulse in her hand as she grasped the knob. The metal wasn't even warm.
She turned the knob and pulled the door open.
Oh.
Through the open door she could see, not the stairs down to her grandfather's basement, but utter blackness, like a night without stars.
Switching on her flashlight, Jenny stepped forward.
There was a resistance as she crossed the threshold. Not like anything solid, more like the g-force she'd felt when the plane accelerated to take off. It made her stumble, not hit the ground quite right.
And the ground seemed to be asphalt. Jenny's flashlight beam made a white circle on it, catching something that looked like a small yellow flower. A smashed flower.
No, not a flower, Jenny realized slowly. The shape was familiar but so far from what she expected to see that she didn't recognize it at first. It was a piece of squashed popcorn.
Popcorn?
Flashlights were switching on behind her, beams crossing and recrossing in the darkness. Dee and Audrey and Michael moved up beside her.
"What the hell... ?" Dee said.
There was a sound like a door slamming. Jenny swung her flashlight around just in time to see that it was a door slamming, it was the door to her grandfather's basement. She saw it for one instant standing shut, a door with no walls around it, and then it disappeared.
Completely. It was simply gone, leaving them-where they were.
"I don't believe this," Audrey said. The flashlight beams were almost pathetic in the darkness, but they showed Jenny enough.
It was Michael who said it, in tones of shock and indignation.
"It didn't work! After all that-and it's not the Shadow World at all!"
They were in Joyland Park.
It was Joyland, exactly as Jenny had seen it that afternoon-except now it was dark and deserted.
The same wrought-iron benches painted green, with smooth wooden planks for backs and seats. The same fences (also green) caging in the same manicured bushes-"poodle bushes," Michael called them. The same pink-and-white begonias Jenny had noticed before-she always noticed flowers. Now their petals were folded tight.
Jenny's flashlight beam caught a heavy-duty brown trash can, an old-fashioned signpost, candy corner, the signpost read.