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“Definitely unusual,” Emma agreed, “even by my standards.”
I stepped forward, my feet crunching on the snowy carpet, to examine the plaque on the door. It read: The Siberia Room.
I looked at Emma. She looked at me.
“It’s probably just a hyperactive air conditioner,” she said.
“Let’s open it and find out,” I said. I reached for the knob and tried it, but it wouldn’t turn. “It’s locked.”
Emma put her hand on the knob and kept it there for several seconds. It began to drip water as ice melted from inside it.
“Not locked,” she said. “Frozen.”
She twisted the knob and pushed the door, but it opened only an inch; snow was piled up on the other side. We put our shoulders to its surface and, on the count of three, shoved. The door flung open and a gust of arctic air slapped us. Snow flurried everywhere, into our eyes, into the hall behind us.
Shielding our faces, we peered inside. It was furnished like the other rooms—bed, wardrobe, night table—but here were indistinct humps of white buried under deep-piled snow.
“What is this?” I said, shouting to be heard above the wind’s howl. “Another loop?”
“It can’t be!” Emma shouted back. “We’re already in one!”
Leaning into the wind, we stepped inside for a closer look. I’d thought that the snow and ice were coming through an open window, but then the flurry abated and I saw there was no window at all, not even a wall at the far end of the room. Ice-coated walls stood on either side of us, a ceiling above us, and probably a carpet was somewhere below our feet, but where a fourth wall should’ve been the room gave way to an ice cave, and beyond that to open air, open ground, and an endless vista of white snow and black rocks.
This was, as near as I could tell, Siberia.
A single track of shoveled snow led through the room and into the whiteness beyond. We shuffled down the path, out of the room and into the cave, marveling at everything around us. Giant spikes of ice rose from the floor and hung from the ceiling like a forest of white trees.
Emma was hard to impress—she was nearly a hundred years old and had seen a lifetime’s worth of peculiar things—but this place seemed to fill her with genuine wonder.
“This is astonishing!” she said, bending to scoop up a handful of snow. She tossed it at me, laughing. “Isn’t it astonishing?”
“It is,” I said through chattering teeth, “but what’s it doing here?”
We threaded between the giant icicles and emerged into the open. Looking back, I could no longer see the room at all; it was perfectly camouflaged inside the cave.
Emma hurried ahead, then turned back and said, “Over here!” in an urgent voice.
I shuffled through deepening snow to her side. The landscape was bizarre. Before us was a white, flat field, past which the ground fell away in deep, undulating folds, like crevasses.
“We’re not alone,” said Emma, and pointed to a detail I’d missed. A man was standing at the edge of a crevasse, peering down into it.
“What’s he doing?” I said, more or less rhetorically.
“Looking for something, it would seem.”
We watched him walk slowly along the crevasse, always staring down. After about a minute, I realized I was so cold that I could no longer feel my face. A gust of snowy wind blew up and blanked the scene.
When it died down a moment later, the man was staring right at us.
Emma stiffened. “Uh-oh.”
“Do you think he sees us?”
Emma looked down at her bright yellow dress. “Yes.”
We stood there for a moment, our eyes locked on the man as he stared at us across the white wasteland—and then he took off running in our direction. He was hundreds of yards away through deep snow and a landscape of undulating fissures. It was unclear whether he meant us harm, but we were in a place we weren’t supposed to be and it seemed like the best thing to do was leave—a decision that was soundly reinforced by a howl, the likes of which I’d heard only once before, in the Gypsies’ camp.
A bear.
A quick look over our shoulders confirmed it: a giant black bear had clawed its way up from one of the crevasses to join the man on the snow, and they were both coming after us, the bear clearing ground much more quickly than the man.
“BEAR!” I shouted, redundantly.
I tried to run but my frozen feet refused to cooperate. Seemingly impervious to the cold, Emma grabbed my arm and swept me along. We lurched back into the cave, stumbled through the room, and tripped out the door, around which a penumbra of blowing snow was filling the hallway. I pulled the door shut behind us—as if that would stop a bear—and we retraced our steps down the long hall, down the stairs, and back into Bentham’s dead museum to hide ourselves among his white-draped phantoms.
* * *
We hid between a wall and a hulking dust-sheeted monolith in the farthest corner we could find, straitjacketing ourselves into a space so narrow that we could not turn to face each other, the cold we’d run from settling firmly into our bones. We stood silent and shivering, stiff as mannequins, the snow on our clothes melting into puddles at our feet. Emma’s left hand took my right—it was all the warmth and meaning we could trade. We were developing a language that was entirely untranslatable into words, a special vocabulary of gestures and glances and touches and increasingly deep kisses that was growing richer, more intense, more complex by the hour. It was fascinating and essential and in moments like this, made me just a little less cold and a little less scared than I might’ve been otherwise.
When, after a
few minutes, no bears showed up to eat us, we dared to exchange whispers.
“Was that a loop we were in?” I asked. “A loop within a loop?”
“I don’t know what that was,” Emma replied.
“Siberia. That’s what the door said.”
“If that was Siberia, then the room it was in was some kind of portal, not a loop. And portals don’t exist, of course.”
“Of course,” I replied, though it wouldn’t have been so strange to believe, in a world where time loops existed, that portals did, too.
“What if it was just a really old loop?” I suggested. “Like ice-age old, ten or fifteen thousand years? Devil’s Acre might’ve looked like that back then.”
“I don’t think there are any loops that ancient,” Emma said.
My teeth chattered. “I can’t stop shaking.” I said.
Emma pressed her side to mine and rubbed my back with her warm hand.
“If I could make a portal to anywhere,” I said, “Siberia would not be high on my list of choices.”
“Where would you go, then?”
“Hm. Hawaii, maybe? Though I guess that’s boring. Everyone would say Hawaii.”
“Not me.”
“Where would you go?”
“The place you’re from,” Emma said. “In Florida.”
“Why on earth would you want to go there?”
“I think it’d be interesting to see where you grew up.”
“That’s sweet,” I said. “There’s not much to it, though. It’s really quiet.”
She leaned her head on my shoulder and exhaled a warm breath down my arm. “Sounds like heaven.”
“You’ve got snow in your hair,” I said, but it melted when I tried to brush it out. I shook the cold water from my hand onto the floor—and that’s when I noticed our footprints. We’d left a trail of melting snow that probably led right to our hiding spot.
“What dimwits we are,” I said, pointing out the tracks. “We should’ve left our shoes behind!”
“It’s okay,” said Emma. “If they haven’t tracked us by now, they probably—”
