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“¡Silencio! El padre está dormido.” A boy, perhaps fourteen, or fifteen, years old, leads a small group of about a dozen men, women and children down the hallway, each of them clutching bags and personal belongings that crinkle and make noise.
I’ve no idea what he said, but I did catchel padre, which I know means father. As in Father Damon?
Staying low, I peek around the corner and see the group come to a stop at a door, before they enter another room. Crouching, I shuffle after them, noticing they’ve left the door slightly cracked—enough for me to peek in.
The boy stands before a bookshelf, where he removes one of the books, and the wall moves to the side.
The entire wall.
Like something straight out of a James Bond movie, or something.
As he herds the group into a dark passage through the wall, I wonder if I’m dreaming this. Maybe I fell off that chair outside and cracked my head, or something.
Once they’re all shuffled inside, he once again says something in Spanish, but all I understand ismañana: tomorrow.
Something happens tomorrow.
Scrambling back to my hiding spot, I breathe quietly, watching the boy pad back toward the bedroom and disappear on the other side of the bed.
As if he fell into an alternate universe, or something.
Mentally counting back from thirty, I give the kid a few seconds to make his escape, then crawl across the room in time to see the door of the nightstand swing shut, and all is silent again. Aside from some specks of dirt on the carpet, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that a dozen people just traipsed through the room.
Another few seconds, and I crawl toward the nightstand, opening it to find a gaping hole and a ladder.
No shit. A tunnel that really does seem to be a portal into another world.
Human smuggling right here in this house.
Peering down into the hole, I try to make out what lies at the bottom, and run my hand over the smooth, cold dirt walls.
“Ivy?”
At the sound of the familiar voice, I scream and tumble backward onto my ass, and land staring up at Damon.
“What are you doing here?”
Pressing a finger to my lips, I attempt to quiet him and wave him on, to the room with the bookshelf wall. “A whole group. Families of men, women, children—they came out of that hole in the nightstand, and he took them here, into this room.”
“Who? Who’s he?”
“A boy. Maybe fifteen, max. Anyway, he removed one of the books on that shelf, and the whole damn wall moved!”
“You saw this?”
“Yes! With my own eyes! The whole. Damn. Wall!”
“Which book?”
“The red one. But don’t touch it! What if they’re not friendly!”
“This is my personal space. If someone is here, I want to know about it.”
“I thought you knew! The kid whispered something aboutel padre. Was all in Spanish, so I couldn’t make out anything else.”
“That’s all you gathered?”
“He said something about tomorrow.”
