Meet the Hallway

There is a mirror at the end of a hallway in this book, and the first thing I want you to know about it is that it is crooked.

Not dramatically. Not haunted-house crooked. It hangs a couple of degrees off true, the way a mirror does in a house where somebody dusts around it and never quite straightens it. It's square. The frame is brass, thin, gone dark in the corners the way brass does when nobody has decided it's worth polishing. If you walked past it you would not look twice.

That's the point. I didn't want a portal that announced itself. I wanted the kind of ordinary object a kid walks past four hundred times before the night he doesn't.

Six doors

Behind the mirror is a hallway, and in that hallway there are six doors.

Six. Not a maze, not an infinite corridor, not a world that keeps unfolding until you lose track of where you started. Six doors, countable on one hand plus a thumb, and you can stand at one end and see all of them at once. I think that's scarier than infinity. Infinity is abstract. Six is a number you can finish.

Here is the part I did not expect to be the frightening part. The five smaller doors are not locked. Nothing is stopping anybody. You can stand in that hallway in your socks at midnight and open whichever one you want, in whatever order you want, including the one you should have saved for last. Each one has something inside it that the sixth door needs. The hallway does not care which order you collect them in and it will not stop you choosing badly.

Three strikes

Three strikes and the hallway keeps you.

Not three mistakes — mistakes are cheaper than that, and a kid who gets something wrong inside one of those doors gets to try again. A strike is bigger. A strike is failing a whole door. There are three of them, and they are not three per door, they are three for as long as you are in there, and they are counted on three dark circles above the last door where you can see them from anywhere in the hallway.

Burn all three and you stay. You can walk around inside that world for the rest of your life. You just don't come out.

I write for kids, so let me be straight about what that means: the stakes in this book are real, and the book does not pretend otherwise, and there is somebody behind one of those doors who has already run out of chances and is still in there. He is thirteen. He has been in there two years. He is the first person the boys meet and he is the reason they understand any of the rules at all.

Two strikes is where the book lives. Two strikes is when a kid has to decide whether being right is worth the last one they've got.

The door they actually opened

They do not start at the first door. I want to be clear that nothing made them do it in order — there is no in order. They stand in a hallway with five choices and they pick the second door, the black metal one, because Dakota already has his hand on the handle and because Jr makes him sit down first and put an ear to the metal.

What they hear is the same three sounds, over and over, in a loop. Jr hears a noise. Dakota hears what it is.

That is as far as I'm taking you.

The book is out now. The hallway's been waiting a while.

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