The Lost Level Read Free Page A

with
chain stores, fast food restaurants, and discount outlets. The doorway hovered
directly over a busy sidewalk, and people bustled around the portal without
even giving it a glance. I assumed that only I could see it. I stepped through
the door and explored the city a little—half a block, no more, endeavoring to
keep the doorway within my sight at all times. I found a newspaper at a bus
stop and skimmed through it and found out that I was in Chicago. This level was
much like our level and dealt with the same problems—global recession,
terrorism, a new arms race, social unrest, the politics of polarization, and a
media that focused more on entertainment news and celebrities rather than
issues of actual importance. But there were subtle differences, as well. The
President of the United States was somebody named Anthony Genova. On this
level, Microsoft was the manufacturer of the iPod and iPhone. And the Chinese
had launched a successful return to the moon in the year 2000. This act had
since been followed by landing human beings on Mars, beating Russia and the
European Federation there by a projection of five years, even as the American
space program was discontinued due to a lack of funds.
    I stayed in that world for an hour, never straying far from the
door. I determined that this alternate America’s cash was the same as ours and
bought something to eat from a sidewalk vendor. I watched some television in a
storefront window and listened to music booming from car speakers as the
traffic crept by. I didn’t recognize the television program or the various
snatches of songs. When I returned through the doorway, I brought the newspaper
with me as a souvenir. I wasn’t sure I would be able to, and when I closed the
doorway and stopped the spell by extinguishing the oil, I half expected the
paper to vanish, but it didn’t. It was still there, proof that I really had
traveled to an alternate reality. When I got home, I hid it safely.
    This time, upon my return, I felt none of the adverse side
effects I’d experienced the first time. Instead, I felt excited and euphoric.
Rather than becoming depressed, I was simply impatient to do it again as soon
as possible.
    So, I did.
    My excursions grew more frequent—and more daring. I never did
master the art of opening the door on a specific location. Instead, my attempts
were similar to channel surfing. But I did become adept enough that I no longer
needed to work the ritual from a place of power. I began doing them from the
comfort of home, rather than the woods, opening doors into the Labyrinth and
visiting other levels from the rooftop of my apartment complex in the dead of
night when everyone else was asleep and I wouldn’t be spotted. I visited a
world where the Nazis controlled America, and one where the gas crunch of the
late–Seventies had turned us into a Third World economy from which we’d never
recovered. I went to other time periods in our level’s history—the Old West,
the Sixties, and what I think was a time about fifty years in my future. I can’t
be sure about the latter because I spent all of my time there hiding in an
alley as a series of massive explosions rocked the city I was in.
    I also glimpsed other worlds, realms, and dimensions completely
different than Earth. Out of an abundance of caution, I never set foot in any
of them, although the desire to do so was strong. The first one I saw was a
desert planet, coated with red sand, much like we are told the conditions on
Mars are like (although I have my doubts about that). A human skeleton lay
there in front of the door, dry and desiccated. Nothing else moved in that
wasteland except a group of scarlet dust funnels, dancing lazily in unseen wind
currents. I didn’t like the funnels. They reminded me of mini–tornadoes, and I
had the uneasy impression that they were alive. I can’t explain why I came to
that conclusion, but I felt it strongly. Suspecting the air there was
poisonous, I stepped back