The Slide
Darby Brown had been missing for the past three weeks. Some said that he had run away from home. Some said that he had been kidnapped. Some even said that he had been murdered. But Joyce and Ellen knew the truth. The slide had got him.
Their town’s swimming pool was one of the largest in the country. It had giant slides, a wave machine, tire floats on rapids, the works. Many of the slides had been replaced or improved over the years, but one slide – The Drop of Despair – had been there since the day the swimming pool first opened in 1986. It was the OG of slides. Nothing fancy, just an almost straight 40 foot drop (at seventy degrees, to be exact) with just a slight curve at the bottom to stop you hitting the water too hard. It was the only slide that most young children were too scared to go on. So much so that over the years stories had developed about it.
Some said that when you go down this slide, you lose a little piece of your soul. Some said that your hair could turn white from fright before you hit the water at the bottom. Some said that if you were to use this slide unsupervised, it would transport you to a deserted island. That one, Joyce and Ellen thought, was probably just made up by the owners of the swimming pool as a way of discouraging kids from trying to sneak in after closing time. But Joyce’s younger brother, Darby, had believed this particular story. He had been obsessed with it, in fact, researching online about fourteen kids that had gone missing within the past three decades. There were plenty of missing adults reported too, but Darby figured that any or all of them could have gone missing for standard adult reasons. But he was convinced that all (or at least some) of those fourteen kids had been transported away by the slide. And he would prove it. He would find a way to get into the swimming pool at night and go down the slide. One week after he told Joyce that, he went missing. His parents had put him to bed at night, the next morning he was gone.
At first the girls thought Darby must be playing an elaborate prank on everyone. But as days turned into weeks and he did not come home, they started to think that maybe he was right. A magical child stealing slide was a wild idea to believe in, but how else could his absence be explained? Joyce was Darby’s big sister and she was supposed to look out for him, always. So she knew what she had to do. She had to go down the slide at night. Ellen, her best friend, was not about to let her do this alone.
Ellen’s older sister worked at the swimming pool as a lifeguard, so stealing the swimming pool keys from her room was easy. That night, Ellen and Joyce entered the swimming pool. With most of the lights off it was actually a pretty creepy place. But the girls put on their swimsuits and climbed the stairs up to the top of The Drop of Despair. They held hands and entered the slide together – it was just wide enough for two, though they were normally never allowed to go down that way. They counted to three, then went.
It felt like they were falling through forever darkness, but they could feel that they were still inside the slide. Until, with no warning, they suddenly weren’t. Now they were falling through nothing but air! A second later, they both splashed down into cold, cold water.
Where are Ellen and Joyce transported to?
What dangers might they face in this place?
Do they manage to find Darby and get home?