← Lantern's Glow

Where the Door Was

Where the Door Was

The board creaked again behind them. Caitlin spun so fast her skirt swept Liam's knees. The west passage was empty all the way back to the dark head of the stair. The little table was where it had always been. The portrait by the corner hung straight. She'd passed both of them on the way up, not a minute ago. She waited for someone to step out at the top of the stair, a guest who'd followed them up for a laugh, and she found she was holding her breath so she'd hear them coming.

Nobody came.

"Probably somebody from the party," she said.

Liam looked down the passage. "Probably."

He said it carefully, the same way he'd said I heard it downstairs. If there'd been anyone to see, she'd have accused him of humoring her. There was nobody to see, and she was starting to wish for somebody. A laugh floated up from below, then the clank of the cider ladle. That was where the people were. They'd come up the west stair. They could go down it again.

"Let's go back," she said. "We can find the musician once I've made sure nobody's set a pumpkin on fire."

"That happens?"

"Not if I get there first."

She led him back toward the little table. His hand stayed wrapped around hers, and she was more grateful for it than she wanted him to know. An hour ago she'd kissed him in the side parlor without a thought for witnesses. Now she'd have given a good deal for a witness, and she still wanted him beside her. If somebody came pounding past with an instrument under one arm, she could take Liam downstairs and be unbearably right about it for the rest of the night.

The portrait at the corner was the man with his hand tucked into his waistcoat. She'd straightened it this afternoon after pinning the paper bat above it, and the bat was still there, one wing bent where she'd driven the tack too close to the edge. She could see the tack and, right beside it, the hole where she'd missed the first time. The Rose Room door stood beside this portrait, on the wall that ran back to the stair: a painted panel and a brass plate, ROSE ROOM, with a scratch through the last E that Ms. Hawthorne polished around every week even though nobody ever used the room. They'd walked right past it. She'd pointed it out.

She reached the portrait, turned her head, and looked for the plate.

Wallpaper ran from the portrait to the table at the end of the passage. Small faded flowers, a vertical seam, and down by the baseboard the curl of loose paper she'd been meaning to mention to Ms. Hawthorne for years. No panel. No plate.

Caitlin stopped walking. Liam stopped with her.

"What?"

"I went past it. I must have." Her voice sounded almost normal. "I was looking at you."

"Past what?"

"The Rose Room." She looked back over her shoulder at the corner they'd come around. "I thought the door was right here."

She walked back toward the stair, faster than she meant to. The room had been kept shut since before she started decorating; she'd never had any reason to try its handle. Maybe the door was nearer the stair than she remembered. It had to be. The passage was short enough to see from end to end. Her eyes were skipping the thing she was looking for because she'd already decided where it should be, the way they did at work when a book she'd been hunting all afternoon turned up one shelf over. That was all this was.

At the table she turned and faced the wall. There was room for a door between the table and the portrait. Her bat's shadow lay on the wallpaper. She started at the portrait and read the wall the way she'd read a shelf when a title had gone missing, spine by spine, slowly, all the way to the stair. Her crooked bat. The table. Flowers. Flowers. No brass anywhere.

Something cold opened at the bottom of her stomach and began to climb.

"Maybe it's the other side," she said. "We were following the music, I wasn't looking, I could have— it could be across from here."

The opposite wall held a narrow window with a willow branch scraping at the glass. It had been a window when they came up. It was far too narrow for anybody to mistake for a room, even her, even tonight. She looked back at the blank wall.

"You said it was closed," Liam said.

"Closed. Yeah. I didn't mean closed like gone."

The joke came out sounding wrong even to her. She opened her mouth to fix it and walked to the portrait instead. She wanted the view she'd had coming up, the one she'd had when she told him nobody booked the room. She stood beside the painted man and faced the stair. The wallpaper went all the way to the table.

"Could it be around the corner?" Liam asked.

"No. We came around the corner after we passed it. I'm almost positive. Because I told you about the room right here, and you can't tell somebody about a door you haven't walked past yet. Well, you can. But I didn't."

"I know. I meant, is there another door."

"The numbered rooms are all down the main hall." She pointed behind them, and her hand wasn't quite steady, so she put it down. "The Rose Room is down here. I know that because every single year I have to talk some guest out of thinking the brass plate is an invitation. And I know it because Ms. Hawthorne sends me up here to straighten this ridiculous portrait, and I always see the door right next to it."

The painted man's eyebrows had never matched. She would have noticed if somebody swapped him for a different man beside a different wall. At the library she helped people sort out the book they'd read from the book they thought they'd read, and she knew exactly what memory could do, and she could picture that brass plate clearly enough to reach out and touch the scratch.

She let go of Liam's hand and slid her fingers into her skirt pocket. The drawing he'd made of her was there, folded where she'd tucked it. The paper caught under her thumbnail. She could take it out and make him smile, trade this for the ordinary kind of embarrassment. She left it where it was. It couldn't tell her anything about this wall. Her fingers stayed curled around it anyway.

"I made you come up here," she said. "I dragged you up a back stair after music nobody else at this party seems to have heard."

"We both heard the music."

"I told you the story, and then I spent the whole stair deciding every creak was part of it."

"That's not what you said."

"It might be what I was doing. You're up here because I wanted the music to be real." And there it was, underneath, the thing she couldn't say: that she'd wanted it to be real because it was her grandmother's, and for three notes in the side parlor she had felt her grandmother close by for the first time in four years, and she had followed it up here like a child.

The stair was behind the table. She went to the top step and leaned over the rail. At the bend below hung the woman in the dark dress, straight where Caitlin had left her. Through the open stairwell she could see a slice of the ground-floor hall and the rope they'd laid along the wall. A guest laughed near the parlor. If she called out, surely somebody would hear.

"Hello?"

The laughter went on. She tried again, louder, in the voice she used to reach the back of a room. It hit the old plaster and came back at her. Somebody below said, "Pass that here," and somebody else objected. They sounded close enough to interrupt. Nobody looked up into the stairwell.

"They might not hear us over the party," Liam said.

"I can see the rope." Her voice came out high. "I can see the rope, Liam."

"I can too."

He came to the rail beside her. The corner of his floor plan stuck out of the sketchbook. She could be down those stairs before he'd finished drawing them. The empty stairhead waited between them and the voices. She didn't move. She didn't know why she didn't move, except that her legs had decided something without her.

"Okay. We'll go down," she said. "I only wanted to check the door first, which was stupid, because doors don't go anywhere."

"It was there."

She turned. "You saw it?"

He opened the sketchbook and brought it close so they could both see. A quick line marked the west passage from stair to corner. Beside the portrait he had drawn a narrow rectangle with the short dark stroke he used for a door in its frame. He'd made this plan downstairs, in the parlor, before any of this. There was no label on the rectangle. There didn't need to be. There was no other door it could be.

"You drew the Rose Room," she said.

"I drew a door."

"It was the Rose Room. There's no other door on that wall."

He turned the book to hold his line up against the wall. His thumb left a gray smudge on the paper. She'd liked watching him make marks all evening. Now she looked at the gap between his pencil and the wallpaper, and her skin prickled all over, hot and then cold. There should be a door there, big enough for the two of them to stand in.

"Is this even the same landing?" he asked.

She pointed down the stair. "That's the portrait I straightened. That's the rope you put against the wall. That's our stair." She could hear herself stacking facts one on top of another, as though if she made the pile high enough it would turn into an answer. "The table's here. The man in the portrait's here. Maybe somebody papered over the door. For the party. As a joke."

Liam watched her and said nothing, and she could see him decide not to say it: that wallpaper took work to hang, and she'd walked past the door ten minutes ago. Still. There were seams. Old paper had seams everywhere, and this one was worth a test.

She crossed to the empty stretch and ran her fingers down the faded line from the picture rail to the baseboard. The paper buckled a little under her nail. Under it the wall was firm. She pressed harder, feeling for a hollow panel, the edge of a frame, anything. It was only wall. She moved her hand across it the width of a door and back again, and then she put both hands flat on it and pushed, as if it might give.

From the other side of the plaster came a burst of laughter, loud and clear, close enough to be in a room right there.

Caitlin jerked her head around. The party was downstairs, by the parlor. She'd seen the hall through the stairwell herself a minute ago. There was no room on the other side of this wall. There was supposed to be the Rose Room, and it wasn't there, and somebody was laughing in it.

A chair scraped. Somebody started telling a story, too muffled to follow. She pressed her palm flat to the wallpaper where the door handle ought to be. Solid plaster, from the heel of her hand to the tip of every finger, and the voices went on behind it, near enough that she kept waiting for one of them to call her name.

None of them did.

Caitlin kept her palm on the wall after the laughter faded. Liam pressed the sketchbook flat against his chest because his hands wanted something to hold. There was a door on the page and flowered paper in front of him. The portrait's frame had a chip at the lower edge; he found it with his fingertip. He'd walked past a door beside that chip on the way up. He had drawn it this afternoon. He'd have sworn to it.

His mouth had gone dry. He noticed that, the way he'd notice a wrong proportion, from a small distance, and set it aside.

"Let's take the stair," he said.

She looked at the steps. "That's where the board creaked."

Through the rail he could see the rope at the bottom. A woman crossed the strip of hall below. He called to her. Caitlin called too. The woman didn't turn. From up here he couldn't see around the bend in the stair.

Caitlin took her hand off the wallpaper. It left a dark print in the dust. She stepped toward the stair. Liam closed the book and went after her.

At the top step, voices rose from below. The way down was open as far as the bend. He looked the other way, toward the main guest corridor. Its route to the foyer stairs lay around the corner.

"What about the main stairs?" he said. "They come out by the party?"

"Yeah. Down the guest corridor. They come out right by the cider."

"Let's try those. We won't have to pass whatever made that noise."

She was looking down at the woman in the portrait on the bend. "But she's right there. I can see her from here."

"If it's wrong, we come back." He kept one hand on the rail. "I can still see this landing from there."

Her eyes went to the book. "All right."

He held out his hand. She took it without looking at him and squeezed his fingers hard, once, and he squeezed back. They walked to the corner. The table stayed where it was. The bat still hung over the painted man's head.

They turned into the guest corridor. Liam stopped to hold up his sketch. The short west passage met the corridor at this angle. The main stairs came up along it, near the foyer end. He'd drawn the stairwell as an open break in the wall with the balustrade running back toward the guest rooms. He'd seen it from below when he arrived; Caitlin had shown him where it came up. A guest coming up those stairs would step straight into this corridor with the numbered rooms on either side.

The corridor looked shorter than his drawing. He checked the sheet against the picture rail, the runner, the ceiling light. He might have put too much space between the turn and the landing. He did get distances wrong when he hurried. But a stairwell couldn't fit behind a closed door, and the sound of the party ought to be coming up its open well.

"How far?" he asked.

Caitlin pointed along the wall. "Past that vase. There should be a railing right where the hall opens up."

The vase stood on a low stand under a floral print. Beyond it was a closed door with a strip of black paper hanging from its upper panel, left over from a decoration somebody had taken down. His plan had an opening on this wall. Caitlin was using the vase to place it exactly.

"Maybe this is a door to the stairs," he said.

"It doesn't have a door. It's never had a door. It's an open stair with a rail."

"Somebody might have put one in."

"Then somebody hung a whole door tonight while I was busy with the pumpkins, and I think I'd have heard the hammering."

The easy lift was gone from her voice. He moved the sketchbook to his left hand and reached for the knob, and Caitlin caught his wrist.

"Wait."

He stopped. The black paper lifted in a draft from somewhere and settled flat again. The party sounded as though it was on the far side of this door, and it also sounded as though it was behind them, coming up the west stair. Sound traveled strangely through old walls. That was the most useful thought he had, and he held on to it harder than it deserved.

"What do you expect to see?" she asked.

"The main landing. The top of the foyer stairs."

"Okay. Good." She let go of his wrist. "Me too. I wanted somebody else to say it first."

Her hand dropped to her skirt, to the pocket, where he knew she kept the drawing. She pressed it flat through the velvet. He couldn't tell whether she was making sure it was safe or reminding herself that something from downstairs had come up here with them. He turned the knob.

The door swung in. Behind it was a guest room.

A narrow bed stood against the far wall with its cover tucked tight at the corners, and a pale crescent worn into the headboard where pillows had rubbed. A wardrobe stood where the stairwell should have dropped away. A glass of water waited on the nightstand. In the window a black branch moved against the night. The room was made up and ready for somebody to sleep in, and nobody was in it.

Liam kept his hand on the door. The hinges hadn't made a sound. Nothing in the room moved. The voices kept pressing up through the corridor behind him, and he felt the floor tilt a little under his feet, though it hadn't moved at all.

He'd had this feeling once before. He'd come home from work to his apartment in Boston and found half of it gone, the bookshelf, the good lamp, the rug they'd bought together, and he'd stood in the doorway exactly like this, holding the knob, trying to make the room match what he knew. He hadn't thought about that doorway in months. He pushed it away.

"Is there a way through?" he asked.

Caitlin leaned past him to look. "No."

"A connecting door?"

"No. None of them connect. None of them have ever connected."

He took one step inside to look at the far wall. The wardrobe was far too shallow to hide a stair. The window was set in the outside wall, where he'd have expected the front of the building to be; through the branches he could see the drive below. They hadn't turned around. They had reached the right side of the inn, and it held a bedroom where an open landing should be.

He stepped back into the corridor. Caitlin stood by the vase, looking at the bed over his shoulder. He left the door open.

He held the sketch against the wall with his thumb on the stair opening. The vase she'd pointed to stood just past it. His wrist was shaking badly enough to blur the lines. He braced it against the plaster until it stopped. The bed was still there.

"I drew the foyer stairs from downstairs," he said. "I might've put the top in the wrong spot."

"You put it right where it is. I watched you do it."

"Where it was."

She looked at him. He could see where her joke ought to come. She might have told him the inn was a bad model, or that he should charge Ms. Hawthorne extra for revisions. Her mouth opened. She looked back into the room.

"There's a stain on the wardrobe," she said.

He followed her eyes. A dark ring the size of a cup marked the lower door. Caitlin moved past him and crouched in front of it. He stayed on the threshold. The window was too high for a safe jump; below it the lawn fell away into dark. He noticed he'd checked that, and didn't like that he had.

"Caitlin."

"I know this room."

"Which one?"

She stood up. Her eyes went from the wardrobe to the headboard. "Ms. Hawthorne set a cup of polish down right there when I was helping her turn the rooms one spring. She was so cross with herself she baked me a cake about it. She's been meaning to get somebody in to fix it ever since."

"Can we go back to the west stair?"

"Yes. Yes, we can."

He believed she meant to try. He couldn't make himself say they'd reach the party. The open stair was behind a corner. They'd seen it minutes ago. He needed them to look at it together, before either of them decided they'd imagined another way down.

"You pick what we check next," he said.

She stared at him. "What?"

"You know the house. Tell me what to check."

He had drawn this plan before anything moved. She knew the room whose wardrobe he'd have walked past without seeing the stain. If she told him to go back to the west stair, he would.

"The number," she said. "We check the number. I know which room goes where. I could walk this floor with my eyes shut." She stopped. "I thought I could."

"Where should this one be?"

"Seven is way down past the main landing, at the far end. It shouldn't be anywhere near here." She looked at the stain and kept her hand well away from the wood. "That's Room Seven."

The black paper on the corridor side of the door lifted against his shoulder in the draft. He turned his head enough to see the brass number underneath it, on the door they'd opened where the stairs should begin.

7.

Caitlin put her hand on the doorframe beside his. Her fingers had begun to shake, and when he covered them with his own, his were shaking too.