← Lantern's Glow

The Party Through the Wall

The Party Through the Wall

Caitlin's hand would not stop shaking against the doorframe, even with his over it. She slid it out from under and took it away before Liam could decide she needed leading somewhere. He'd already felt it. He was looking at the brass seven on the door, which was kinder than looking at her, and she loved him a little for that, in a small panicked way she didn't have time to examine.

The wardrobe stood across the room with its old ring of polish, and she knew that ring. She'd watched Ms. Hawthorne leave it there with a cup she set down and forgot while she explained which drawer the spare candles lived in. So if this was some other room, somebody had copied this one right down to the stain, and nobody had known she and Liam were coming up here. Her mind offered her something worse than that, and she refused to let it finish the sentence.

"Can you close it? Please close it," she said.

Liam drew the door shut. The strip of black paper on the panel lifted and settled. Room Seven was supposed to be much farther along this corridor, past the opening to the foyer stairs. She had turned left at the top of those stairs so many times that she'd stopped seeing them years ago. Maybe the opening was farther on. Maybe she'd been so sure of where the stairs began that she'd looked at the wrong part of the hall.

She could hear her own argument picking up speed, the way it did at the front desk when she knew a patron was right and she was wrong and she was trying to talk her way back to solid ground. She'd rather put her feet to work.

"Okay. We'll walk to the end," she told him. "The foyer stairs have to meet this floor somewhere. They always have. If that door really is Seven, the landing comes after it. Right?" Nobody answered. "Right."

"What's between here and there?"

"The vase. Two room doors. The radiator under a print of some roses that look diseased. The stairs open on the right." She pointed down the corridor. "The parlor's on that side, below us. You drew it."

He opened his sketchbook without trying to persuade her his drawing was a better memory than hers. "Here?"

His pencil had made the inn behave. The main stairs rose from the foyer to an open space off this corridor; Room Seven sat beyond it; the west passage came in at the other end. He'd drawn it this afternoon, when he could walk from room to room like a normal person. She put her finger on the penciled stairs.

"Here," she said. "Okay. Now we look."

They passed the vase and the floral print. Her skirt swept the stand, and Liam caught the vase before it could tip. Earlier tonight she'd have called that a lovely excuse to touch his hand and saved it up to tell Maggie. Right now all she wanted was for the vase to stay exactly where it belonged, and it did. The thin crack in its lip faced the wall, where Ms. Hawthorne always turned it so guests wouldn't see.

"That one's right," she said.

"I'll mark it."

He made a short stroke. She heard the pencil rasp on the paper and thought of him drawing her at the carving table, a hundred years ago, before dinner. The drawing was still in her pocket. She pressed it through the velvet with two fingers, a small ordinary thing that had come upstairs with them.

The first numbered door was shut. So was the next. She didn't read the numbers. What mattered was where they were: two doors, then the radiator, then a stretch of open rail where anybody coming up from the foyer could see straight down the corridor. If she kept watching for the stairs themselves, she might miss the place where this turned back into the hall she knew.

She counted the doors out loud. At the second one, there was the radiator under its faded roses. One painted rose had a brown drip running through its middle. She remembered finding it while hanging ghosts one year and telling Ms. Hawthorne that even the wallpaper had dressed up for Halloween, and Ms. Hawthorne had laughed so hard she'd had to sit down on the stairs.

"There," Caitlin said. "The landing's right after this."

Liam looked ahead. "How far?"

"A few steps. I've never counted."

The carpet went on. They passed a narrow window, and she tried to remember if she had ever seen it before and couldn't, and they should have reached the stairs by now. The runner ended in a brass strip, and past it the corridor carried on under another ceiling light.

She stopped at the window. The black glass gave back a version of them with all the party color drained out: her red dress a dark shape, Liam's face half behind the raised sketchbook. Past their reflections a willow branch touched the pane. She looked away before she could start inventing a new outside wall to explain it.

"The hall's longer," she said.

He waited.

"I mean it's longer than it should be. That light's not supposed to be there."

There. She'd said it out loud where he could hear it, and the moment she did, her knees went loose and watery, as if saying it had made it true. If she made a joke now, she'd be asking him to pretend along with her, and he'd already given her more honesty than that.

"I could walk back to the radiator," Liam said. "See how far it is."

"No. Don't. We know where it is. I can see the roses from here, and if you walk back, I'll only be standing here watching you get farther away."

It came out before she could stop it, and it was the truest thing she'd said all night.

"Then we keep it behind us."

He held the sketch low enough that she could see his face. He was waiting for her to decide, though he could have taken longer steps and reached the end of the hall before her. She wanted to reward that with some confidence she didn't have. What she said was, "All right. We keep it behind us."

She stepped over the brass strip. This part of the runner had a patch worn down its middle. She couldn't remember ever seeing it, but then, she had never before approached the foyer down a corridor with too much corridor in it. Her eyes went to the ceiling light and the door beneath it on the left, and the baseboard ahead, which ran on and on with nothing breaking it. No open rail. No top step. Nothing.

The party came through again: a glass set down hard, one voice rising over another, a child's wail of protest. She turned toward the right-hand wall. The sound seemed to come from past the end of the hall, where she wanted the stairs to be. A faint warmth touched her face. The parlor fire was downstairs on that side. She could almost make herself see the rail up ahead, past the light.

"Hear that?" she asked.

"The kid?"

"And the glass. Somebody set one down hard. We're going the right way."

She took another step, and the smell of hot cider reached her, thin but unmistakable. Ms. Hawthorne had been warming it all afternoon. Caitlin pictured the foyer at the foot of the main stairs, the parlor door open, Maggie waiting to tell her exactly how long she'd taken to find a handsome stranger and lose him again. She'd let Maggie have the story. She would write down every humiliating word of it herself if only Maggie would answer when she called.

She opened her mouth to call.

Maggie laughed on the other side of the wall to her left.

It was Maggie's laugh, two quick notes and then a long one. Caitlin had heard her laugh exactly like that at the library desk whenever a patron discovered that the book they swore the library had lost was in their own tote bag. She'd know it anywhere. Beside the ceiling light was a closed guest-room door, and between that door and Caitlin was plain plaster. The party was supposed to be to the right and downstairs. She could see back the way they'd come, the vase and the radiator behind them. They hadn't doubled back.

"Maggie?" Her voice came out thin. She tried again, loud enough to carry through any ordinary wall. "Maggie, it's Caitlin."

The laugh dissolved into other voices. Somebody moved a chair. Caitlin crossed to the door on the left and turned its knob. A made bed waited inside, its corners tucked tight the way Ms. Hawthorne liked them, and no Maggie, and nobody else. She looked behind the door, because her eyes insisted on finishing the search, and then closed it gently. There was no sensible reason to slam a door on an empty room.

She stood there with her hand on the knob, and it came to her all at once, the thing she'd never have said to anyone. She knew this. She knew exactly this. She'd spent years on the wrong side of this sound. Every Halloween at this party, and at every wedding she'd been invited to alone, and every Friday night Maggie went out with her boyfriend and Caitlin went home to a novel and a pot of tea: other people laughing somewhere close by, close enough to hear every word, and no door she could find that let her in. She had simply never had it built for her out of plaster before.

Her throat closed up. She swallowed until it opened.

The clipping said the guests followed music. Later they heard laughter, and opened rooms, and found nobody in them. Caitlin shut the guest-room door and went back to Liam. He hadn't crossed to the right-hand wall to prove his drawing. He was listening to the left one too.

Caitlin kept her eyes on the far end of the corridor, and Liam could see her jaw working, as though she were chewing on something she couldn't swallow. He looked down at his sketch, then at the stretch of wall where her friend had laughed. The parlor ran along the right edge of his drawing. He'd checked it from the foyer himself. The guest room on their left had a window facing the drive. Maggie might have been down in the yard under that window, laughing; except he'd heard a chair scrape after her. Caitlin had heard it too.

He turned a page and found his foyer study. There was the staircase climbing the wall, its top rail open to the guest floor. He'd shaded the balusters because the afternoon light had come through them and laid stripes across the wallpaper opposite. He'd drawn it standing in the parlor doorway. He'd even put in a boy hanging over the rail until Ms. Hawthorne called him down. If he'd drawn the landing in the wrong place on the plan, he still knew the stairs existed. He'd drawn a child on them.

His hands were cold. He tucked one under his arm, against his ribs, and kept the book steady with the other.

"The radiator," he said. "Is it usually before the main stairs?"

"Before them, if you're coming from the west end. Which we were. I keep checking."

"And we passed it."

"Yes. Two doors, the radiator, the ugly roses. I counted."

"All right." He put his thumb on the penciled opening. "We could go farther, but I don't see the rail."

"Neither do I. And I keep looking anyway."

Her answer came fast. Her hand was jammed into the pocket of her dress so hard that he could see the outline of folded paper through the velvet. He knew which paper. He'd drawn her laughing, before he knew what her face did when she couldn't find a door in a house she'd known all her life. He couldn't fix that. He could see it now, and he'd have given a great deal not to. He did know one other way down.

"The west stair," he said. "We saw it from the top. We saw the rope at the bottom."

"We also saw the Rose Room door right before it disappeared. I'm not helping. I know."

"True."

She glanced at him, maybe expecting an argument. He closed the sketchbook around one finger. "It's the shorter way down anyway. Let's go back and try it."

"You've been keeping score. There are little tick marks all over that page. You're keeping score on a hallway."

"I'm making marks. I don't know who's winning."

The corner of her mouth moved. For an instant he saw the woman who'd climbed a ladder with paper ghosts and had an opinion about his drawing before she knew his name, and something in his chest turned over. Just as quickly, she looked past him at the closed guest room.

"It was Maggie," she said.

"I believe you."

"She has a laugh you could pick out from the next county."

"So it was her."

"It should've been." She pulled her hand out of her pocket. "Except the guests heard laughing too. It's in the clipping. They went looking and found empty rooms. And I just opened an empty room."

She'd told him the story. He'd watched her separate what the clipping said from the endings her grandmother had added. He wanted to hand her that same clean division now: the empty room they'd checked, the party they'd heard, and all the guesses in between.

"You found the guy at the fair, though," he said. "From that night."

"Arguing about a pumpkin. Somebody walks out of this inn, and the next anybody sees of him, he's at the fair fighting about a pumpkin."

"He got out well enough to argue."

"At some point." She folded her arms tight across the velvet. "I never found out when. It could've been the next week or ten years later, and I hate that those are the best words I've got."

He shut the book. "Then let's look at the stair."

They started back. The corridor was quiet under their shoes. At the radiator Caitlin touched the painted rose with the brown drip without breaking stride, a check on a place she'd named. He noticed she used her wall-side hand and kept the other free. When he reached for the free one, she took it. Her grip was warm and hard, and she didn't let go.

"You can tell me if you want to turn around," he said.

"Do you?"

"No."

"Then I don't. Part of me does. That part doesn't get a vote."

They passed the vase. He moved the sketchbook under his arm before he could clip it, and she saw him do it.

"If we get downstairs," she said, "Ms. Hawthorne's going to bill you for handling that vase."

"It didn't fall."

"She'll bill you for thinking about it."

He almost told her he'd pay for the vase. He shut his mouth and tried to meet her halfway instead. "I'll put it in the drawing. Proof it's still in one piece."

She let out a startled breath of a laugh, and her fingers loosened around his. It lasted as far as Room Seven. The number gleamed on the door that stood where his foyer study had an open rail. She stopped in front of it, and he stopped with her. He could have pointed out that they'd passed this door without changing position. It would have told her nothing she didn't already know.

From farther along the passage came a short run of notes. Uneven. The last one held until the party noise swallowed it. Liam turned toward it. Nobody stood by the portrait at the corner. Beside him, Caitlin didn't hum along this time.

"Did you hear it?" he asked.

"Yes." She was looking at the sketchbook under his arm, not at him. "My grandmother never told me who played."

He waited for more. She shook her head and walked on toward the west passage. The tune might have come through a wall, the way the laughter had. He didn't ask her to believe that. It gave them no help choosing a stair, and her face, when she said my grandmother, had made him want to stop asking her anything at all.

At the corner the little table and the portrait came into view. Her paper bat still hung over the man's head with its bent wing. Past them was the west stair they'd climbed. The top of it was clear. The rail led down to the bend, where the woman's portrait hung out of sight from here. Voices rose from below, too blurred to make out. He could see the first few steps, and the worn edge he'd caught his shoe on coming up.

"That's it," Caitlin said. "That's the one we came up. The rope's at the bottom, and the public hall's right past it, and I'm going to hug that rope."

Her voice was firm. He squeezed her hand. He wanted that lower hall as badly as she did. More, maybe. He wanted her out of this more than he'd wanted anything in a year.

They reached the stairhead. Before either of them could put a foot on the first step, a board creaked below the bend. Another answered, nearer. A third creaked on the steps right in front of them, close enough that Liam pulled Caitlin back from the rail without thinking and put himself between her and the stairs.

The sounds had climbed toward them.

He leaned over the banister, his heart slamming. The stairs down to the bend were empty. He shifted so he could see the woman's portrait and the strip of steps beneath it. No face. No hand on the rail. No foot drawing back around the turn. Caitlin came up beside him and looked too, and he felt her shoulder pressed hard against his arm, and he didn't know which of them was shaking.

Nothing was there.