← Lantern's Glow

The Short Stair

The Short Stair

The stair was empty. Caitlin had looked down the rail from the top, and Liam had leaned out farther than she liked. Whatever had made those boards answer each other had finished climbing. There was nowhere for it to be standing.

She put her hand on the banister. She knew the worn place under her palm the way she knew the dip in her own mattress. The portrait at the bend hung straight, the way she'd left it. Below that was the short run down to the public hall and the rope Liam had laid along the wall. Somebody at the party raised their voice over the noise, asking who had the carving knife. A living person with a pumpkin problem. She would have given anything to be annoyed with them.

"I'll go first," she said.

Liam looked at the empty steps. "You sure?"

"I know where the bad board is. And if I leave you in charge, you'll stop to draw the portrait, and we'll still be here when Ms. Hawthorne starts making breakfast, and she'll put us to work washing cups." She tried to grin at him. It didn't quite take. "Come down with me. Okay?"

"Yeah."

He took the sketchbook from under his arm and held it flat against his chest. He let her take the first step and stayed close behind, near enough that she could hear his shoes on the wood and feel the warmth of him at her back. She was grateful he didn't tell her the stairs were safe. He'd watched them creak with nobody on them.

When she couldn't remember whether she'd locked the library's back door, she could always picture turning the key. The trouble was she could also picture turning it on the days she'd forgotten. So she counted the treads out loud instead. If she reached the woman's portrait at the eighth step, the way she always did, she'd take the lower flight. If the portrait came early, or late, they'd turn back while the top landing was still in sight.

Her voice sounded silly in the narrow stairwell, high and schoolroom-careful. Liam didn't join in, and he didn't tell her to stop. He put his hand on the rail behind hers and followed the count. Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her throat, in the roots of her teeth. The board by the portrait groaned under her foot. It had groaned for years, usually while she was hauling a box of paper bats and wishing she'd made fewer. Tonight she could have kissed it. At eight, the woman's dark sleeve was right beside her shoulder.

"That's right," she said, and her breath went out of her. "The top flight's right."

"Okay." Liam looked past her. "Can you see the rope?"

"After the turn. She blocks it from here."

She touched the bottom of the frame. The painted woman's hand rested on the back of a painted chair, and the gilt had a nick where Caitlin had caught it with a decorations box last October. Last October, when she could have taken this corner in the dark and come out beside the party with cardboard dust in her hair. She was taking the same turn now. Her feet knew how.

She rounded the bend.

The lower flight was gone.

A runner started where the last step ended and ran on into a room with a broad window at its far end. Caitlin stopped so short that Liam's chest bumped her shoulder. The portrait was at her back. Ahead of her, chairs stood along a wall papered in pale vines, and a narrow table sat beneath the window. The curtain hung still. Beyond the dark glass she could see no yard, no road, only their two reflections and a patch of black.

The public hall should have been here. She should have been looking down at the rope, and across the hall to the parlor door. If she'd called to whoever was hunting the knife, they could have looked up and seen her.

Her stomach dropped the way it did in dreams of missing a step. Every part of her went cold at once, starting at her scalp.

"What is it?" Liam asked.

She moved aside so he could see. "This isn't the bottom."

He came down beside her. Neither of them stepped off the last stair. From this angle the room nearly made sense: an old inn might keep spare chairs on a landing, and a curtained window might show nothing at night. The trouble was how wide it was. The walls spread away beyond the stair on both sides. There was no room for them between the west side of the inn and the yard. The table was too far away. She couldn't make her eyes bring it any closer.

She leaned across the threshold and pressed her fingers to the nearest chair. Solid wood, with a splinter under the seat. She didn't know why she'd half expected her hand to go through it. The runner smelled faintly of floor polish. Ms. Hawthorne did have another stack of chairs, but she kept them in the conservatory, and Caitlin had carried every one of them at one time or another. None of them belonged here.

Liam pulled the sketchbook open. She could see the line he'd made for the lower flight: turn, down, rope, public hall. No square for a room. He set one finger on the corner and looked at the broad window.

"Which way does that face?" he asked.

"It can't face anything." She stepped onto the runner, and Liam stepped off the stair after her. "We'd be out past the willow trunk."

She could have told him which window in this inn leaked every March. She couldn't place this one. She kept the wall at her side and moved toward it, leaving herself a line back to the stair. The table was dark oak, with a pale scar on its edge where someone had once set down something heavy. When she put her hand on the window frame, it had the same thick old paint as every frame she'd ever fought open in this house, and the glass was cold. No branch touched this pane. Their reflections looked farther away than they ought to.

When she looked down at the table, the lantern was standing on it.

It was the lantern. The squat brass one with the wavy glass, the one she'd moved the toffees away from this afternoon, the one that was supposed to be downstairs on the parlor mantel right now, surrounded by her paper ghosts and a row of carved pumpkins. The two little figures on its glass ran through their row of trees. She didn't touch it. She didn't say anything to Liam about it, either, because if she said it out loud, it would be true.

The party cheered. She and Liam both turned toward it. It came from the wall to the left of the window, near enough that she could pick out one child's shriek from the rest. Her hands came up before she'd decided what to do with them. She laid one flat against the wallpaper. Nothing gave. She called for Maggie. She called louder, in her story-hour voice, the one she used when the back row had decided she was too quiet to deserve attention.

The party swallowed her name. A chair scraped on the other side. Nobody called back.

Liam stood near the window with the sketch held open. He'd left a clear path to the stairs. When they came in, she'd been able to see the woman's portrait over her shoulder, a slice of dark dress through the doorway. As long as that was there, she could take him back up to the guest corridor and try another door. The stair had brought them down. It could take them back up.

"We go back," she told him. "Upstairs. We figure it out up there, where at least I know which floorboards hate me. I don't know this room."

He nodded. "I'll follow you."

She turned.

The portrait wasn't there.

A corridor began where the stair doorway had stood, with a dark red carpet she had never seen anywhere in this inn, and she would have known. The ceiling sloped down toward the left-hand wall. A row of closed doors ran along it with plain brass knobs. The nearest door stood exactly where she had last seen the painted woman's shoulder.

Liam turned with her. He hadn't touched a door or stepped between her and the stairs. The window was still at her back. The chairs still stood along the wall. She crossed to the nearest door and closed her hand around the knob before he could tell her to wait. She didn't turn it. There'd been no door here a breath ago, and she had no reason on earth to think opening it would help.

"The stairs were there," she said.

"I saw them."

She looked down the sloping corridor. No rail. No portrait. No way to check her count. Behind them a child at the party complained loudly that it was her turn. The sound came through the room's wall, as if the child were close enough to kick it.

Caitlin let go of the knob.

"Liam, I can't get us out." Her voice cracked straight down the middle. "I don't— I can't get us out."

She waited for a joke to come after it, the way one always did. Nothing came. There was only the cold in her hands and the burn behind her eyes and her own breath going ragged. He lowered the sketchbook and came to stand beside her, facing the corridor, and his shoulder touched hers. She leaned into it before she'd decided to, all her weight on that one warm place, because it was the only thing on this floor that was exactly where she'd left it.

The red carpet ran on past where the light reached. Liam could see the nearest doors and part of a window farther down; the rest vanished where the hall bent. From the threshold, the room's far window had seemed to sit in the outside wall. The new corridor began where the stairs had been and ran along the outside wall too, where the yard should be. His drawing had no place to put either one.

Caitlin's weight against his shoulder was the steadiest thing he had. He stayed very still so she could keep it there.

She kept her hand off the door. She looked up at him. He had no answer, so he turned the sketchbook so she could see it with him, which was the only thing he had to offer.

"You counted to the portrait," he said. "I saw it at the bend."

"Eight. It's always eight."

He marked the upper flight, the last place the sketch still fit. He left the room off the page.

"I believe you," he said.

Her mouth pulled tight. "Okay. I believe you too. For the record."

"Okay. That window." He pointed down the corridor. "What's supposed to be out there?"

She looked, then glanced back at the room's window. "The yard. It should be the yard. They should both face the yard, which means that hall's outside, which it can't be, because then it'd be standing in the— no. There isn't room."

He held the book up at eye level and sighted along its edge. In his afternoon sketch, the west stair lay against the outside wall. Anybody going down it reached the public hall after the bend. Even if he'd drawn the angle badly, this corridor would have had to run through the yard.

He didn't want her to be right. He couldn't find a single mistake in what she'd said. He had trusted his eye for ten years, and now his hands were cold on the sketchbook. The hall had a window in the wrong place. The red runner went farther than his west passage ever had. He touched the pencil line for the wall, then the nearest doorframe. The frame was there under his hand. That was worse, somehow, than if it hadn't been.

"Is there a hall like this anywhere in the inn?" he asked.

"No. Not with this carpet. Ms. Hawthorne would never pick this carpet."

"Okay."

He stepped back into the room and looked at the chairs. They hadn't moved. The table still had its scar, and on it sat the lantern he had drawn on the parlor mantel this afternoon. He didn't mention it. Neither did she, and he understood from the way she wasn't looking at it that she'd seen it first. He went back to her. He wanted to try the other doors, to see whether one of them opened onto a hall she knew. But he'd already opened one door tonight because it belonged on his drawing, and it had given them an empty guest room. Opening another here might only give them another room.

Caitlin took the folded drawing of herself out of her skirt pocket. For a moment he thought she meant to hold it up against the sketchbook. She only checked that it was there and put it back. He remembered drawing it while she laughed at the pumpkin. That scrap of paper had come through every wrong turn with her, and she kept reaching for it the way he kept reaching for the plan. He'd have liked to tell her he was glad she'd kept it. That could wait. He hoped to God there'd be a later to tell her in.

"The guests in the clipping," he said. "They got out, right?"

"One of them was at the fair afterward, arguing about a pumpkin. I told you that. But it doesn't say when he got out of here. Nothing says that."

"What did your grandmother say?"

"That the innkeeper found them up near the attic at dawn. Sometimes. She changed the ending, Liam. She wasn't there."

"You think we might be here till morning?"

"I don't know. She always said dawn like it was the happy ending." She looked back toward the door where the stairs had been, and her chin wobbled once, and she stopped it.

He couldn't use the fair to promise her an hour. He shut the sketchbook.

"Okay," he said. "We keep checking."

"You don't have to stay right beside me."

"I want to."

He'd meant the doors. It came out meaning a great deal more than that. Her eyes came up to his and held, and he found he had no wish to take it back. It was quiet enough that they both heard somebody at the party call out that they'd found the knife, and a small cheer go up. Caitlin moved toward the wall that carried their voices and lifted her hand to it, then let the hand fall. She'd already tried that wall.

He opened the book again and turned to the foyer page. If they found the open rail, they'd find the main stairs. He could look for its light, even if the lines on this page meant nothing to the carpet under his feet. He marked where they stood with a question mark and pressed the pencil down so hard the point broke.

"If we saw the main landing, would you know it?" he asked.

"From the rail. The foyer light falls across it. There's a print on the wall too, but I wouldn't trust the print tonight."

"Rail and light, then."

"If we find them."

"Then we look."

He left the question mark. The corridor had doors on both sides. They could pick the nearest one and find out what was behind it, or walk to the bend and see whether a rail appeared. Caitlin watched him look from one to the other. He turned the plan so she could see it, and she put her finger on the penciled foyer, a long way from where this corridor ought to be.

Four uneven notes sounded somewhere past the bend. The last one held long enough that he heard the little break in it, the same break he'd heard in Caitlin's voice when she hummed it in the parlor. He looked at her. Her lips were shut tight.

Before he could ask, the notes started again behind them, from the room with the broad window. The last note of the first run hadn't finished yet. For a moment the same tune was ahead of them and behind them at once, and the two held notes rubbed against each other, not quite in tune, and the hair rose all along his arms. He turned. The chairs were empty. The window gave back their reflections.

"You hear both?" he asked.

"Yes. Both. Both of them."

He couldn't choose a direction by the music. He shut the sketchbook and put it under his arm to leave his hands free. Caitlin was already beside him. They could hear the party through the room's wall: somebody laughing, a glass tapped lightly against another. He searched the corridor for the foyer light. There was only a dim glow past the bend, and no rail anywhere in sight.

At the far end, past that bend, a door clicked shut. He couldn't see a door from here. He heard its latch settle.

Caitlin grabbed his sleeve. Her fingers found his wrist through the cuff and held on, and his pulse was going so hard against them that she must have felt every beat. He didn't pull away. He didn't want her to think he was steadier than he was. The music stopped. The party went on behind the wall, and Liam stood in a corridor that couldn't exist with her hand on his racing pulse, and he did not know which way to take her.