← Lantern's Glow

The Rose Room

The Rose Room

The click came from around the bend where the corridor went dim, and Caitlin knew that sound. She'd heard doors in this inn shut behind a hundred guests going back for their scarves. It had never once made her stomach turn over like this, slow and sick. Liam opened his sketchbook again, though she could see he didn't expect the page to help. She kept hold of his sleeve.

"We could stay in that room," he said.

She looked back at the broad window and the chairs. The party was audible through its wall. So, still, was the memory of that latch.

"Until somebody comes looking? Maggie will. She'll come up the main stairs and find a perfectly normal guest landing, and I won't know how to tell her where we are."

"You don't have to tell her yet."

"I know." She let go of his sleeve. "I can't stand next to that wall and listen to them all night. I can't."

He closed the book. They went down the corridor together, keeping the windowed room in sight as long as the bend allowed. She trailed her fingers along the plaster as she walked, raised vines under her fingertips and then the smooth painted wood of a doorframe, then vines again. It helped a little, touching things. The corridor was quiet now. No tune ahead, none behind. The boards took their weight and gave back only their footsteps.

At the bend she stopped. The glow came from a small lamp on a hall table. It lit a brass plate on the door beside it.

ROSE ROOM.

She'd passed that plate every October of her life on her way to straighten the portrait. She'd once set a basket of paper bats on a table beneath it, and Ms. Hawthorne had asked her kindly to move them, because guests kept thinking the bats came with the room. She knew the plate. She knew the scratch through the last E. And she knew it belonged in the short west passage beside the man with his hand in his waistcoat, not here at the end of a carpet that ought to run through the yard.

Liam read it over her shoulder. "Is that where it should be?"

"No." She put her finger on the scratch. "But the plate is."

"That helps?"

"It helps me know I didn't make it up. I'm keeping the plate. It's the only thing up here I recognize." Her voice wobbled on recognize, and she let it.

Somewhere past the corridor a party guest laughed, faint and low. She couldn't tell if it came through the door or up through the floor. The Rose Room had a sitting room; Maggie always said it was full of flowers too dead for anyone to throw out, and Ms. Hawthorne called them arrangements, and that was as much as anyone had ever gotten out of her on the subject. There was another room past it, too. Caitlin had heard that from people who'd enjoyed knowing something about this inn that she didn't.

She put her hand on the knob. "There's a sitting room. We can close the door and think."

"Okay."

"If it opens onto the kitchen, I might scream. Don't be surprised."

"I'll be surprised if it's the kitchen."

She turned the knob. It gave. Chintz crowded a settee and two chairs, porcelain shepherdesses lined the mantel beside a crystal vase of dried roses, and the bookshelf on the far wall was so stuffed with old volumes that its lower shelves sagged. The air smelled of dust and a perfume she couldn't name. Maggie had been right about the flowers. Caitlin owed her an apology, if there was still a party to go back and apologize at.

Liam waited in the hall while she went in. The lamp outside threw its light through the doorway. She crossed to the settee and looked behind it, then into the narrow space beside the mantel. Nobody was there. There was no second door to the hall. The room was exactly the size a room at the end of this little inn might be, if the corridor leading to it had come from the right place.

"Come in," she said. "I checked. Nobody's hiding."

He came in. She shut the hall door and kept her hand on the knob. The latch caught with a small, ordinary sound, and she opened it again at once. The same lamp and red carpet waited outside. She knew Liam had watched her do it. She looked at him before she shut it again.

"I needed that," she said.

"Yeah."

"It's still the wrong hall. I know."

"We can open it again later."

In the sitting room the party faded to a far-off clatter, glass on glass with no direction to it. Caitlin couldn't keep still. She circled the settee and went to look at the bookshelf. She had heard about the opening. An old volunteer at the library, who'd stayed in this room on her honeymoon back before Ms. Hawthorne stopped letting it out, had described the shelf that swung aside. She'd also described the roses on the wallpaper behind it and gone so pink doing it that Caitlin stopped asking questions, which she still slightly regretted. The bookshelf had a narrow gap at the floor and a little brass catch tucked under one side. She put a fingertip against the wood and did not pull.

"What's behind that?" Liam asked.

"The rest of the suite. The bedroom." She straightened up, and heard how that sounded in a closed room at night with him, and her face went hot. "There's a catch. I haven't tried it."

He looked from the shelf to her. He didn't ask to see the bedroom. He went and checked the hall door instead, tried it once, and left it closed.

Caitlin sat down on the arm of the settee. The porcelain shepherdesses smiled past her shoulder with their little painted mouths. They'd have been easier to stand if they belonged to somebody she could argue with.

"I wanted a strange night," she said.

Liam came back from the door and stopped close enough for her to touch him. He waited.

"I mean before any of this. At the party. When you came in, I wanted you to stay and look at me again. I wanted to do something that would turn into a story later, and I had all the usual stupid ideas about that lantern, because I've watched other people tell those stories for years and I've never once been in one." She rubbed the edge of the settee where the chintz had worn down to threads. "I didn't ask for a room I can't get out of."

"You didn't."

"I can't tell whether the inn's playing a joke on us, or if that's me being ridiculous because it's Halloween and the doors have stopped making sense. Either way I hate it, because what if I'm the joke? I wanted you, and now here we are in a sitting room with a bedroom attached, which is— that is not subtle. Even for a house."

The words ran out, and she was left sitting there having said them. Her whole body felt scraped raw and too light.

Liam sat on the settee facing her. The cushion shifted, and the worn thread slipped out from under her finger. She knew he'd heard the part about wanting him. She didn't know what he could possibly do with it while that wrong hall waited outside.

"You wanted me before the hall changed," he said.

"I did."

"I wanted you."

He said it plainly, the way he said everything, and it went through her like heat. She stared at his hand on the cushion. There was still graphite at the side of his thumb, ground into a crease. He had held a pencil through all of this and never once pretended to know what this place was doing, and she found she trusted that hand more than the brass plate she'd known all her life.

"You could have stayed at the party," she said. "You came with me because I pulled you into a ghost story."

"I came because you asked."

"That was before we knew the stairs could do this."

"Yeah." He glanced at the hall door. "I'd have followed you back out if they'd worked."

She took her hand off the arm of the settee. "Liam, I want to kiss you. I also keep hearing the kids downstairs and wondering why none of them can hear me. I can't do both at once. Or I can. I don't know. I've never tried."

He held out his hand and didn't tell her which to choose. She took it. His fingers were warm around hers, and when he drew her down beside him, she went. He gave her room to stop. She kissed him instead.

His mouth brought back the edge of the party, the side parlor, the window cold against her shoulder, the moment she'd kissed him because she wanted to and for no other reason in the world. Right in the middle of it she remembered the corridor, and her hand clenched on his. He pulled back enough to see her face.

"Too much?" he asked.

"No. I remembered where we are." She glanced at the bookshelf, then away. "That's a terrible sentence to say in this particular room."

He didn't take the invitation the room seemed to be making. He brushed her hair back off her cheek, slowly enough that she could catch his hand before it left, and she did, and held it against her face a moment with her eyes closed.

"We find the party first," she said. "We find a door we can walk through. After that we can figure out the rest."

"Okay."

"I mean I still want you. I'm not taking that back."

"I heard you."

She let go of his hand before she could kiss him again and pretend the hall had fixed itself. At the bookshelf, the little brass catch gave a neat metallic tick.

Neither of them had touched it.

Caitlin was already standing at the bookshelf by the time Liam got up off the settee. He could still taste her. His hand was still warm where she'd held it to her face. He went and stood beside her. The catch sat under the side of the case, half hidden in carved wood. From here he could see a thin seam running all the way around the shelf. He'd drawn old furniture for magazines. He'd seen a door built to look like a bookcase before. He didn't know what had made this one click.

"Could it open by itself?" he asked.

"It hasn't." Caitlin stayed close to his side. "Not while I've been here, anyway. I don't know. I don't know anything about this room."

A little of her quick way of talking had come back. She was holding one elbow tight against her ribs, though. He set the sketchbook on the mantel, well clear of the vase, and checked the shelf. The catch moved under his thumb. He pulled. The whole case swung inward on a hinge hidden in the plaster. Nothing pushed back from the other side.

A small bedchamber waited behind it. Climbing roses covered every wall. A four-poster bed filled most of the floor, its faded velvet curtains tied back at the posts. Across from it stood a vanity with a silver-backed mirror. The bed was made. The window was black and gave back the pale shapes of the bedposts and his own arm on the shelf.

Caitlin leaned close to look past him. "So the volunteer wasn't making up the wallpaper."

"Was she right about anything else?"

"That's as far as I asked." She stepped back. "She looked much too pleased with herself."

That nearly got a laugh out of him, and he was grateful for it. He looked at the bed, then pushed the shelf closed until the catch rested against its socket without latching. He could have checked the window, tested another possible way out, but from the threshold he could see it was a room with one outside window and no other door. Nothing about that bed was going to get them downstairs.

"I don't see a way out," he told her.

"I didn't expect one."

She watched him leave the shelf and cross to the hall door. The settee stood between the two openings. He picked up his sketchbook on the way and tucked it under his arm. It hadn't found them a single familiar doorway. He kept it anyway.

At the door he tried the knob. The red corridor was still there. The lamp lit the scratched plate, and the bend hid the windowed room. He left the door open a hand's width and listened. No music. Voices came faintly from somewhere past the bend and faded when a louder laugh went up. He couldn't give her a direction yet. He hated that more than he'd hated anything tonight.

"Can you hear anything?" she asked.

"People. Can't place them."

"That's all I've had since the stair."

He closed the door again, leaving the latch free. The porcelain figures on the mantel faced the room with their painted cheeks. Caitlin crossed to the mantel and set a shepherdess upright; it must have tipped when he picked up the book. Her hand stayed on it after it was steady.

"I shouldn't have put it like that," she said. "I mean I don't want to hide in here and call that a decision."

"I know."

"Do you? You barely know me. I've shown you a ridiculous clipping, gotten us lost in the smallest inn in the county, and then announced I wanted to kiss you. There's a better version of me somewhere who can arrange a date without a disappearing staircase. I assume."

"You told me the stairs were wrong. Right away. You didn't pretend."

"Not much of a date, though. I'd give it two stars. One of them's for the pumpkin."

"Two's generous." He came away from the door. "It could improve."

She turned toward him. Her mouth lifted, and then the smile went when the hall gave a faint knock from somewhere far off. He waited until they were both sure it wouldn't come again.

He could tell her about Boston now. About taking this job because he'd reached the point of saying yes to anything that got him out of his apartment. About the two blocks near his place that he still walked the long way around. None of it would help her with this door. His train ticket was in the front pocket of his bag, upstairs, in a guest room he was no longer sure he could find. Friday. He hadn't let himself think about Friday since he'd stepped off the train.

"I came up here because I needed a few days away," he said. "The assignment's real. But I needed to get out of Boston, too."

She waited, her hand still on the shepherdess.

"I didn't expect to meet you."

"Was that the good part or the inconvenient part?"

"Both."

He heard himself say it, and his face went hot, and he let it. She studied him for a long moment, no joke ready this time.

"Okay," she said, and before he could move, she added, "When do you go back?"

"Friday. There's a ticket in my bag."

She took that in. Her hand left the shepherdess. "That's three days."

"I know."

He didn't know whether she wanted a longer story. She didn't ask for one. He reached past her and turned the shepherdess a little so its painted eyes faced the wall instead of them. Caitlin watched his hand, then let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

"Thank you," she said. "She was getting on my nerves."

"We should go."

"I know."

Neither of them moved. Her hair had come down over one shoulder of her costume. A loose red strand caught on the velvet collar shifted every time she breathed. He remembered catching her paper ghost at the foot of the foyer stairs, before he knew this house had another way to frighten her. He'd wanted to draw her then. He wanted to take her hand now. He didn't, because he didn't know where he'd lead her.

She took his instead. "Which way?"

"Back to the corridor. Listen at the bend."

"And if the room with the window is gone?"

"Then we check what's there." He squeezed her fingers. "I won't send you ahead."

"I wasn't offering. I had something funny to say about that, and it's gone."

The bookshelf catch seated itself with a dry tick. They both turned. The shelf had closed against its frame, and neither of them had touched it after he left it resting loose. Caitlin kept her hand in his. He didn't go back to prove what had pulled it shut. The hall door was still shut, its latch still free.

The tune started up beyond the wall, those uneven notes with the last one held too long. He crossed to the hall door with her hand still in his and reached for the knob, and before his fingers closed on it, the music broke off in the middle of the long note.

A glass clinked somewhere out in the corridor. Another answered it. He opened the door. The lamp and the red carpet were still there. The glasses rang again from beyond the bend, and this time they stayed put, in one place, the way a real party does.

"There," he said. "Can you hear them?"

Caitlin nodded.

"Follow them," he said, but she was already pulling him out into the hall.