← Lantern's Glow

A Way Back

A Way Back

Liam said to follow the glasses, and Caitlin wanted to tell him that was a terrible way to find your way around a building. Before she could, a glass clinked beyond the bend, and somebody laughed close enough that she caught the end of a word. A person, laughing somewhere she could actually get to. She took his hand and went.

The red carpet ran on past the little lamp, around a corner, and ended at the familiar brass-edged runner of the guest landing. Caitlin stopped with one foot on each. They'd gone down the west stair to get into all this, and they'd come out upstairs. She decided she would think about that some other year. The rail was right there in front of her, and the foyer stairs going down on the right, the same stairs she'd carried ghosts up this afternoon. Across the landing, Room Seven had its crooked brass seven, exactly where Room Seven belonged, the numeral she kept meaning to tell Ms. Hawthorne to straighten.

She knew how to get downstairs from here. It ought to have been a small thing. Her legs went weak with it, and she grabbed the rail with both hands and held on, and for a moment she couldn't see the stairs at all for the water in her eyes.

"Caitlin?" Liam said.

"The foyer." She pointed, though he could see it perfectly well. "Those stairs go down to the foyer. I said foyer twice. You can see the pumpkins on the newel post."

"Yeah."

"We can go down."

He didn't tug her toward them. He waited while she looked back around the corner. The lamp still burned beside the Rose Room door at the end of the red corridor. Nothing changed while she turned her head, and she nearly laughed at herself for checking. Nearly.

She took the stairs. Each step showed her more of the foyer: the bowl of wrapped candy, the paper ghost she'd pinned too low, the parlor doors standing open with warm light spilling through them. The voices came from where voices should come from. Liam stayed beside her with his sketchbook under his arm. At the bottom a guest in a crooked witch hat passed between them and the parlor carrying a plate of apple cake and apologized without looking up.

Caitlin had never in her life been so glad to be in somebody's way.

She'd have hated me fussing over her just then. I'd have fussed anyway. I'd have asked her about that tune, too, though I'm not sure I'd have liked the answer.

Through the open doors the parlor was packed. Children crowded the hearth rug while a man tried to convince them a carved pumpkin had eaten his watch. Somebody had set a cider cup down beside the lantern on the mantel, which Ms. Hawthorne would spot from across the room and deal with. The lantern sat where it always sat, among the pumpkins. Its glass panels shone. Caitlin looked at it for a long moment. It looked back at her, squat and brass and entirely ordinary, and she found she couldn't hold its eye.

Maggie spotted her before Caitlin found the edge of the crowd. She held up the tray she was carrying and made straight for them.

"There you are. I've been covering your table since you two wandered off." She looked at Liam, then at Caitlin's hand in his. "Actually, never mind. Take a cider."

Caitlin could have asked what time it was. She could have asked whether Maggie had come upstairs, whether she'd passed a hall table with a lamp on it, whether an old stair had ever taken her somewhere it shouldn't. Maggie had cups balanced against her wrist and a child tugging at her sleeve. Caitlin took a cider because it was there and hot, and she could feel the cardboard sleeve warm in her cold fingers, and that was something real to hold.

"Did anybody come looking?" she asked.

"For you? Ms. Hawthorne asked if you'd put the paper bats away. I said I'd check." Maggie's eyes went to her face and stayed there. "Hey. Are you okay?"

"I think so. We took the west passage, and it got strange." It was such a useless word that she nearly took it back, but a child was trying to steal a marshmallow off Maggie's tray, and there was no room for a better one. "We're here now."

"Okay." Maggie put her free hand on Caitlin's arm for a moment and squeezed. "Come find me when I've gotten rid of this tray."

She turned to rescue the marshmallows. Caitlin wanted to call her back and tell her everything, starting with the stair and ending with the room whose window couldn't fit inside the inn. By the time she had a first sentence, Maggie had handed the child a cup and gone into the crowd. And then it was only Caitlin and Liam, and she was still holding his hand in front of everybody.

He noticed her looking at their fingers. "Want me to let go?"

"No. I was going to ask how long we've been gone, but if I start checking clocks I'll check every clock in the inn, and Ms. Hawthorne owns a frankly unreasonable number of clocks." She lifted the cider. "Maggie saw us come back. That'll do for now."

"Okay." His thumb moved across her knuckles, one slow pass, and the heat of it went straight up her arm and into her face, in front of the whole party. Upstairs she'd told him they would find the party first and figure out the rest after. Well. They had found the party. "You want to sit?"

"I want to check the stairs."

She expected him to argue. He turned with her instead. From the foyer she could see the main staircase all the way to its turn. She climbed to the landing, touched the crooked seven on Room Seven's door with one fingertip, and came down again. The little paper ghost still hung too low. Liam stood at the foot of the stairs waiting for her. Past him, the front door opened for somebody coming in off the porch, and the smell of wet leaves came in with them.

"Did it work?" he asked.

"This way did. I know where the top goes, and I know where the bottom goes. I didn't think that was going to be something I'd be celebrating tonight."

"I'll get you another cider."

"I've barely started this one."

"Then I'll get me one."

She watched him cross to the tray, where Maggie was handing out cups. People passed between them, but she could follow the dark line of his tailcoat, the sketchbook under his arm. Halfway there he looked back over his shoulder to make sure she could still see him. The worry on his face eased when she lifted her cup.

All her life she'd wanted somebody to cross a room for her. And here he was, crossing one away from her and checking over his shoulder that she was still in it, which was so much worse, because it was so much better. Her chest ached with it. On the heels of the ache came the thought that his train left Friday, that Friday was three days off, and the ache turned into something with sharper edges. It bothered her far more than it should, about a man she had met this afternoon.

Near the mantel, an older guest was waiting for somebody to clear a path to the fire. She stood beside the lantern humming to herself while she straightened the cuff of her costume, a gray-haired woman in a witch's cape with a cameo at her throat. The notes came unevenly. She held the last one long enough that Caitlin heard her grandmother holding it, the little wobble and all, and then the woman broke off to greet a friend coming toward her.

Caitlin's cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

Liam turned from the tray with his cider. She could have crossed the room and asked the woman where she'd learned that tune. The woman had already taken her friend's arm, and Maggie stepped between them with her empty tray.

Caitlin kept her eyes on the gray head until the crowd closed over it.

Caitlin was looking past him when Liam got back. She lowered her cider without drinking it, and her face had gone the way it had gone upstairs, pale and still, and his heart dropped before he knew why.

"What?" he asked.

"A woman by the lantern was humming." She ran a finger around the rim of her cup. "The tune from upstairs. My grandmother's tune."

He looked toward the mantel. Guests blocked it. "Do you know her?"

"No. I could find her. It's not a big room. But then I'd have to ask a stranger where she learned a song, in front of everybody, and she'd say the radio, and I'd have to stand there and say thank you." She tried to see around a man's top hat and gave up. "Tomorrow. I'll ask around tomorrow."

Maggie came by with her empty tray, saw the two of them together, and raised her eyebrows. Caitlin said her name in a warning voice. Maggie backed off, grinning, and vanished into the parlor.

A man opened the front door for a child in a paper crown. Cold air swept across the foyer with the smell of wet leaves in it. The child ran out, came back for a dropped glove, and ran out again.

Caitlin watched the door swing. "I need air," she said. "Real air. Air that's definitely outside."

They took their ciders out onto the porch. The lamps were lit along the path, and the willows dripped onto the lawn. At the bottom of the slope, her car sat where the gravel ended. She leaned on the rail and let out a long breath, the first real one he'd heard from her since the stairs, and Liam felt his own shoulders come down from somewhere up around his ears.

"My car's right there," she said. "I could walk down to it and drive home and change into socks with no skeletons on them and never find out what that tune is."

"You could."

"I'm not going to. I'm only saying it out loud so the house can hear me." She raised her cup toward the dark upstairs windows. Nothing up there answered. She finished her cider in one long swallow and handed him the empty cup.

Her nose had gone pink in the cold. He followed her back inside, set both cups beside the candy bowl, tucked the sketchbook tighter under his arm, and walked past the paper ghost by the door, with his gray thumbprint still on its face, into the public hall. Somebody had hooked the rope back across the west stair. The parlor was loud with the party, and nobody looked their way. Caitlin stopped at the rope and looked up the steps toward the portrait at the bend.

Upstairs there had been no guests, no cider ladle, no one asking her where the bats went. Upstairs she had been frightened half to death, and she had leaned all her weight on him, and she had told him things.

"It was nice," Liam said, "when it was just the two of us."

It was out before he'd looked at it. He could have explained he didn't mean the part where they couldn't find a way out. He left it there.

She turned around. Her eyes had gone wide, and for a second he thought he'd said exactly the wrong thing.

"It was, wasn't it?" she said.

He leaned down. She came up on her toes to meet him, and her fist closed in his cravat and pulled him the rest of the way. Her nose was cold from the porch. Her mouth was warm and tasted of cider, and when she made a small sound against him, his heart started going hard enough that he could hear it over the party. He got a hand into her hair. She pressed closer, velvet against his shirt, and he forgot the party was a few feet away until somebody in the parlor laughed. Nobody came into the hall. When she pulled back she was breathing fast, and she was grinning.

She unhooked the rope and grabbed his hand.

"That's the stair," he said.

"I know it's the stair. It's my stair. I've been going up it my whole life, and I'm not letting one bad night have it. And if it does anything weird, we come straight back down and I'm never speaking to it again."

Spoiling the speech entirely, she giggled, a quick breathless sound she tried to swallow and couldn't, and pulled him onto the first step.

"One," she said.

"You're counting."

"I'm always going to count now. This is my life. Two."

She counted a little louder on every step. At five he said it with her, and she looked back at him, delighted.

"You're counting."

"Somebody has to check your work."

She laughed and kept going, and on eight the board by the portrait groaned under her foot the way she said it had for years, and she told it to hush, patted the frame, and turned around. One step above him, her mouth was level with his, and she kissed him so hard his back met the rail. Her hands were shaking. So were his. Neither of them said nine.

They lost the count entirely after that. She pulled him up the rest of the flight faster than anybody ought to take stairs that steep, and he missed one near the top and caught himself on the wall, and she laughed out loud, breathless, and didn't slow down.

Even at that speed, he noticed the upper flight was the length he'd drawn this afternoon. At the top the short west passage ran to the corner: the little table, the portrait of the man with his hand in his waistcoat, her bent paper bat above it. And beside the portrait, the Rose Room door stood in the wall where it belonged, painted panel and brass plate, where she'd told him it would be before any of this started. He felt her hand tighten in his when she saw it. The sketchbook stayed under his arm.

She stopped at the door with his hand still in hers and looked back past him. The stair went down to the rope and the hall and the party, all of it exactly where they'd left it, and at last her eyes came back to him. She was free to go down those stairs. So was he. He watched her know it.

"It's where you said it would be," he said.

"Of course it is." She put her hand on the knob. "It's my inn. It knows better."

She opened the door. The settee and the porcelain shepherdesses waited inside, and the one he'd turned to the wall was still facing it.

"Come in, Liam," she said.

He followed her over the threshold and set the sketchbook down on the arm of the settee, and left it there.

"I'm glad you kept the drawing," he said.

Her hand went to her pocket. "I'd have gone back through that whole corridor for it."

Behind them the passage stayed lit, and the stair stayed where it was. She reached past him and shut the door, and then she was kissing him with her back against it and both hands pulling him down by the coat. His hands were shaking again, for her this time, and he stopped thinking about the passage at all.

And this, I think, is where I see myself out.