They hadn’t yet gotten past the three sequential rooms because they hadn’t been lit. They would have had to bring a flashlight and more courage than either was prepared to muster. The second room of the three had four doors—four!—and if they each exited through the sides, they’d meet up in room three.
But the strangest thing: once they’d walked back to room two from room three, only to find the room now had two doors instead of four. The doors were all old, wooden, and paneled, with strangely fanciful door handles: some crystal, some shiny metal, some old, painted. Like they’d been installed at different times, different centuries maybe.
“Unless we screwed it up, right?” asked Julia, who was fourteen and, Hannah loathed to admit, smarter.
“We didn’t screw it up,” Hannah insisted and walked them back to the steps, to the starting point, again. Room one, room two (four doors), exit either side, meet in room three, and walk back to two. Two doors instead of four. It was difficult to envision what rooms existed beyond the walls of the small room they were in. But still, not impossible. They were smart children; everyone told them that.
“Let’s just go straight through until we can’t go straight anymore and see what happens,” Julia suggested, and so Hannah followed her sister. They pushed through one door, then another, doors alternately on the right and straight ahead, until it felt like they were going in circles. Hannah’s job was to count.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . . dead end, back to 6, 8.
“I fouled up the count,” Hannah said finally. Were they in room nine or ten?
Julia huffed at her, and they retraced their steps back to the beginning, to the staircase that led them upstairs to the library hallway.
“I have an idea!” Julia exclaimed and bounded up the steps, only to return a moment later with a stack of index cards and a marker. “I’ll hold the flashlight; you just number the cards and leave them in the room. When we come to the dead end, just call it whatever number and move on to the next number, okay?”
Julia really was the brighter one. So smart.
Hannah began again with counting, this time with documentation (a word Mr. Fare, her sixth-grade science teacher, had spent so much time on this year—she felt proud of using it over the summer). She wrote carefully, as her mother was always yelling at her for sloppy handwriting.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . . dead end, back to 6, 8.
Hannah pushed open the door on the far side of eight. Not the door they’d come through (six).
There was a card on the floor. Room five.
Not possible—they hadn’t gone in a circle.
“What the hell.” Julia let a rare curse fly out. They retraced their steps. Eight, six, and then three, four, one, two. Then the stairwell. It was all out of order. Either the cards had moved—stuck on their sneakers, maybe?—or the rooms had.
“I don’t understand what’s happening.” Hannah stomped a foot, dirt billowing below her sneaker. It made no sense. They collected all the cards and started over.
“This time, we won’t go backward. Only forward, okay?” Julia instructed. “We’ll get to the end and see what happens.”
Hannah renumbered the cards up to thirty and then ordered them so all she had to do was drop them. They started off again. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . . dead end. The air had begun to smell like must and something foul and felt still, cooler, like they’d been descending downward, except they hadn’t. She didn’t think so, anyway. Everything felt the same level. Back to 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 . . . dead end, back to 11, 13.
Thirteen was a quarter the size of the other rooms, barely enough space for both girls, and Hannah could feel Julia’s hot breath on her neck. The door shut behind them, and Hannah screamed. She could reach out, past her sister, with both hands and touch cool concrete in all directions. The flashlight dimmed and flickered, and Julia caught her breath, which was starting to come in funny starts and stops anyway.
“Back out, Hannah,” Julia ordered, her voice pitched and wobbly with panic. The room felt like a coffin, and Hannah thought of a documentary about being buried alive she had seen on television once—how they used to attach bells to the outside of coffins. People could pull a string, and a gravedigger would come dig them out if the bell rang. She shuddered, and suddenly it was hard for her to breathe too. Hannah’s breath came in panicked gasps, and she started to cry.
Julia grabbed her arm. “You can be scared, but don’t you ever show it. You’re a rock, you hear me?”
Hannah turned, the doorknob right at her back. She tried to push, then pull; the doorknob wouldn’t give.
The door was locked.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Now
She woke at three.
Huck snored gently next to her, facedown, his arms under his pillow. The room was hot; the castle was not air-conditioned, and by August it could get insufferable. A breeze lifted the curtains, and Hannah had the sense of being watched. She sat up, eyes scanning the room. Everything looked as she remembered it: white chenille coverlet with long ivory fringe, deep-walnut four-poster bed with oversize armoires on either side of the room. The floor was heart pine—variable-width planks with square nails. The doorway was vaulted, and the heavy wooden door swung open, soundless.
In the doorway stood Uncle Stuart. Alert, awake, dressed in the way Hannah remembered him: khaki pants and a deep-green bush shirt, with Velcro pockets and sleeves rolled up to his forearms. He motioned to Hannah, Come here, his smile reaching his eyes. His hair gray, salt and pepper, not white. His face lined but not gaunt.
She stood and followed him down the hall, down the stone steps, and into the foyer. He moved with the grace of a healthy fifty-year-old man. He didn’t speak. She followed him through the kitchen and out the side door, into the courtyard. She double stepped to keep up, through the garden, down the stone path. Hannah walked quickly, her feet bare, her nightgown snagging on branches and sticks clinging to her hair. Stuart led her past the pool and to the edge of the forest to the path that led to the embankment and then the Beaverkill. He navigated the embankment deftly in his well-worn hiking boots, descending the way he’d shown her when they were small—sideways, long step, short step. She followed him barefoot and yet felt no pain.
The forest was dark, but she could see Uncle Stuart’s hair, bright in the moonlight.
“Uncle Stuart,” Hannah said, not sure what was real. Was this a dream? She tried to wake up.
He turned and smiled again, his eyes crinkling and the laugh lines deepening around his mouth. She felt a sting in the back of her throat and wondered if she’d finally, finally cry.
Slowly, he lifted his index finger to his lips, hushing her. With his other hand he pointed to the riverbank. The river was low; it hadn’t rained in three weeks.
On the sandy hill stood a girl. Her hair long and shining, blonde curls in ringlets, wild around her pale face. Even from this distance Hannah knew her eyes would be blue, her mouth shaped like a heart, her nose rod straight, without Hannah’s characteristic ridge. When Hannah stood in front of her, she could barely breathe.
“Julia,” Hannah said, her voice husky. She looked seventeen. She wanted to fling her arms around her sister but knew now it must be a dream. “You’re dead,” Hannah said, trying to wake herself up. She’d read that you couldn’t dream and feel pain. She pressed her toe into a pointed rock, felt the sharp sting.