But there was no denying it: the melody of hope and innocence once again played through Sadie’s voice, even if her words were too faint to make out.
Kris felt the edges of a smile push at her cheeks. There was a spreading warmth as the muscles attempted to resist, but she welcomed it.
She leaned in closer and closed her eyes, listening to the sweet sound as Sadie’s voice lifted into a question punctuated by giggles.
Kris raised a hand from where it rested at the edge of the doorway and reached forward, watching as the darkness consumed first her fingers, then her hand, and finally her forearm up to the crook of her elbow. The disappearance of the appendage was absolute; one minute her flesh was illuminated by the warm glow of sunlight and the next it was gone. She knew it was still there; she could feel it reaching into air that felt strangely thick and held a chill even as the rest of the house remained warmed by the summer heat. Her brain could not reconcile what her eyes were seeing, the blackness that seemed to slice her arm cleanly so that only a stub remained. She clenched her invisible hand into a fist.
Pull it back! her mind cried out in irrational terror.
Kris ignored the voice.
She crawled into the darkness.
She knew what she was seeing was impossible. A fat, pale moon hung above her in a starless night sky. Two lines intersected it, slicing it into four equal pieces, as if she were looking at the moon through the sight of a rifle. The walls, if there were walls, could have been as close as an inch away, or they could have been hidden on the other side of an unseen horizon line. The impression was that of being plunged into an infinite void, of an astronaut taking that first step out of the safety of the shuttle to float freely over endless darkness with only a single safety cable to keep her from drifting off into space.
Except Kris had no safety cable. She had not even bothered to retain a grip on the doorframe before plunging into the abyss.
Panic ran its frozen fingers down her spine, and she glanced quickly to the doorway.
It was still there, less than a foot away, yet like the full moon that shone down on her now, its light did not seem to actually penetrate the dark. It was held at bay as completely as if the door had been shut.
Kris swallowed hard and forced her vocal cords to produce a single word: “Hello?”
If this were indeed Wonderland, then she had tumbled through at the darkest hour of night. She tried to recall if Alice had ever stayed in that other world after the sun went down, and what creatures crawled out with glowing yellow eyes and clicking claws to greet her.
It’s not a fantasyland from a children’s story, she reminded herself. It’s a storage room. A small one. You know this. You were here when you were little. And you know that there is a light right above you, if you can just find …
The string.
That’s right. Dangling somewhere above her was a string with a small metal clasp at the end. One tug, and a bare bulb mounted to the ceiling would pop on, driving the darkness away to crouch as little more than shadows in the corners.
Carefully, Kris extended a hand into the space directly above her. She could not recall how low the ceiling was and whether or not her fingertips might collide with its rough, splintered surface. When she had her arm completely stretched out and still hadn’t felt wood, she began to wave her hand back and forth, first in front of and behind her, then side to side, hoping at any moment her fingers would grasp that dangling string and the room would fill with light.
From somewhere in the blackness before her, she heard the slow movement of steady, patient breaths.
At the same time, her hand bumped into what felt like an unusually thick length of spider silk. She grasped at it with trembling fingers and yanked, hard.
A fine line of flame exploded within the dingy bulb, and a harsh cone of light blasted down around her.
She was not in some nightmare version of Wonderland, nor was she drifting helplessly through an endless vacuum. She was in the extra storage room, accessible only through that small door, a narrow rectangle that ran from the front of the house to the edge of the great room, directly above the kitchen. The walls were unfinished, the studs exposed, the old wood split in places by poorly driven nails. Hovering above was not a full moon but the round casement window she had seen when she arrived. It quivered gently in its frame as the breeze outside knocked softly against it.
Sadie was sitting in a small red chair at a round play table positioned below the casement window. Across from her was an empty chair, this one painted a light purple. A sheer cream-colored sheet was suspended from a hook driven into a crossbeam above. It draped around the table like a canopy. Like everything else in the house, clumps of gray dust clung to its fabric.
Kris let out a breath of relief.
“Hey, sweetie. What are you doing up here?”
Sadie remained silent, but her eyes darted quickly to the empty chair across from her.
Crawling over to the chair, Kris held out her arms. “Come here,” she said, letting the little girl slip down into her arms. She felt Sadie’s small hands stretch around her and grasp the back of her shirt, holding on tight.
Overhead, the lightbulb buzzed like a hovering insect.
Kris rested her cheek against the soft mound of Sadie’s curls.
“How did you find this place?” Kris asked.
She felt Sadie shrug. “Just found it, I guess.” Then, as an afterthought, “Did you know it was here?”
“Yes,” Kris said.
The truth was she hadn’t remembered until a few minutes ago. But like many things since returning to the lake house, the details were quickly coming back to her.
She remembered her father bringing the play table from their house in Blantonville. She remembered him setting it and the chairs below the windows in the larger room, before it was cluttered with unwanted things from the rest of the lake house. She remembered sitting in that blue chair the first time she glanced over and spied the silly little square door in the wall.
She remembered dragging the table over to the tiny door and turning it sideways so that it would fit through.
She remembered bringing in the red chair and then the purple one, and placing them across from each other so Alice could have a tea party in Wonderland.
But Alice was alone. Even though she filled her secret play space with dolls and stuffed animals, she could still hear Alice’s howls of pain, the desperate cries to be let go, to be allowed to leave that awful, miserable place.
She remembered crying when she realized there was no Wonderland. And she was not Alice. And no matter how dark that slender room seemed when the sun drifted over to the other side of the house, it did not compare to the true darkness that awaited her in the real world.
Stretching out a hand, Kris pointed toward the square of light illuminating the doorway to the other room.
“Come on, honey. I’ll get dinner ready.”
One by one, they crawled out of the tiny room, first Kris, then Sadie. As Kris was rising to her feet, she noticed Sadie glance back into the darkness inside the door.
There was a glimmer behind her eyes.
A spark.
And then she was marching off, ahead of her mother, toward the landing at the top of the stairs.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TUESDAY, JUNE 11, marked a full week at River’s End. It was also the first inarguably hot day since their arrival. Even the air blowing up from the lake held little of the water’s coolness.