The Raconteur's Commonplace Book Page 3

  The boy’s knees knocked. “What’s the treasure, then?”

  “Inside this house,” the peddler said, “there will be an adit-gate. A . . . let’s say a sort of cabinet that, when opened, shows you something other than the inside of it. That is the adit-gate. It might be part of any sort of cabinet, big or small, old or new. It might be locked, in which case, you may try this.” And from his pocket he took a skeleton key. “Take care not to drop it.”

  Pantin took it carefully. It was pale where it wasn’t marred by red and orange rust streaks, and it was rough to the touch, like unglazed china.

  “When you find the right cabinet,” the peddler continued, “do not go into it, no matter what you might see. The treasure I want is the keyhole from that cabinet.” He handed Pantin a rolled piece of oilcloth, inside of which the boy felt long, thin shapes. “These might be useful. Or then again, they might not.”

  Pantin stowed the peddler’s skeleton key and the rolled cloth inside his pack, took a deep, deep breath, and stepped past the peddler and across the threshold. “Thank you for lighting the candles.”

  The man’s cold confidence wavered. “I didn’t light them.”

  The door swung shut between them before the boy could reply. The moment it banged closed, all the lights—the ones on the table as well as the candle in Pantin’s own lantern—flared a deep blue. Then they blinked out, and he was swallowed by the dark.

  He fumbled in his bag for matches as he lurched across the room. He struck a light and reached for the nearest candle, only to find his little flame casting its meager glow onto an empty table thick with dust that didn’t look as though it had been disturbed in a very long time.

  He still had his lantern, of course, and it lit without trouble, burning a perfectly ordinary flame. Pantin swallowed his nerves, lifted the lamp with an unsteady hand, and set out to explore the house and find the peddler’s mysterious cabinet.

  From somewhere in the darkness came the ticking of clocks, but there was no furniture in the big foyer except the dusty table. Opposite the front door, a sweeping curved staircase led up to the next floor. There was a single doorway in each wall: the front door he’d come in through and three wide entrances leading to rooms to his right, to his left, and straight ahead, the last of which was tucked under the curve of the big stair. Through the half-open pocket door to the left, he could just make out the vague shapes of furniture. That room, he thought, might also contain the source of the ticking. Through the arch that gave into the room on the right, Pantin’s straining eyes, beginning to adjust, picked out the shadows of large, unmoving animal forms. He bolted instinctively for the arch under the stairs.

  This led him through a dining room to a swinging door that deposited him into a hallway, which, in turn, took him to the kitchens. There, at last, the boy found cupboards to try. Some were empty and some were not, but everything he found inside each of the cabinets—cutlery, glassware, mismatched china—seemed ordinary. Even the empty ones seemed only ordinarily empty.

  The kitchen had three other doors in it. Pantin chose a set of narrow, paired shutters that he thought probably led into a larder. He opened one . . . and found himself looking into the foyer again, as if through the front door. There before him was the dusty table, and beyond that, the big curved stair and the arch to the dining room below it.

  This should have been impossible, and yet there he was. Pantin glanced back over his shoulder. If he was by some weird miracle now looking through the front door, then the driveway and Fellwool Street ought to be just as weirdly and miraculously behind him. But no: there was the kitchen, right where he’d left it.

  Flummoxed, he stepped through into the foyer and closed the door behind him. He turned to open it again, and, instead of the kitchen, there was the outdoors and the dark circular drive. Out in the middle of it, the other boys had built a fire. Pantin shut the door with a shaking hand and leaned against the wood, breathing heavily. Was it possible he had found the cabinet the peddler had told him of so quickly? He didn’t remember having seen a keyhole on the shutter doors, but then he hadn’t been looking for one.

  He ran across the foyer again and through the room behind the stairs. But this time, the back hallway beyond the dining room took him not to the kitchen but to a narrow set of steep steps that seemed as if it couldn’t possibly exist without intersecting with the big sweeping staircase opposite the front door. And, just as unsettlingly, there was light up there. Pantin retraced his steps and found himself in a billiard room where the dining room had been.

  The boy dropped to his haunches and covered his face with his hands. Then he started to laugh. Did every door in this place lead to something other than what logically ought to be behind it? If so, did he just need to find any keyhole at all? The laugh trailed off after a moment, and Pantin whispered, “Cabinets,” into his palms. The peddler had asked for the keyhole from a cabinet, and anyway, Pantin had all night. He stood up and wiped his face.

  Now that this space was a game room, there were cabinets to try: a sideboard with dusty bottles, a shallow case on the wall that hid a dartboard, a box of dry and flaking cigars and another of fragrant matches; but none of them turned up anything interesting. And there was a set of double doors covered by curtains. “Onward, then,” Pantin murmured, stepping through into a towering, glass-ceilinged solarium full of dead and decomposing plants.

  There was a barrister bookcase, its shelves protected by glass, but it held no surprises—just gardening tools, folded paper envelopes of dried seeds, a pair of notebooks, and a broken pencil. A cuckoo clock hung on the wall beside the door. Pantin dragged a chair over, took it down, and opened the back. He jumped as a live bird, red and green, hopped out, stretched its wings, and fluttered away to disappear down the hall. This was odd, certainly, and just as oddly, the clock was empty of workings. But the inside of the case was square and wooden and perfectly matched to the outside, and anyhow there was no lock or keyhole on it, just a simple hook-shaped latch.

  He rehung the clock and climbed down, then picked his way through wicker furniture and broken plant pots to the glass-paned French doors across the room. He cleaned a grimy pane with spit and his sleeve and peered out. There, beyond the hedges enclosing an overgrown garden, he saw the drive that led to Fellwool Street again, which didn’t make sense because the solarium hadn’t been visible from the lane. Logically, then, the solarium ought to have been at the back of the house, not the front. But there were the boys, sitting around their fire, and farther on, a smaller glow flared and dimmed: a cigarillo, perhaps, in the hands of the peddler with the cold blue eyes.

  Pantin went to the bookcase for the writing supplies he’d seen earlier. One of the notebooks had barely been used. He flipped past a few sketches of plants and accompanying notes to a blank page and, in a halfhearted attempt to make sense of the confusion of rooms and doors, tried to draw the layout of the house. But there was no way, on the two-dimensional surface of the paper, that he could puzzle together a logical arrangement of the spaces he’d passed through so far.

  He gave up on that and began making rough drawings of each room, each on its own page, along with each entrance and exit he’d seen and where they’d taken him. Then he tucked notebook and pencil into his satchel, returned to the doors that had shown him the back garden with its overgrown hedges, and walked through them. Instead of stepping outside, he arrived in the kitchen by way of the paired pantry doors. And so the night passed.

  Pantin was never certain that he explored the whole of the first floor. He looked through whatever space he found himself in: a library, a salon stuffed with taxidermied animals both familiar and strange, a music room, a parlor full of ticking clocks that asserted, ridiculously but with perfectly synchronized chimes, that he’d been in the house for less than fifteen minutes. In each room, he opened everything that would open: instrument cases, Davenport desks, chifforobes, curios, tea chests, case clocks. He sketched each room in the gardener’s notebook. Sometimes
the red-and-green bird appeared, fluttering overhead and disappearing through a doorway. Sometimes, instead of a new room, the house deposited him into the hallway that ended at the bottom of the narrow staircase with a spill of light at the top.

  But at last Pantin began to notice a pattern: different kinds of entrances led to others that were similar. If he went through a set of French doors, he would emerge through French doors, so from the solarium he could get to the kitchen by way of the pantry, the game room by way of its curtained doors, or the foyer by way of the front entryway. Open entrances led to other open entrances, so he could get from the foyer to any room that also had at least one open, doorless entryway. Pocket doors led only to rooms that also had pocket doors—though that category appeared to include any kind of sliding panel, which Pantin discovered by leaving the music room through a pocket door only to find himself tumbling out of a dumbwaiter into a bedroom whose window, when he looked out of it, peered down on the solarium from an upper floor.

  That bedroom in turn deposited him back on the first floor when he tried to leave through its door. Therefore, the boy concluded, what floor a room was on mattered less than what kind of doors it possessed.

  Nine times out of ten, any entrance he passed through took him somewhere he didn’t expect. The peddler had said he wanted the keyhole of a cabinet, but would a keyhole from a door suffice? But no—none of the interior doors appeared to have any locking mechanisms at all.

  Pantin began to notice something else, too. If he stopped to listen at a door before going through it, he could make a guess as to what room lay behind it. The parlor full of clocks was the easiest one, but each room, he found, had a sort of voice. The music room’s old-house creaks sometimes came with accompanying tones, but out of tune, as if the instruments were settling as well. The solarium had a rattle of loose glass panes. The swinging door in the kitchen creaked on its hinges, moving with shifting air currents. Between hearing those sounds and knowing what types of doors each room had, Pantin was able to predict with increasing accuracy which room he’d be walking into, provided it was one he’d already visited.

  Listening to the house and keeping detailed notes helped him navigate—or at least anticipate where the house was likely to take him—but Pantin never did make sense of how time passed in that place. Still, time was passing, and he began to feel the effects of exhaustion and nerves. For a long time, though, as the night wore on, the constant strangeness kept him awake and alert, which was good because sometimes there were unlikely accidents.

  In the taxidermy salon, just as Pantin was opening a firearms closet of burnished wood, a mounted head fell off the wall, and only the open closet door saved him from being skewered by a spiraling antelope horn. In the music room, a wire in the open-topped grand piano snapped and whipped out with a discordant ploing. It missed lashing him right across the neck only because he happened just then to be holding up his lantern for a better look at an unfamiliar brass instrument on a nearby chair. The impact when the wire hit the metal edge of the light was enough to send a crack snaking through the glass on one side.

  Only once, in all the rooms he explored, did he find anything that wouldn’t open easily at a touch: a terrarium shaped like a small glass church that he discovered in the clock parlor, in which a little porcelain rabbit wearing a clerical collar and clutching a tiny glass bauble in its paws crouched among a collection of sad-looking flora. When he couldn’t raise the lid, Pantin lifted the terrarium carefully from the mantel and set it on a coffee table. He touched the streaked key in his pack, but there was no lock holding the delicate glass structure closed, just a rusty hasp at one roof edge. Pantin took out the peddler’s tools and carefully worked a small screwdriver between the rusted bits until he felt the hasp give.

  He lifted the lid and peered down into exactly the same scene he’d seen through the dusty glass from the outside, though now he could see that the glass bauble contained a single flower woven of hair, and the plants, through some miracle of glass and humidity, looked like they might still be clinging to life. He opened his canteen and poured a trickle of water into the soil at the bottom of the terrarium, then closed the lid. The minute bell in the glass belfry chimed once as he put the little church back into its place.

  Not long after that, Pantin found the map room.

  He was in the hallway, having just turned away from the narrow staircase for the umpteenth time, and was about to step out into the foyer. The room through the right-hand arch had changed again. And, although he couldn’t make out the source, there was light in that room—enough to lie tantalizingly across part of a strange chest with an assortment of drawers of various shapes and sizes, and to glance along one edge of a framed map on the wall above a leather chair just right for curling up in to take a very short catnap. The room called. The light all but beckoned.

  He stepped out of the hallway and into the foyer, and the house dumped him right back into the hallway, as if the entire world around him had pivoted 180 degrees. Pantin turned and tried to go through again, and the same thing happened. He grabbed unsteadily at the wall for a moment before trying once more to leave the corridor, but the second his foot stepped across the threshold, the house shifted again. For whatever reason, it did not want him going into the room with the chair and the map.

  He tried for a few more minutes to find a way to it, despite the house’s efforts to keep him out. The map room had a doorless arch, so he consulted his notebooks and tried every open entry he could find, but the house just kept throwing the narrow staircase at him, over and over—the one with the light at the top, which had not at first seemed like it could possibly fit where it was without running into the curved foyer stair.

  Evidently the house had decided it was time for him to climb these particular steps, so although he longed for the welcoming light of the map room, Pantin went up.

  He emerged on a landing, where a bare bulb in a wall sconce threw dim bluish light into a cramped hallway with a green baize door midway down its length. Pantin opened the door and looked out into a wide gallery with a red carpet. A carved marble balustrade ran the length of the gallery on the other side, broken only by the opening that marked the top of the grand foyer staircase.

  From where he stood, Pantin could see a little way into each of the rooms below. The room with the map on the wall was still there, with its warm, glowing, come-this-way light. From that angle, the top of the cabinet was visible. Upon it sat a collection of globes in varying sizes and a single, partly unrolled chart that showed blue water.

  Abruptly the green baize door swung shut, whacking him right in the nose and flinging him back against the wall of the corridor lit by the flickering bluish bulb. When he shoved it open again, the red-floored gallery was gone, replaced by a different one with a blue carpet. Instead of looking down into the foyer, this gallery overlooked the solarium through a wall of green-tinged, many-paned windows. Pantin crept across the space, held up his lantern, and looked through the glass. The bird from the cuckoo clock fluttered past on the other side, singing.

  The boy didn’t know it, but the house had done him a kindness, just as it had when it had refused to let him into the foyer once the map room had appeared. Possibly this was the influence of the parlor, where Pantin’s own act of kindness in watering the terrarium had not gone unnoticed. But what is certain is that the gallery where the curved stair landed was one of those spaces within the house that had a tendency toward violence.

  What looked like a russet-and-red paisley pattern in the carpet was actually an array of bloodstains of varying ages that had dried to a range of rusty tones. It wasn’t a very imaginative space—it was home to a collection of grudge-holding suits of armor carrying a variety of edged weapons, most of which were a bit anachronistic for the armor they’d been paired with. But those weapons had impossibly sharp edges, and the suits moved preternaturally fast for collections of plate metal. In fact, the only more vicious space in the house on Fellwool was the map room,
which used its enchanting light as an anglerfish uses its lure.

  And now, of course, Pantin could think of nothing but getting to that very room, with its tantalizing cabinet full of drawers and that light that made each of the globes atop the cabinet seem to wear a sort of halo. And, logically, it seemed that the shortest way there would be through the red-carpeted gallery. But the house did not seem to want to allow him into it.

  Pantin slumped against the wall that faced the solarium and tried to work out how to use what he’d learned about the house so far to find his way to the map room, tiredly watching the bird flap its way around and around the domed, green-glass-paned ceiling.

  Was this a joyful flight, a celebration of having been let out of the clock? Or was it a desperate flight, a doomed effort to find a way out of this new, larger, glass cage? Was the sky beyond the solarium beginning to lighten, or had Pantin’s eyes managed to adjust at last to the constantly changing darkness in this place? And if the sky was beginning to lighten, did that mean morning was really on its way, or was it only daybreak here, in the blue-carpeted gallery? The timepieces in the clock parlor had been tolling behind a door just down the hall only minutes ago, and Pantin had counted only two chimes. He watched the bird flapping in its endless circles and tried not to feel quite so much of a connection to it.

  He took out his notebook, leaned down into the glow of his lamp, and began to sketch the red-carpeted gallery, but he hadn’t seen much of it before the door had slammed in his face, so he didn’t get far. After that, Pantin sat there for what felt like a long time, trying to figure out how to reach the map room. It wasn’t just the problem of the spaces moving around; for whatever reason, the house didn’t want him going into the chamber with the glowing light. And gradually Pantin convinced himself that this was because the thing he’d been looking for, the cabinet with something else on the inside, was there.