It was, Doc thought, not a terrible plan. He decided Game Boy needed encouragement: “No hammering, but if you can get it open I’ll lend a hand. Wake me up, okay? But bring bin bags! It’s probably full of crap.” Likely it was just a closet, shelves piled high with yellowing newspapers and cans of lead-laced paint curdled with age. Likely they’d just mismeasured the interior dimensions of the bedrooms. But: “You never know, there might be some buried treasure…”
Game Boy gave a perfunctory nod, then scurried off to his hobby room. Doc glanced after him, just once, and sighed. And I thought I had problems? Everyone who lived in Chateau Impresario was at least a little bit fucked-up, but Game Boy was the worst by a mile. He wasn’t quite eighteen and he was desperate but couldn’t even get on the waiting list at a gender clinic without parental approval for another five months. He was a lot better now he was on black market hormone supplements and out from under his folks’ roof, but he was still fragile. Doc felt as if he had to tiptoe around Game Boy: if he ever got angry and lashed out Doc could easily break him. It would be as easy as dropping an egg from the top of a skyscraper. With great power comes great responsibility he reminded himself, and snorted. Then he went into his bedroom, closed the door, and lay down.
It felt as if only seconds passed but it must have been a lot longer when Doc awakened to find Game Boy leaning over him. “Doc? Doc!”
“What.” Doc yawned. He’d been lying on his back, mouth open, and now it felt gluey and his throat was dry. But his headache had receded. “What is it?”
“You told me to wake you if I found something! And I found all the things!” Game Boy was back to what passed for normal again, ebullient and excited.
It was so contagious that Doc found himself smiling back at him. “What did you uncover?”
“The door wasn’t locked and it’s not a closet! You’ve got to see this! We’ve got a bathroom!”
It took Doc a few seconds to set his brain in motion. He sat up, yawning, and pulled his shoes on. “A bathroom? Where?”
“Off the corridor behind the door! It’s not a closet, it’s more like the wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch, and—”
Doc bit his tongue before he could say the first—stupid, negative—thing that slipped into his head: You’ve been raiding Imp’s special stash, haven’t you? He settled for an ambiguous “This I have got to see,” as he followed Game Boy out onto the landing.
Game Boy had been busy. He’d heaped a pile of crap—rags, paint scrapings, tools—atop an old newspaper at one side of the landing, then attacked the frame and hinges. The door, previously a grubby white expanse of gloss paint, was now a mess, scraped all the way down to bare wood in places. The brass knucklebones of hinges peeped around the frame. It stood ajar, and now Doc could see why Game Boy was excited. He wouldn’t have credited it otherwise.
“There’s a corridor,” he said stupidly.
“Yes! And look, doors!”
It wasn’t a particularly pretty passageway. The carpet was the sort of muddy brown weave beloved by landlords in decades past. It was wallpapered in woodchip-textured light brown, and it stank of dust and a dank note of mold that made Doc’s sinuses clench like fists. There were no windows, but a naked filament bulb, so dim that Doc could almost look at it directly, hung overhead. It cast a questionable light on two closed doors to either side, and another at the end of the corridor. Doors which, quite obviously, couldn’t possibly exist.
“Right, that’s it.” Doc turned, about to march downstairs to have it out with Imp (who had clearly been a bit too generous with the hallucinogens lately) when something Game Boy had said, in combination with the state of his post-nap bladder, made him pause. “Hey. You said there’s a bathroom?”
“First door on the left. Check it out!”
I’m going to regret this, Doc thought, and opened the first door on the left.
The bathroom was quite unexceptional—for a room furnished in the 1970s with the sort of fixtures and fittings that had been commonplace when Doc’s parents were growing up. The suite was a peculiar shade of bilious green—optimistically dubbed “avocado” by marketers—with plastic taps and a showerhead that promised to spray a lukewarm dribble of water all over the bathroom floor if one dared to use it. There was a frosted-glass window, and a bathroom cabinet with mirror-fronted doors. A radiant heater bolted high up on one wall and controlled via a pull-cord threatened a charmingly domestic electrocution to anyone who used it. It was all completely mundane and normal, except that it couldn’t possibly exist because it occupied the same space as the back bedroom on the left.
“Okay, then.” Doc shut the bathroom door behind him and raised the toilet lid. He sniffed. Water. He wished he hadn’t: it was quite appallingly stagnant. He pushed down on the old-style handle and it flushed, almost as if it was real. There was even a roll of toilet paper on a wall-mounted holder beside it. Sighing, he lowered the toilet seat, and then his trousers, and gingerly lowered himself until he felt the seat rim—quite solid—under his buttocks. “Fucking hell.”
After flushing again, he stumbled back onto the landing at the top of the stairs and shook his head. He looked doubtfully back at the door, then went inside the back bedroom on the left and looked around. Nobody had broken into their house and installed an avocado suite while they’d been
