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.
The house made old-house noises around him, subtle creaks and squeaks that seemed almost like a voice. “Let me into the map room,” Pantin said quietly. Then louder: “Let me into that room! Why won’t you let me into that room?” He thought he knew why, of course, but it wouldn’t do to confirm it. Not if the house was really listening.
A new sound overlay the creak-and-squeak: a sort of slither of wood against wood, accompanied by the ticking of many clocks. Pantin didn’t have to open the notebook to know that the parlor now lurked behind the nearest door in the wall he was still leaning against, the one he had come through to arrive here, overlooking the solarium.
“I know you’re keeping me out of that room,” he said. “I
