But no, he realized as he approached the map again, cautiously. There was no lock here. Something about this picture or its frame held a portal, which was miraculous, certainly—but the peddler hadn’t wanted a portal. He didn’t want just any old miracle. He wanted a keyhole. A . . . what had he called it? An adit-gate.
Pantin sighed and turned back to the rest of the beautiful room. Well, he thought, there are plenty of cabinets here to try. But this room will kill me if I let it. And he began opening things. Rolled maps, flat maps, decaying maps and incomplete maps and unfinished maps. Cartography fashioned of lines, of dots, of yarn and sticks, of shaped wood and linen and skulls, of gloves and spheres. And the map room held itself still and waited.
Now and then, one of the pages he unrolled made his fingers tingle strangely or felt oddly chilled, as if it had just been brought in from the cold. Once, he slipped as he climbed up onto a table to reach a portable lap desk on a shelf and found himself tumbling to the floor. This was a near miss: there had been a map already unrolled on the table’s surface, and what had felt like a bit of odd clumsiness had, in actuality, been Pantin’s left leg falling into the painted landscape. Only because he’d been leaning to the right to reach the portable desk had he merely fallen off the table rather than tumbling into the map, in which the legendary carnivorous beast that prowled the prairie could actually be seen by anyone who looked closely enough. Or at least, the paths it trailed through the waving watercolor grasses could be seen, but then, anyone who looked that closely was probably already falling in, and this beast didn’t always wait as patiently as the tentacled monster did.
Pantin had picked himself up and glared down at the map on the table. “No, you don’t.” He swept it to one side and moved on. But after that, he was a bit more careful as he passed in the shadows of more maps and more marginal monsters and occasionally unrolled more doorways into the habitats of terrible things. All around him, the room waited. Soon, soon, it whispered silently to its cartographic bestiary. Soon. Be patient.
At last, Pantin reached the side of the room opposite the arched entrance and paused. He looked around for anything that could be opened that he hadn’t already tried. On the wall behind him, the largest framed map hung at a slight angle from the bent nail and frayed twine that supported it, its top edge tilting a few inches away from the rolling-wave wallpaper and looming into the room. Pantin had deliberately kept himself at a safe distance from this particular piece, which was a darkly beautiful representation of a forested hinterland. Or at least, it had seemed like a safe distance.
Without warning, the twine broke and the map crashed to the floor, where it stood up on its lower edge for a fraction of a second before falling forward into the room. Pantin half turned, but he barely had time to raise his hands before the map toppled right over him. And then, in the space of two breaths, he found himself crouching in a dense, cold forest, and for some reason holding a decomposing, lichen-rimed tree branch in both upturned hands.
Now the thought was clear as a bell: This room will kill me if it gets the chance. Except he wasn’t in the room with the soft, warm light anymore. Now he was in the dark and the cold amid sharp tangles of undergrowth, and there were noises of large bodies in the bracken and not enough light to see beyond the nearest overhanging trees.
Instinctively his hands uncurled to let go of the branch; some part of his brain had noted that it was damp and rotted and wouldn’t make much of a weapon, and given the sounds coming through the trees, Pantin was going to need one. But just in time, the boy stopped himself. In the cold dark, there was one faint source of light: a narrow trickle painting the downturned backs of his hands. The light under the branch was different from the illumination above and around it.
The noises got louder and closer, and the unseen things began to shriek at one another. Desperately, he raised the branch, which he realized was much heavier than it seemed it should’ve been, and just as if he’d raised a shutter covering a window, the map room became visible before him. Pantin flung himself under the branch and through the opening, feeling his body roll across carpet instead of forest floor.
Behind him, the top edge of the map fell to the ground with a puff of old-room dust and forest-scent.
Pantin scrambled backwards until he collided with the chair by the desk. Then he leaped away from that, terrified the rolled maps on the surface might tumble off and catch him. He stood, thought he might fall again, and reached for a low bookcase, the nearest piece of furniture without maps either on or hanging above it.
This room will kill me if it can, he thought for the third time.
“Enough,” he said aloud through chattering teeth. If it wasn’t daylight outside yet, if the other boys were still out there waiting, and if they tried to hassle him about coming out early, Pantin decided he felt perfectly up to throwing a few punches. The peddler would have to contain his disappointment too. Pantin had evaded murderous suits of armor and animate cartography. He was done being intimidated by mere humans. And he was done with the
