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
