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
