The smell hits me first. It’s entirely wrong. Gluey instead of musty. When my eyes adjust, I realise why. The whole of the vast cupboard’s interior has been covered in cheap beige wallpaper. I drag over a stool, climb up into the cupboard, and with only the shortest of hesitations, start to smooth my palms over the paper. I half expect to find nothing at all, but when I feel the outline of something hard and metal, my heart skips a beat. I dig in my nails and rip the wallpaper away. Please be here. Please still be here. By the time I’ve torn most of the paper from the wall, I’m sweating, breathing too heavily. But there it is. As if it had never been hidden at all. A full-size, quarter-panelled door with rusting hinges and two heavy slide-bolts.
The door to Mirrorland.
*
I look at the door for a long time. There used to be something pinned to its surface. One of El’s paintings: an early effort focused more on colour than form. Blues and yellows and greens. I close my eyes. The Island. Of course, The Island. A rough coastline of rocks and beach, an interior of forest and flatland. A tropical paradise instead of a snowy wonderland, since Mirrorland was our Narnia. Of sorts. Though it had more colour, more ambiguity. More terrors. More fun.
I’m holding my breath. I draw back the bolts. I pull open the door.
It’s the cold I feel first; the cold that I’ve forgotten. When I let my breath go, it fogs white in the dark space ahead of me. My fingers grip the door. There was a treasure map on this side of it. Black roads and green spaces. Long blue water. A volcano. The memory sharpens and then loses focus. I’m procrastinating, I realise – hesitating, even though that thick sense of longing is back, that urgent need to step down into the darkness, to step out of this house and into another world. I felt it just the same the first time Mum showed us this hidden door, this secret space. Fear, deep and brittle and delicious.
I step out of the cupboard, out of the house, and down onto the first wooden tread. I shiver as I look up at the low wooden roof and narrow wooden walls that enclose the staircase. As the creak of that old wood settles and suffocates, I wonder if my nervous excitement is merely the ghost of the child I once was. Creeping down here in the dark, in the night, so many, many times with El, it seems impossible that our sticky, hot hands haven’t left behind some residue on the walls and bannisters; our torches, no shadows of dancing, jagged light; our terrorised giggles and whispered shoosh!es, no echoes.
This time, I only have the light on my phone. It casts an ugly white glow that creates more shadows. The old vertigo – that dizzying terror of always waiting to fall – seizes sudden hold of me, and I find that I can’t move. I close my eyes, breathe slowly until it passes. Because I’m no longer a child. My fantasies can no longer ride roughshod over logic, over reality. There is nothing to be afraid of down here. Two hundred years ago, when Westeryk was still a village and this the largest, grandest house within it, before this door was hidden behind a cupboard, it was nothing more than a convenience, a contrivance. Access to the kitchen was possible only from the back garden or the front door. This pantry, this door, this staircase, and the alleyway beneath are nothing more than a tradesman’s entrance. The rear of the house sits on far lower ground than the front, its rooms elevated ten feet or more above the back garden. This covered steep staircase serves the same ordinary purpose as the scullery stairs: access to ground level.
And yet my light still shakes as I descend, as the staircase’s walls and roof open up into draughty space, and at the bottom of the stairs, I hesitate again. The darkness has more dominion here, my memories more power. Anticipation, sharp and bitter, like lemon juice rubbed into a cut.
I step down onto stone. Down into Mirrorland.
My phone judders frantic light across brick and wood and cobwebs, and I grasp it in both hands. Stop. I’m only in an alleyway. A ten-foot-wide, stone-paved corridor between the exterior southern flank of the house and the boundary wall, sheltered from the weather by a low wooden roof like a medieval hoarding over battlements. Stretching from the now bricked-over door to the front garden in the west and the stone washhouse in the east. The latter sits squat at the end of the alleyway like a sentinel, a gatehouse, blocking the exit into the back garden, save for a small door set into its only exposed side.
I turn through one more circle, my frozen breath spinning a wreath of fog around me. The morning sun is still low enough that it breaks through the cracks in the wooden roof as tiny shafts of bright white. I look up, see the bare bulb hanging down from the hoarding’s ridge board in just the instant I remember it. When I pull on its string, I’m rewarded – incredibly – by immediate and strong light, as if I wasn’t
