Reg’s phone started to ring. She looked down at it.
“Oh, it’s Francesca. You remember, the charmer, who helped with the draugrs.”
Harrison nodded. “I remember her,” he agreed. He stared at her phone. “You’d better answer it.”
Reg was going to put it off and call Francesca later, but she was struck by the urgency in Harrison’s tone. She swiped the phone and answered the call.
“Hi, Francesca.”
“Reg? They are gone again! I do not know how they can disappear like this. I know that Nicole doesn’t want me to give the kittens away, but that’s what we have to do. You and I understand that, why can’t she?”
“Maybe because she’s a cat. All she has are instincts that tell her to mother the kittens. She probably can’t figure out why you would want to take them away.”
“If she is smart enough to understand that I want to take them away, she ought to be smart enough to figure out why.”
“I think you’re just upset. Why don’t I come over after we have breakfast, and then—”
Reg didn’t even get a chance to finish her sentence. She was still talking into her phone when she was suddenly in Francesca’s living room, face-to-face with her. Reg blinked and looked around, not sure what had just happened.
Harrison was a couple of feet away from her and Starlight was there to, bent over like he was still eating from his dish. He put his ears back and looked around.
“What?” Reg shook her head at Harrison. “Did you do that? You can’t just transport people across space without warning them!”
Harrison twirled the ends of his mustache. “I may have helped a little,” he said, “but mostly it was the passageway.”
“What passageway?”
His raised his brows. “The passageway between your homes.” He took in their blank expressions. “You might call it… a wormhole?”
“A wormhole. Like on Star Trek? Are you kidding me?”
“A wormhole is real,” he said, somewhat petulantly.
“A wormhole is not real. It’s a made-up thing in science fiction movies. You can’t tell me that they are real.”
He scratched his ear and looked at Francesca, who was still holding her phone to her ear and looking at them in shock. Reg shrugged dramatically.
“I’m sorry. Don’t ask me. I didn’t tell him to transport us. It just happened. I don’t know what this nonsense about a wormhole is; I haven’t heard anything about it before.”
“Not to worry,” Francesca said politely. “You are here now, and that means we don’t have to wait.”
“Right. Do you have any idea where they went? Did you check the attic?”
“I did look this time, in case they got up there again. And I looked for a vent or a hole in the wall that they could have climbed, but I could not find anything. I do not know how they got up there, and I do not know where they went this time.”
“Cats can squeeze into some pretty tight places. The kattakyns may not be real kittens, but they are small enough they could get through a pretty small hole.”
Francesca shrugged. “You see if you can find any very small holes that they could get through. Can you sense where they are?”
Reg closed her eyes, thinking about it and feeling for Nicole. Last time, Nicole had tried to confuse her to keep her from finding them. This time, Nicole must have gone wherever the kittens had. Reg rubbed her fingers together to get Starlight’s attention. He approached her, rubbing against her legs and purring, giving her extra psychic energy to extend the search. Then he drew away from her, sniffing along the ground. Reg watched him.
“Do you know where they are? Can you smell them?”
He continued to move away from her, intent on some scent, and Reg decided it was worth it to go with him and see if he had any luck. They got to a closed door in the kitchen. Reg raised her eyebrows at Francesca.
“A basement?”
“I told you I do not have a basement.”
“Then where does that door go?”
Francesca looked at it. “I do not know.”
“You don’t know where the door goes? You live here. Is it a broom closet?” She reached out and turned the door handle, but the door did not open.
Francesca made a noise that was half-laughing, nearly a sob. “I have never seen that door before,” she said. “There was just… a blank panel there.”
“Well, now there is a door. It seems like it’s stuck.”
“Pull harder,” Francesca suggested. She reached out and took the door handle in Reg’s place. “Just… pull…” She gave it a yank, but it didn’t budge. Reg turned around and looked at Harrison. “Can you open this door?”
He looked at it for a moment, then shrugged. He made a flicking gesture, and it shuddered, then opened on its own.
“Uh… thanks. That’s a good trick.”
Reg pulled the door open the rest of the way. The air smelled moist. There were wooden stairs that descended into the darkness. Reg felt the wall for a light switch, but couldn’t find one. She tried to peer into the darkness above her, and moved her hand around, searching for a pull-string, but she couldn’t find any way to turn on a light.
“How could they be down here?” Francesca demanded. “How could they get through that door? They cannot open normal doors. They cannot open a door that is stuck or magically sealed.”
“I don’t know… but something is down there, and we are going to go see what it is.”
“You should not tread into darkness without a light,” Harrison contributed.
“I’ve got a light.” Reg turned on the flashlight app on her phone and held it in front of her. “Am I going by myself or is someone coming with me?”
Reg descended the stairs slowly, shining her phone light ahead of her on each one to make sure she wasn’t stepping into a dark abyss. The stairs felt spongy beneath her feet, each giving way slightly as she stepped on them. Francesca followed a step or two behind her, grumbling as she went. The kattakyns couldn’t be down there. They shouldn’t just walk into it without knowing what they were going into. But how were they supposed to know what was down there without looking?
“Are you down here, kitties?” Reg called softly. “Nicole? Kittens? I’m coming down.”
The staircase was longer than she expected, more than the thirteen or fourteen steps that she would expect for a typical basement. And they didn’t have basements in Florida. So why was there one in Francesca’s house? Reg pushed away the anxiety she felt about going underground. She had been able to go underground when they entered the pixie realm; it shouldn’t be hard to walk into someone’s basement. Even if it were just a dirt floor, what was she going to find that would be so terrible? Skeletons? Rats? If the cats had retreated to the basement, then she wouldn’t have to worry about rats. And she was quite sure she wasn’t going to find any skeletons. That kind of thing didn’t happen in real life.
Ghosts?
There certainly might be ghosts, but that would be nothing new for Reg. They couldn’t do anything to scare her. No more than Norma Jean could. She was the scariest spirit that Reg could remember.
Finally, Reg’s feet hit the floor. It was concrete rather than packed earth. Everything was damp, as she had expected. She shone the phone light around the large room. It didn’t penetrate far into the darkness, but there wasn’t much to see. The room was almost entirely empty.
“Nicole!” Francesca saw the cat’s shining eyes in the darkness and moved past Reg. “You are a naughty kitty! You quit trying to hide the kittens! I don’t know how you got down here, but you just stop it! It scares me when I cannot find you!”
Francesca moved into the room and shooed the cats toward the stairs. Reg felt their disappointment at being found and resignation at going back upstairs to the main part of the house. Francesca had said before that cats needed to roam outside, and Reg was sure that in this case, Francesca was right. The cats would have gone outside if they could have. They didn’t want to be cooped up in the house. They wanted to get away before Francesca could split them up.
Starlight meowed. Reg looked at him, startled. She hadn’t realized that he had followed her down the stairs. He was looking at her, his ears standing up in attention, whiskers bristling with curiosity. Reg looked around. She was surprised that he hadn’t gone upstairs with Nicole. He always loved being around Nicole. But he seemed to be more interested in the basement this time. Maybe there had been rats, and he could still smell them. All Reg could smell was dampness.
She walked around the room, shining her light along the wall and into each dark corner. The basement was undeveloped. Reg had expected some dusty old preserves lining a few old storage shelves. Unlike some of the homes she had lived in farther north, there was no furnace in the basement. Under the stairs, there was another closed door—a little storage closet. Probably filled with old brooms and spiders.
Reg grasped the handle and tried to turn it, but unlike the hidden door at the top of the stairs, the handle did not turn. It was locked. Reg looked around for the others. Francesca was shooing the cats up the stairs. Harrison hadn’t followed them down. It was just Reg and Starlight. She tried the door once more, but it didn’t budge.
“Well, I guess that’s it,” Reg told Starlight.
He looked at her. He sniffed along the bottom of the door and then pawed at it. He clearly wanted her to open it, but Reg could not comply. She tried to imagine the inner workings of the lock to see if she could persuade it to unlock. Since being locked up in the warehouse with Corvin and Warren and the others, she had been attempting to manipulate locks with her mind. It hadn’t worked in the warehouse because there had been a spell on the locks. But she had been able to open some of the locks she had tried at home.
The lock to the closet resisted her efforts and she wasn’t able to get it open. She walked back up the stairs, Starlight trailing behind her. When they reached the kitchen, he sat down and started washing. Reg imagined that if she had to walk through the basement barefoot, she would have wanted to clean her feet off too. They were probably caked with dust and cobwebs.
Francesca was trying to count up the cats to make sure that all ten were there. Harrison had either disappeared or was in another part of the house. Reg wasn’t sure how she was going to get back home. Maybe a cab.
“Do you have a key to the closet down there?” she asked Francesca.
“What closet?”
“There is one under the stairs.”
“I did not see a closet,” Francesca said dismissively.
“Well, you didn’t go through the whole basement. It was under the stairs; you had to go around and under…”
“I do not have a key for any door.”
“What about the door to the house? Maybe it would fit? Or maybe there were some keys left here by the previous owner, on a peg or in a junk drawer?”
Francesca hesitated, then nodded. She opened the drawer closest to the back door. She picked through it, taking out a few random keys on rings. Sometimes there were two or three keys on one ring, sometimes just one. There were a few that were obviously for padlocks, too small for a door lock. Reg looked through the remaining keys.
“It could be any of these.”
She went to the basement door and again went down the stairs carefully, using her phone as a flashlight. She went around the stairs to the little cubby underneath, and stopped, staring at a blank wall. “What the…”
She felt along it, looking for a panel or crack. There had been a door. A doorknob with a lock. But there was no longer any sign of it.
“What’s going on here?”
She closed her eyes and tried to picture it in her mind. She knew where it had been. She drew the lines out in her mind, glowing bright lines around the crack in the door. A bright door handle. She reached out and grasped it. She could feel the knob in her hand. It was warm and rough. But it was still locked. She opened her eyes and could see nothing but the faint afterimage of the light. She was still holding on to the doorknob, but it wasn’t there. She felt for the keyhole and, keeping track of it with one hand, brought the first of the orphaned keys out and tried to fit it into the hole. It didn’t go in. She went methodically through each one of them, but couldn’t force any of them into the hole. They were all wrong.
Or she couldn’t fit them into the keyhole because there actually wasn’t a doorknob with a keyhole there.
Reg went through each key again. She could feel the cutaway of the keyhole, but she couldn’t fit any of the keys into it.
Finally, she turned and went back up the stairs.
“You see?” Francesca said immediately. “There is no door down there.”
“There is a door, but it’s gone invisible again. I could still feel the door handle, but I can’t fit any of the keys into it.”
Francesca lifted one eyebrow in disbelief. She probably thought Reg was making up those details to cover up the fact that there was, in fact, no door in the basement. Reg put her hands on her hips.
“There is a door!”
“I did not see a door. Perhaps you are right… but perhaps you are not.”
“Just because you can’t see a thing, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
“That is true,” Francesca admitted. “But it is not usually the case with a door.”
“You never saw this door before.” Reg pointed at the door leading to the basement. “So why don’t you believe there’s another door you can’t see?”
“I can see this one. I just never noticed it before,” Francesca said, revising her previous recollection. Reg had seen that reaction before. When something was impossible to believe, the person simply made up an explanation that they could believe. They replaced the memory, and then the world made sense again. Reg didn’t like to think of how many times she might have done that herself. There had been a lot of things in her previous life that hadn’t made any sense. How many memories had she replaced in order to keep her sanity?
Francesca closed the basement door. As she did so, it disappeared into the paneling. Reg stepped forward, trying to grab the door handle and open it again. “You can’t do that! Don’t shut it!”
But she was protesting far too late. Francesca had already closed it, and they were both left to stare at the blank panel. “You see,” Francesca pointed out. “It’s just because it blends in so well.”
“It’s gone!” Reg felt for the door handle, but couldn’t find it.
“The cats are back, so everything is fine,” Francesca pointed out. She wasn’t going to be deterred by missing doors. Her only concern was with the cats, and now that they had been found again, she could forget about any inconvenient wormholes or disappearing doorways. Reg looked around, wanting to ask Harrison whether there was any relationship between the doors and the wormhole. Maybe they had come in through the door, and that was why it had become visible. Or maybe it had been Harrison’s presence, or he had worked some magic to make it appear so that they could find the kittens. He loved cats, after all; it followed that he would do whatever was necessary to make sure they were found and kept safe.
He wasn’t in the kitchen. Reg went into the living room and found him sitting on the floor, the cats surrounding him and crawling over him. He was giggling like a toddler. Starlight and Nicole were nearby, rubbing against and grooming each other and watching the strange man play with the kittens.
“Harrison.”
It took a couple of times before Reg was able to get his attention. Harrison looked up. “Oh, Regina. Did you find what you were looking for?”
He was playing with the cats, so obviously he knew she had found them. Reg shook her head, brushing away the question. “Can you help with the door? It has disappeared again.”
“You must open it to see it,” Harrison advised.
Reg stared at him, willing him to say something sane. She had to open it to see it? She had opened it, but she had been able to see it before that. She could not open it if she couldn’t see it. He was getting it backward.
“I’ve tried. I can’t see it. I can’t feel it. I want to get back to the basement. There is another door down there. A closet. I want to see what’s in it.” That didn’t fully express what she was feeling. “I need to see what’s in it.”
“The door does not belong to you.”
“No. I know that. It’s Francesca’s. But she didn’t do anything to make it appear or disappear.”
Except to close it. Maybe she was more than a charmer. Maybe she had some pretty sophisticated magic that allowed her to manipulate those doors and to hide them when necessary. She had some secret to hide and didn’t want Reg to see it.
“It is not Francesca’s door either.”
“It’s in her house.”
“It is not her door.”
Reg shook her head. “Okay. Then how do I get it to appear again?”
“You need all of the keys.”
“I have the keys.” Reg held up the keys from the drawer in the kitchen.
“Humans are so charmingly literal.”
Reg blew out her breath in frustration. “Tell me what I need to do to see the door again. And I might need you to open it like you did last time. Then I want to be able to see the one downstairs too. And to unlock it so I can see what is in the closet.”
“You got it right the first time. Use your tools, Regina. You have been given everything you need.” Harrison held a kitten on either side of his face, cooing at them and making silly faces.
Reg didn’t know how she was supposed to take him seriously when he behaved like a fool.
She had been given everything she needed. What had been different when she’d walked up to the door the first time?
She had been following Starlight. He had led her to each of the doors.
“Starlight. I need you. Let’s go look at the doors again.”
Starlight was busy with his lady friend and did not even flick a whisker in Reg’s direction.
“Come on, Star. Don’t you want to see what’s in the closet? You were trying to get in there. Let’s go see.”
He still didn’t pay her any attention. Usually, when Reg needed help with a psychic project, he was quick to come when called. It was the only time he did. But he was too distracted by Nicole to pay her any mind. Nicole was, once again, throwing up barriers in Reg’s way. Why did she care whether Reg opened the closet or not? She had been down there with the kittens, so she had, in effect, led Reg to the closet.
Reg marched over to where Starlight and Nicole were grooming and picked Starlight up.
He gave a startled squawk and tried to twist around to right himself. Reg let him turn himself right-side up, but wouldn’t let him go. He kicked with his strong back legs, giving her a long scratch down one arm.
“Ouch! Stop it!”
Starlight stopped kicking. He looked at Reg reproachfully.
“Don’t look at me like that; you hurt me! And you’re not listening to me. You’re my familiar. You’re supposed to help me at least when I ask you to help with a job like this. Even if you don’t pay any attention to me the rest of the time.”
He was still in her arms. Reg walked with him into the kitchen and stood in front of the blank panel where the door had been. And there it was, just as it had been before. Reg rolled her eyes. “This is getting ridiculous. Doors shouldn’t appear and disappear. So why do I need you to see the door?”
Reg knew that the first time, turning the handle hadn’t worked. Harrison’s magic had been required to make it open. But Reg had some of those powers herself. If her father was Weston, who knew what powers she had inherited from him?
She focused on the doorknob, feeling inside it. The doorknob itself wasn’t locked. The door had just stuck. Magically sealed. Until someone who knew the right magic could open it.
She mentally ran her attention all the way around the door, making sure that it was free of the frame.
Open.
As when they had asked Harrison to help with the door, it simply creaked open.
“There, you see?” Reg asked Starlight. “Just a little bit of the right kind of attention, and it opens all by itself.”
Reg put Starlight down at the top of the stairs. “Now, are you going to go down with me and see if we can get the door open?”
He stood there, sniffing the air from the basement. He looked up at her.
“Are we going to do this? Harrison said that we have what we need to open the door. I don’t know why I need you, but apparently, I do. So let’s go down together and see what’s in that closet.”
Whatever was in the closet, it didn’t belong to Francesca. Not unless her ignorance of the basement and the closet was an act, and Reg was pretty good at discerning when someone was lying. She didn’t think that Francesca had anything to do with the appearing and disappearing doors. Or at least, not intentionally. Whatever was behind that door, it was Reg’s.
Starlight started to descend the stairs, placing his paws carefully on each step. Reg took his lead and was also careful not to trip or to stay on any one stair for too long. Who knew how rotten they were?
They walked around the stairs again to the place where the closet door had been the first time.
And there it was. Reg didn’t need her psychic powers to see it or to remember where it was. She again tried the random keys in the keyhole, even though she knew none of them had fit before. Maybe they would now that the door was visible. It was, at least, easier to try them.
Again, none of the keys fit. Starlight prowled along the bottom of the door, sniffing it and scratching at it.
“I’m doing the best I can,” Reg told him.
He sat back and looked at her as if waiting for her to get herself together and figure it out. Reg raised her eyebrows. “What? Exactly what do you expect me to do about it? I need the key. Without the key, I can’t get in.”
Harrison had told her that she had the key and that she could unlock it. So why couldn’t she?