SATURDAY, 12:27 A.M.
The curvy corridor lay before them. It was creepy and mysterious and oddly inviting.
Both boys had stepped onto the carpeted runner. It was soft and warm under Xander’s bare feet. He forced himself to start walking. David clung to him like one of those remora fish that attached themselves to sharks. It made Xander feel like the big brother he was. When it came to tackling new adventures, David was fearless. As long as he knew others had trod before him and lived, he figured he could do it too.
What spooked the kid was . . . well, spooky things: ghosts, vampires, dark shadows, mysterious noises. The unknown.
My turn to be brave, Xander thought.
They approached the first light fixture. It was a small statue mounted to the wall: an old man, whose long beard flowed into a tunic. A wreath crowned his head. He held open a book and pointed at a page. His eyes were cut out, allowing the light from the bulb within to shine through them. Xander recognized the style of the carving as ancient Greek—one of the things about having a history teacher for a dad was you got a lot of history lessons. He suspected the man was Plato or Socrates or one of the other brainy sage-types. The top of the lamp was open. Light splashed up the wall in the shape of an ice-cream cone. The ice-cream scoop itself was a glowing circle on the ceiling. As they passed, Xander’s eyes kept darting back to the decorative fixture. He half-expected the old man to turn his head, following their progress.
David jabbed him in the ribs.
“Ow, what?” Xander said. David was pointing. The wallpaper had been peeled away in four thin, horizontal furrows. The rips were as long as Xander’s arm. One ended in a bunched-up wad of wallpaper; at the end of the other three furrows, rippled strips of paper hung like the tails of rats.
“Claw marks,” David whispered.
“Maybe,” Xander said, but that’s exactly what they looked like.
They were a few feet from the first door. It was six-paneled and stained dark brown, like the others in the house. On the front of the door handle was a face: a scowling man whose tight lips appeared ready to open for a hearty reprimand. A brass plate under the handle was etched in the same intricate pattern as the carpeted runner. The impression of an old hotel was so strong in his mind, Xander was mildly surprised that no room number was affixed to the door.
“What do we do?” David whispered behind him.
“I’m thinking.” He had a mind to knock—another remnant of the hotel milieu. Or maybe he thought politeness would spare him the wrath of whoever might be lurking on the other side. Instead, he turned the knob and pushed open the door. A small room lay within. A single domed fixture in the ceiling cast the room in a harsh, bright light. Xander pushed the door farther until it stopped against the left-hand wall. He could see through the crack between door and frame, on the hinged side, that no one was waiting to jump out.
Xander stepped in.
David hung back, putting more than a hair’s distance between them for the first time since they saw the figure downstairs. He looked up the hall in both directions, apparently decided that being in the strange room with Xander was better than being outside it without him, and stepped in.
A wooden bench ran the length of the wall on the right.
A shelf with a series of heavy brass coat hooks below it was above the bench, slightly higher than Xander’s eye level. Hanging on the hooks were the accoutrements of a day at the beach: a man’s bathing suit, a colorful beach towel, swimming fins, snorkel, and mask. A beach umbrella, extending from bench to ceiling, leaned into a corner. Next to the umbrella, two blue and white flip-flops sat side by side. Opposite the entrance was another door. It felt like they were in a mudroom.
Xander stepped to the inner door. Slowly, he gripped the handle. “It’s locked,” he informed David.
“From the other side?”
Xander looked at the handle. There was no keyhole. No deadbolt or any other hardware on the door. Even the hinges must have been on the other side, for they were invisible to him.
He tried the handle again. It was as solid as a dock’s mooring cleat. If it could be unlocked only from the other side, then it must also be locked from that side. The implications hit Xander like a plank upside his head. He pressed his palms against the door, holding it shut. He swung his face around to David.
“It’s locked from the other side,” he said, almost hissing out the words. “You can’t unlock it from this side. That means—”
“There’s somebody in there!” David finished.
“Can you see anything under the door?”
David dropped. He pressed his cheek against the wood floor. “Nothing. It’s all black.”
Xander kept leaning into the door, sure something was about to push through. He tilted his head to put an ear against the surface. Something on the other side scraped the door. He said, “Get out! Go! Now!”
David scrambled up. He backed through the open door into the hall.
“Xander?” he said, sounding like he was ready to cry.
Xander came off the door. He backpedaled out of the room, pulling the first door shut as he did.
His grip remained tight on the handle. At last, he let go and backed away. He and David stared at the door a long time.
“What’d you hear?” David said.
Scraping.
“Think it was him?”
“Has to be.”
David scanned the other doors down the hall. “You want to check the other doors?”
“Why?” Xander said.
“If he’s in this one, he’s not in those. Maybe we’ll find something to help us.”
David was the video game player of the family. He tended to think this way: strategically. When Xander got stuck on Halo 3, David jumped in and methodically checked each possibility until he found the answer.
Xander doubted snapping a beach towel at the figure would do any good. But tools or weapons, now that was another story. At the very least, they might be able to determine the size of the locked room by examining the other rooms. He wasn’t sure exactly how that information would assist them, but didn’t the hero in every movie, from war spectacles to horror flicks, gather intelligence about his opponent? Often, the solution lay in outwitting the bad guys, not overpowering them.
“Good idea,” he said. He stepped past David to the next door. It was on the other side of the hall from the first.
Before he could open it, David stopped him.
He gestured toward the first room they had looked into.
“What if he comes out of there, while we’re in here?”
Xander didn’t have an answer. “You want to go back downstairs?” he said. “Go to bed?”
David shook his head.
Xander opened the door into a room precisely like the first: the bench, the shelf, the second door set in the opposing wall. The only difference were the items left behind. There was a white parka with a fur-lined hood, goggles, binoculars, a white canvas bag adorned by a fat red plus sign. Propped into the corner was a pair of beat-up skis. Beside them on the bench were what appeared to Xander’s untrained eye to be two sticks of dynamite. Long fuses. Wrapped in thin red paper, stains showing through. Nitroglycerin, Xander thought.
“Are those real?” David asked.
“Don’t touch them.”
“What’s with all this stuff ?” David said.
Xander shook his head. “It’s like a closet for storing a few things you’d need for one activity. The beach stuff in the other room, the . . . I guess alpine things here.”
“Dynamite?”
Xander shrugged.
“Why?”
“David, I’m seeing this for the first time, like you.”
“Check the door.”
The second door was locked, as the one in the other room had been. He tried to force the doorknob to turn. Clockwise, counterclockwise—it wouldn’t budge. His body rocked as he attempted to rattle the door. It didn’t move or make a sound. “How . . . it’s impossible,” he said.
“There’s not somebody in that room, too, is there?”
“I hope not.” He put his ear against it. He pulled back fast, almost ran, but didn’t. “It’s the same sound,” he whispered.
“Fingernails?” David was moving toward the corridor.
Xander listened again. “More like wind. Something blowing around in the wind. Sand, maybe. Leaves and twigs.”
“Does it lead outside?”
“Can’t,” Xander said. “I’ve inspected the outside of the house. There are some dormer windows in the attic. Nothing like this, no doors.”
“Is it a real door?” David said.
Xander stared at him, thinking. “Like . . . maybe it’s not a door at all.” As David had done earlier, Xander got onto the floor to look under the door. “It doesn’t look like it just stops there.” Remaining on his knees, he looked around. He rose and stepped to the skis. His hand was inches from them when he stopped. What if it was a trap? What if every item was booby trapped somehow? He pulled his hand away. To David he said, “Give me your pajamas.”
“They’re my pants,” David protested.
“I’ll give them right back.”
David tugged at the drawstring, unraveling a bow. He pulled them off. In only boxers now, as Xander was, he hesitated, then handed over his pajama bottoms. The material was thin and lightweight, as Xander had expected. He dropped to his knees again and began pushing one of the pant legs under the door. “Hey!” David said.
“I just want to see if there’s space on the other side of the door . . . or if there’s a wall. I told you I’d—” The pajamas ripped out of his hands. They zipped under the door and were gone, so fast their final moments were a blur. Xander jumped back. He crashed into David, who had already spun halfway out of the room. Xander grabbed him and shoved him toward the stairwell.
“Go, go, go!” he yelled.