100 Cupboards (13 page)

A cupboard door, beneath and beside Grandfather's bookshelf, was open. The opening was small, but big enough for a person to fit through. The light from the room didn't seem to penetrate it. On the floor outside the door was a shoe and half a pair of glasses. They weren't Henrietta's.

Henry knew what kind of cupboard this must be, and he suddenly understood how someone had been able to live in the house unseen. He knew what he should do. He should go wake up Uncle Frank, hand over the journals and the keys, tell him everything, and apologize.

Instead, he dropped onto his hands and knees, took a deep breath, and crawled into the cupboard.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Henry's
eyes were shut, and he expected, once he opened them, to find himself in another place. Instead, he ran into the back of the cupboard. He squirmed his way out and sat on the floor, confused and rubbing his head.

It was the middle of the night, he was in Grandfather's bedroom, and Henrietta was missing. Henry examined the shoe and the broken gold-rimmed glasses. He was not the Henry who would have sat there two weeks ago. He didn't once tell himself that Henrietta was probably down in the kitchen or in the bathroom. He knew she had gone through the cupboard, and he thought that someone else, someone he may have seen, had gone with her. Or taken her.

Henry was worried, and his heart was trying to fly in his chest. He was worrying that he wouldn't figure out how to follow Henrietta through the cupboard before she got hurt, and that he might not be able to get her back before her parents woke up.

He got onto his hands and knees and felt his way back into the cupboard. There was nothing inside but a funny smell and the solid back. Henry climbed out and began pulling at various books on the shelves around the cupboard, hoping one would trigger a mechanism and open the back. None of them did. He pushed on every bit of wood that looked secretive, and still nothing happened.

Henry walked to the door. He didn't want to leave the room, but he needed to find the journal Henrietta had been reading. He went as quietly as he could to his room. Once there, he moved the old journal and rifled through his blanket, shoved aside his posters, and then dropped to the floor to look under his bed. There it was—open, face down, some of the pages bending. He pulled the journal out without looking at it and hurried back downstairs. He sat on the floor beside the cupboard and looked at the first page. His eyes struggled with the handwriting but began to adjust after several lines. He skimmed over it as quickly as he could.

To Frank and Dorothy,

I have written all that I know about the cupboards in this book. In my other journal, there are some helpful things that I will not repeat here for the sake of time, as I would prefer to have finished this before I am dead, though I may not. The doctors would bury me now, and my body seems to agree, as it already turns to dust. Here also, I intend to be as honest as I have always been deceptive, though honesty will no doubt damage your memory of me.

The cupboards were first assembled by my father, and the process was the work of his life. I have, after struggling through his papers, assembled the stories behind each of his acquisitions and his choice of this place for his house. The cupboards' functions vary a great deal, shifting because of grains, origins, etc. Some allow the passage of light, some of sound, and some remain as dark and silent as tombs.

Of course, the house was designed after his studies and was meant, for many reasons, to culminate in the cupboards. There are things he did not discover until much later and things he would have changed, like the location of the primary entrance (he could never get one to work on the same wall as the cupboards, or even the same floor), but he never had the energy to attempt a second house design. I have restructured and rebuilt the house as much as I was able and opened the last of the cupboards.

I will attempt to explain how things function as they are. I do this not because I would recommend that you exploit your access to these places, but because my father ran great risks and was damaged in many ways for the entirety of his life as a result of his experiments, studies, and exploration. He left me to undergo the same process, making the same discoveries, though I was able to avoid much through a careful reading of his notes. While I would not recommend you attempt any exploration, neither can I tell you not to without hypocrisy, something you may be surprised to hear, as hypocrisy was at times natural to me. I understand that the cupboards cannot remain hidden forever and can hardly expect that you have forgotten them, as memories such as the ones you formed as children are not easily struck from the mind's page. You will rediscover the cupboards, and you will find it necessary to explore them. This is written so that you may avoid harm, such as is possible in such undertakings, but particularly the mistakes made by my father and myself.

Henry turned the page, glanced at it, and then, impatient, flipped to the middle somewhere and began reading again.

I cannot explain it, and though he was first and foremost a mathematician, he was never able to come up with a stable formula for the passage of time in a cupboard relative to the passage of time here. His journals are littered with attempts. He found that time passed differently through each of them, at varying and apparently inconsistent rates. This by itself accounts for much of my father's sickness, or so he thought. For myself, as I so early chose only one to pass through, I did not experience nearly the temporal upheaval that he did. And, of course, after my first experience, I never traveled without the rope, which I have always left coiled beneath the bed. It is not necessary for one with magic, but it was woven “elsewhere” and aids the mind of the weaker traveler.

Henry stood up and walked over to the bed. Beneath it was a pile of brown rope with one end tied to the bed leg. He sat on the edge of the bed, flipped toward the back of the book, and found the page Henrietta had shown him—a list of the cupboards, each one next to a compass-lock combination. He flipped back a couple of pages.

Of course, many combinations lead nowhere. They might, if additional cupboards were found and aligned, but they do not now. When the locks are set to any of these empty combinations, the back of the main cupboard will be as solid as any other. Nothing could pass through it, because it terminates in our own space. The benefit of this, as I quickly learned, was that no thing could pass through from the other direction, either. I could go nowhere, but I also would not wake to find myself sharing a room with a noble-hog, as happened to me twice. Before I set the compass locks permanently to what would become my second place, I would never sleep unless the locks were set to an empty combination and the back of my cupboard was solid. This, of course, does not prevent things from entering the cupboards in the attic. But they would need to be very small and also strong enough to force the door open from the inside (the most startling variation on this was the boy Henry).

Henry coughed and read the line again. There he was, a simple parenthetical, an offhand comment. His eyes flew back over the words and hurried on, hoping for some kind of elaboration.

Once I had permanently set the combination with plaster, I would still frequently wedge the door shut when I was not using it. I have copied all the combinations for the cupboards in the next pages. When one of their combinations has been set, you will find no back to my cupboard. The back is still there, as is the wall that supports it, but the cupboard meets with another place before it meets with the wall.

Henry sat very still. There were no answers to the questions flooding his mind, but he had found the mechanism of the cupboards. He did not know how it worked or why, but he believed that it would.

It was very late. He wanted to read both journals from front to back to front. He wanted to know exactly who he was and where he came from. But Henrietta had disappeared. He had no time.

Henry knew what he had to do next. He was going to go upstairs and guess which cupboard Henrietta had gone through. Then he was going to crawl through a small door in his dead grandfather's bedroom. He might be crawling home and not know it. He might crawl into some place worse than Endor.

He felt strange leaving his grandfather's room. He didn't shut the door, because Henrietta still had the key. He didn't turn the light off, because he didn't want to come back to a dark room. When he reached the attic, he sat down on his bed and stared at the compass locks. If he understood what the journal had been saying, the combination that he set would determine which cupboard, or place, he would go to when he crawled through the larger cupboard downstairs. Henrietta had turned a knob before they heard the thumping, so the combination must have let something through. Henrietta had gone downstairs to turn the light off and shut the door to Grandfather's room. Whatever it was must have taken her back through the cupboard.

“Or she followed it,” he muttered out loud.

And then Henry had turned the knobs again while he was waiting, after she'd gone downstairs. That's why the cupboard was closed.

Henry's chin crept toward his chest. He felt his jaw tense. His eyes watered a bit and then shut completely as he yawned, a long, sprawling yawn. He wasn't tired. He certainly wasn't bored. He was nervous, more nervous than he had ever been. He yawned again. He took slow, deep breaths, but they weren't enough. His body kept yawning, his hands were cold, and his spine prickled. At least he wasn't panicking or throwing up. Yet.

He stood up to look at the compass locks and hoped that the combination for the cupboard Henrietta had gone through would be fairly close to the one the knobs were set to now. He looked at the strange figures around the two knobs, then looked at his grandfather's journal. He found a combination four figures off from the knob on the left and two from the one on the right. He checked the number of the cupboard and found it on his wall. It was a normal-looking brown one. Its name tag said “Tempore.”

Before Henry set the combination, he made sure he had his knife. He pulled his backpack out from under the bed and tucked both of Grandfather's journals inside it. He slid his arms through the straps and turned to the compass locks.

With a deep breath, he carefully twisted the knobs.

In Grandfather's room, he shut the door most of the way and stared at the still-open cupboard. He went to the bed and pulled out the rope. He figured that the rope was supposed to be tied to the bed leg, so he just held the loose end. Then he turned off the light.

Henry stood in the dark for a moment to let his eyes adjust, then he got down on his knees in front of the small door. His knife was in one hand and the rope in the other. He didn't fit very well with his backpack on, but he dropped to his belly and squirmed in.

A loud ticking surrounded him. The smell of a wood fire.

Henry worked his way farther in, and the ticking grew louder. He could see a room now, but firelight was reflecting off something in front of him.

He was behind glass.

Henry pushed on it and felt it bend. He tried to look above himself, but he was squeezed in too tight to turn. So he just pushed his head up. The top of the cupboard was gone. He put his forehead on the glass and tried to pull his legs in behind him. They came a little ways, so he moved his head higher and tried to work his way closer to vertical. The ticking was very loud now, though he wasn't paying much attention to it.

He bumped his head on something heavy. Something else chopped at the back of his scalp. He yelped and tried to drop back down but only banged his head again. Noise filled the small space—rattling and bonging as chimes shook and met each other above his head.

I'm in a clock, Henry thought.

Something was moving in the room. It had stepped in front of the fire. Henry froze. It was walking toward him. Henry heard a voice on the other side of the glass. It was a boy's voice.

“What are you doing?” it said.

“Um…,” Henry said, and tried to shift his weight.

“Why are you in the clock?”

Henry grunted. “I'm stuck.”

“Where's the rest of you?”

“It's stuck, too.”

The boy laughed. “But how did you get in there? How do you fit?”

“I don't.” Henry heard a click, the glass pressing against his face moved, and his head fell forward. He levered himself with his elbows and squirmed out onto the floor. Then he looked up at a skinny, white-faced boy. He noticed first that the boy's lips were large and second that his pants were pulled very high, up to his ribs. The legs only reached the middle of his shins.

“They always leave the key in it,” the boy said. “You would have been locked in if they didn't. How did you get in there?”

Henry looked back at the clock. It was a grandfather clock, big but not enormous. The pendulum had already forgotten it had clipped Henry's head and was swinging steadily. The weights were still shifting and bumping into each other.

“I came through from the other side,” Henry said.

“Is it a secret room?”

“No. I don't really know how it works.”

“A tunnel?”

“No. The back of the clock just connects to somewhere else.”

“Is it magic?”

Henry wasn't listening. He was looking around the room. The fireplace was wide, built from smooth stone, and a low, bulging couch and matching chairs squatted in front of it. One wall looked like it might be entirely windows but was covered with heavy purple curtains.