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Well, that wasn’t much to go on—there wasn’t even a zip code—but I supposed I could Google it.
But when I typed the address into my phone, nothing popped up. I couldn’t find a single town or county named Hidden Hollow anywhere in Massachusetts or anywhere in the US for that matter.
My heart sank. What good did it do me to have inherited a free house if I couldn’t find out where it was? I wished I could have made myself talk, so I could have asked the little delivery guy some questions. He’d said something about “seeing me around the Hollow” so presumably he knew where it was.
“How am I supposed to find this place?” I muttered, feeling frustrated. I flipped the paper over again and reread the will. I noticed that one line of it was underlined—“if she agrees to these terms.” Was there something else I was supposed to sign somewhere?
But another look in the envelope showed it was empty of any other sheets of paper. There was, however, something I hadn’t noticed before—a heavy, iron key with an intricate, swirling pattern at the top of it.
“What in the world?” I asked Sebastian, who had hopped up on the table to sniff the key as I turned it in my hands. “How did I miss this? I should have seen it earlier.”
But I hadn’t. Was it the key to my new house—to Morris? It must be, I decided, but how did I get to it? Or to him—if my Grandmother’s will was right, the house must be a guy. At least I assumed he was, with a name like “Morris.”
Again the words that were underlined in the will jumped out at me, “If she agrees to these conditions.”
“All right,” I said aloud, waving the key in one hand and the will in the other. “I agree to all the terms and conditions. I won’t change the house, er, Morris, in any way. He can stay just like he is as long as I can live in him for free. I’m about to lose my apartment if I can’t pay the rent at the end of the month. And then I don’t know what I’m going to d…”
The words died in my mouth because something very strange was happening in the middle of my apartment. It looked like someone was using an invisible welding torch to draw a line of fire right in the middle of the air.
No, not just one line, I saw as the invisible torch made an abrupt ninety degree turn in midair and continued parallel to the floor for about three feet. Then it took another turn and went straight downward. When it reached the worn carpet on my floor, it stopped. A moment later a smaller fiery line appeared—it drew a circle with a squiggly mark below it. I recognized the shapes when I saw them—a knob and a keyhole.
After a minute, the fiery lines stopped glowing and became solid and there it was—standing right in the middle of my living room area.
Someone or something had drawn a door for me and now I had to decide if I wanted to go through it or not.
CHAPTER THREE
“Should I go through it?” I looked at Sebastian who was still sitting on the table at my elbow. He was watching the door—which was thick and looked like it might be made of oak—with his wide green eyes. His whiskers were trembling and his tail was lashing like it does when he’s interested in something.
In answer to my question, he jumped off the table and walked over to the door, his plumy tail swishing back and forth. He sniffed it once and then turned his head and said,
“Mmmrow!” very decisively. It was a definite stamp of approval.
I have always trusted my cat’s judgment. He’s good at letting me know who’s trustworthy and who isn’t and he once woke me up and warned me about a fire that had started when the motor in my bedroom fan overheated. People claim that dogs are the best at taking care of their owners and maybe that’s true, but I would put Sebastian up against any dog.
If you’re wondering why I was consulting my cat instead of freaking out about the mysterious door that had suddenly appeared in my apartment, well…I don’t know. I thought it might have had something to do with that flash of memory—my grandma in the kitchen baking brownies.
Something inside me whispered that this kind of thing wasn’t new to me—that it wouldn’t even have been unusual if I could just remember more of my past. It had never bothered me that I didn’t seem to have any early memories before—now I wondered what I had been missing.
“All right,” I said to Sebastian and came to stand beside him. Putting out a hand, I gripped the doorknob and twisted…only to find it locked.
I frowned. Okay—what was the point of having a magical door appear in my apartment if I couldn’t open it?
I let go of the knob and walked around the other side of the door—only to have it abruptly disappear. I could see Sebastian standing there, staring at it, but from behind there was nothing to stare at.
I came back around again and the door reappeared. Okay good—at least I wasn’t going crazy. Clearly you could only see it from one angle. But that still didn’t answer the question of how I was getting in.
Then I remembered that I was still holding the elaborately curved iron key in my left hand. I had thought it was a key to the house I had inherited—to Morris. But maybe this was the lock it was supposed to fit. There was only one way to find out.
Hesitantly, I pushed the key into the keyhole that had been drawn below the knob. It went in smoothly and turned at once when I twisted it to the right.
“Well—I guess this is it,” I said, looking down at Sebastian. “Let’s try it again.”
This time when I twisted the knob (it was still warm, as though it had retained the heat from the fiery lines that had drawn it) the door swung open. When it did, I saw a sight that looked like it was straight out of a Thomas Kincaid painting…or maybe a photo in a tourism brochure.
The open door was standing at one end of a long, wooden bridge. There were tall lampposts—two on either side—but they weren’t lit. Maybe because it appeared to be late afternoon, rather than ten o’clock in the morning, like it was outside my apartment. Hazy golden light poured down, gilding the gorgeous Fall foliage I could see surrounding the bridge on either side.
Yes, in the place on the other side of the door, it was Autumn—possibly sometime in October, not February, like it was outside my apartment. Not that you get any snow in Winter in Central Florida. You’re more likely to get a few days in the 60s and a very brief respite from the merciless Florida heat and humidity.
