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“Huh,” she murmured, as the conclusion settled and solidified. It felt right. She could get through a locked door only by traveling from an unlocked one. She needed to test the hypothesis.
Cassie walked back out onto Second Avenue, swinging her gaze across to the far side of the street and back, whistling happily to herself. She found a Citibank, the building it occupied covered in scaffolding that provided a canopy over the doorway. The Citibank itself was just a square room with five ATMs and no staff.
“Perfect,” Cassie murmured.
She reached for the door, the other hand in her pocket and holding the Book of Doors. She remembered the door she had just tried to Mr. Webber’s building, the feel of the handle in her hand. She remembered the cold metal, the sound as it had rattled in the lock. She remembered—shefelt—all of this as she was aware of the book changing in her pocket, growing more solid. She glanced down and peered into her pocket, seeing sparking lights like fireworks in a cave, and she smiled to herself as she pulled the Citibank door open and stepped not into the bank, but into the hallway of Mr. Webber’s building, a block south and around the corner. The world was suddenly quiet, the smell of warmth and wood in Cassie’s nose.
“Cool,” she murmured, as the door banged behind her, sealing off Second Avenue. Relief washed over her, and she realized she had been worried by the locked door on the street, worried that the magic wouldn’t work anymore.
She pulled the Book of Doors from her pocket and flicked through the pages to that drawing of a doorway. Where once there had been a dark room, and then a street in Venice, the image now showed thehallway Cassie was standing in. She found herself staring at that drawing, and then lifting her eyes to compare it to her surroundings.
“Unbelievable,” she murmured, smiling.
She scampered up the stairs to the top floor. The door to Mr. Webber’s apartment, the only door on the top floor of the building, was locked. She knocked smartly, and the sound bounced around the walls and off the tiled floor like a rubber ball. She waited, but there was nobody home.
Cassie thought about how to get into Mr. Webber’s apartment. Now that she had seen the door, now that she hadexperiencedthe door she wanted to open, she just needed an unlocked door to get through it.
She realized what she had to do. She took another good look at the door, reaching out and gripping the handle, just as she had with the street door. And then she headed back down the stairs and onto the street, around the corner and back to the Citibank, slightly irritated by having to retrace her steps, but delighting in what felt like mischief and magic, in her secret adventures.
A few minutes later she opened the door to the Citibank for a second time and stepped into a darkened hallway behind Mr. Webber’s locked door. Unable to stop herself, she looked at the drawing in the book again, and she saw that it had changed once more, showing the gloomy interior of Mr. Webber’s apartment.
“It’s magic,” she said, shaking her head slowly. It was as thrilling as the first time she had used the book the previous day; more so, even, because now she was testing what it could do, she was exploring the impossible. She was developing a relationship with the book.
She walked along the corridor and into an open-plan living area with two large windows facing the street. Beams of gray, watery morning light stretched across the space. The walls were lined with bookshelves, all of them full and neatly arranged. A wingback armchair sat by a window with a footstool in front of it, and a two-seater sofa sat in the middle of the room facing a small, square television on a wooden unit. The kitchen area was to her right. The whole place smelled of wood and leather and books and coffee.
Cassie ran her eyes around the bookshelves. She saw Dickens andDumas, Hardy and Hemingway, plays and literary theory and music scores. There were modern books as well, fantasy and science fiction and horror, paperbacks in bright colors filling one set of shelves. But there was nothing like the Book of Doors, no other magical notebooks.
She found a second short corridor on the other side of the living room, three doors along its length. She ignored the bathroom and looked into the gloomy room on the right of the corridor. There was a single bed pushed against the wall and an old cupboard in the corner. A small window looked out onto a courtyard behind the building. Inside the wardrobe Cassie found clothes, but the clothes of a younger woman rather than an older man. She wondered if Mr. Webber had had a girlfriend at one time. Or a relative maybe. There were books here, arranged in a neat line along the window ledge. Paperbacks, classics and contemporary books, an eclectic mix. Cassie nodded as she ran her finger across the spines, appreciating the taste of whoever had brought the collection together.
The main bedroom at the end of the hall was a much bigger room, with a double bed against the far wall, a single window similar in size to the two in the living area, and a built-in cupboard on the left that was full of clothes, and shoes neatly arranged on the floor. These were Mr. Webber’s clothes. She recognized scarves and jackets, the faint smell of whatever toiletries he had used. Sadness fell upon her again at the loss of this man she barely knew, but she pushed it away.
She closed the cupboard door and walked over to the window, watching a delivery truck wobble down the snowy street as she wondered what she was doing. There was nothing significant in the apartment.
Why had she come?
What had she hoped to achieve, really? Or had it just been an excuse to play with the Book of Doors?
She walked back into the living area, the comfortable space full of books and daylight. It was a quietly joyful place, Cassie decided, a place where Mr. Webber would surely have been content.
“Why did you give me the book, Mr. Webber?” she asked to the room. “And where did you get it? What is the secret behind it?”
She waited, but there was nobody there to answer her.
“How are you, dear?” Mrs. Kellner asked when Cassie arrived at work. She had walked through the cold lunchtime air from Mr. Webber’s building, slipping and sliding occasionally on the frozen snow where the sidewalks hadn’t been cleared, and her face felt windburned and dry.
“Fine,” Cassie said.
Mrs. Kellner nodded approvingly. “That’s good, dear.”
Mrs. Kellner called everyone “dear,” regardless of whether they were old or young. She was a woman of indeterminate age herself, and to Cassie’s eye she hadn’t aged in the six years since Cassie had first met her. She was short, solid, and always well presented, the sort of woman who would stare down a crisis like it was barely the worst thing that had happened to her in the previous half hour.
Cassie had been a customer of the bookstore before she had been an employee. In her first few months in the city, after returning from Europe and while she was still sleeping in hostels, Cassie had toured the bookstores of New York. Kellner Books had been her favorite—it was easy to get to, away from the tourists and busy people of Midtown, and big enough to have a good selection of books without being so big that it was impersonal and soulless. She had ended up visiting most days of the week, becoming known to the staff, and even rearranging books when she found them in the wrong place on the shelves. After months of this Mrs. Kellner had taken Cassie aside and had offered her a job.
“You’re here often enough; you might as well get paid.”
The truth was, as Cassie had found out weeks later from Izzy, Mr. Kellner had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and he was already showing the signs of a rapid deterioration.
“He’s not going to be able to do anything in the store soon,” Izzy had told her, as they’d tidied up together at the end of one day. “And Mrs. Kellner is going to be doing less because she’ll be looking after him. So she needs more help. And you have an honest face.”
