Girls of Brackenhill(22)

She said the only thing she could that felt true. “We don’t go down to the basement anymore.”





CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Then

June 1999

The door that led to the basement was in the kitchen. Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart didn’t care if they played down there. The cement walls were painted white; the floor was packed dirt. It seemed unremarkable as far as basements went. The first few rooms held cardboard boxes stuffed to the gills with picture frames and old notebooks, cookbooks, smaller boxes. Things they didn’t know what to do with. Seemed a lot like their basement at home.

The rooms in the basement were small, about the size of a large closet. But the thing that made it interesting was that there were just so many of them. Like little horizontal blocks stacked sideways, connected in a multitude of ways so that each room might have two or three doors in it. Which made no sense—why not just have one large room? Or even, like upstairs, one hallway with storage rooms on either side?

“Who would build a basement like this?” Hannah asked. She was so close to Julia that when Julia stopped, Hannah would bump into her back. She could hear her sister’s huffs of frustration every time she gave her a “flat tire” by stepping on the heel of her sneaker.

They were trying to get to the “end” because they never had before. They’d push through two, maybe three doors before doubling back, squealing in terror. What was at the end of all the little rooms? They had no idea. What if no one knew? Hannah had wondered. What if no one had ever made it all the way through? Julia told her that was dumb, it was probably just a regular old cement wall, but the point was, Who knows?

At the foot of the basement steps, you could only turn left. To the right was a solid white wall. From there you could enter a succession of three sequential rooms, each with doors at both ends and one on the right or left wall. In the past, they’d split up and tried to find each other again.

They hadn’t yet gotten past the three sequential rooms because they hadn’t been lit. They would have had to bring a flashlight and more courage than either was prepared to muster. The second room of the three had four doors—four!—and if they each exited through the sides, they’d meet up in room three.

But the strangest thing: once they’d walked back to room two from room three, only to find the room now had two doors instead of four. The doors were all old, wooden, and paneled, with strangely fanciful door handles: some crystal, some shiny metal, some old, painted. Like they’d been installed at different times, different centuries maybe.

“Unless we screwed it up, right?” asked Julia, who was fourteen and, Hannah loathed to admit, smarter.

“We didn’t screw it up,” Hannah insisted and walked them back to the steps, to the starting point, again. Room one, room two (four doors), exit either side, meet in room three, and walk back to two. Two doors instead of four. It was difficult to envision what rooms existed beyond the walls of the small room they were in. But still, not impossible. They were smart children; everyone told them that.

“Let’s just go straight through until we can’t go straight anymore and see what happens,” Julia suggested, and so Hannah followed her sister. They pushed through one door, then another, doors alternately on the right and straight ahead, until it felt like they were going in circles. Hannah’s job was to count.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . . dead end, back to 6, 8.

“I fouled up the count,” Hannah said finally. Were they in room nine or ten?

Julia huffed at her, and they retraced their steps back to the beginning, to the staircase that led them upstairs to the library hallway.

“I have an idea!” Julia exclaimed and bounded up the steps, only to return a moment later with a stack of index cards and a marker. “I’ll hold the flashlight; you just number the cards and leave them in the room. When we come to the dead end, just call it whatever number and move on to the next number, okay?”

Julia really was the brighter one. So smart.

Hannah began again with counting, this time with documentation (a word Mr. Fare, her sixth-grade science teacher, had spent so much time on this year—she felt proud of using it over the summer). She wrote carefully, as her mother was always yelling at her for sloppy handwriting.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . . dead end, back to 6, 8.

Hannah pushed open the door on the far side of eight. Not the door they’d come through (six).

There was a card on the floor. Room five.

Not possible—they hadn’t gone in a circle.

“What the hell.” Julia let a rare curse fly out. They retraced their steps. Eight, six, and then three, four, one, two. Then the stairwell. It was all out of order. Either the cards had moved—stuck on their sneakers, maybe?—or the rooms had.

“I don’t understand what’s happening.” Hannah stomped a foot, dirt billowing below her sneaker. It made no sense. They collected all the cards and started over.

“This time, we won’t go backward. Only forward, okay?” Julia instructed. “We’ll get to the end and see what happens.”

Hannah renumbered the cards up to thirty and then ordered them so all she had to do was drop them. They started off again. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . . dead end. The air had begun to smell like must and something foul and felt still, cooler, like they’d been descending downward, except they hadn’t. She didn’t think so, anyway. Everything felt the same level. Back to 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 . . . dead end, back to 11, 13.