CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I was about your age, Penelope, walking home from school one day. It was the end of summertime, and school had just started. There were more people in Henry then, or it seemed like it, and they all loved baseball. There were lots of boys, and they had a system of teams picked, and each team had their own home field that they had claimed from some farmer. One of these fields used to be right out beside our house.”
Dotty twisted and untwisted her fingers. She wasn’t looking at her daughters. She was looking past years, sorting summers in her mind.
“On this day,” she continued, “when I got home, my father was standing in the front yard watching a game, and there was a boy with him. I didn’t want to have to meet the boy, so I snuck around to the back door and went inside.
“The boy was there for dinner, but he didn’t talk to me at all. He was older than I was, and he was lean and dark, with a bright smile and eyes that were always laughing. I’d never seen a boy sit up so straight or look right through you like he could, and he wasn’t at all afraid of Daddy. Your aunt Ursula flirted with him the whole time. Mama and I didn’t say much, and Daddy just kept telling us how well the boy could hit. He had a ring on his thumb, a big silver thing that people used to use to stamp wax—it had three starfish on it—and Ursula must have asked to see it at least a dozen times.
“The next day, when I was walking home, I saw the same boy playing in the park. I stopped to watch, and he really could hit. The day after that, I saw him at school. Everybody was talking about him—the grown-ups, too—but all the talk was about baseball and how he could help Henry High. An old couple, the Willises, let him move in with them.”
“What?” Penelope asked. “Really? Is that why…”
Dotty smiled at her. “Just wait. I’m going too slow already. It was almost a year before I ever really did talk to him. I was walking home again, and he caught up to me. He said he needed my help to get back to his home. He was from a town in another place, where they didn’t play baseball, and he needed to get back. He made me stop and sit down, and he told me a very strange story.
“The boys in his family were always sent off for a year to adventure before they could take their places in the town where he was from. Two of his brothers had gone to war and been killed. But his adventure had been different.
“My father had visited his town many times. He only went to their library, and at first, no one thought anything of it. But then some books, which were apparently important, began to disappear. Your grandfather was sent away, and the boy was sent to follow him.
“He followed my father all the way out of town and off the road, through hills and woods and finally into a hidden mountain valley. In the valley, swallowed by brush and vines, were the ruins of an old temple.
“The boy watched my father from a distance, watched him walk right up to a hole in the ruined wall and step through. He was gone. He waited for a while, but eventually the boy followed, and when he stepped through, something pushed him down onto his belly, and he crawled out into my parents’ bedroom.
“He went straight outside as quickly as he could and ran into my father drinking lemonade on the front porch. My father recognized him, so the boy asked him if he was a sorcerer and whether he had stolen the books from the library. My father laughed and told him that he was just an explorer and took him out in the yard to show him baseball.
“His year of adventure turned into a year of baseball in Henry.”
Anastasia couldn’t wait for the end. “Grandfather was magic?” she asked. “For real?”
Dotty sighed. “No. He wasn’t. But he’d found some. The boy told me that your grandfather could make a door in his bedroom lead to different places, and that he had to find a way to make it go back to his own town. Your grandfather told him that it wasn’t possible anymore. The ruined wall had collapsed on the other side and the doorway had closed. The boy didn’t believe my father, and he wanted me to help him.
“When my parents were out for dinner and Ursula was at a friend’s, he came over and we went into the bedroom and looked at the cupboard. It didn’t lead anywhere. So I took him up to my father’s little office closet in the attic, where Henry has been living. The double doors were locked, and I watched while the boy kicked them open. Then we went into Daddy’s closet and saw all the cupboards, along with books that your grandfather had taken. And there were some notes, naming the cupboards and explaining how the little doors worked. Any of them could be made to lead through the door in the downstairs bedroom.”
Dotty stopped and looked at the wide eyes on her daughters’ faces. “The boy didn’t recognize any of the names, so we went through and then came back and went through again. We did that until we went into a…very unfriendly place and someone tried to keep us. But your grandfather came, and managed to get us back through, and shut the cupboard behind us. He was very angry and told us that he was trying to find a way back and that he would help the boy when he did.
“Your grandfather never did. Or at least he said that he didn’t. In the end, he stopped using the cupboards. Things had begun coming through them from the other side, both in the attic and in his room. Unpleasant things. One day, he just stopped locking the attic room, and when I looked in, all the cupboard doors were gone. He had covered them all with plaster.
“So the boy stayed in Henry awhile and kept playing baseball, because he couldn’t ever go back.”
Upstairs, Frank traded his pajama bottoms for old green pants with pockets on the legs that he had found at a yard sale. He opened the top drawer of an aged white dresser and dug his hands through the piles of mismatched striped tube socks before pulling out a sheathed knife. Frank slid the blade out of the sheath and watched it catch the light. It had been given to him when he was very young, and it was the only knife in the house that he had never sharpened. It was the reason why he sharpened everything else.
Frank tied the sheath to his belt, at the small of his back, and grabbed an old, sweat-lined blue baseball hat with a red H stitched to its front. Then he hurried out of the room.
On the landing, he dropped into a crouch, bouncing on his legs, then stood and twisted his torso back and forth, breathing deeply.
“Francis,” a voice said behind him. “You’ve grown.”
Frank spun in place. At the bottom of the attic stairs stood a woman, not tall but beautiful, holding a mangy cat. The cat looked at Frank, but the woman’s pale eyes stared past him. She smiled, and her smooth olive skin glowed. Her hair, black as obsidian and straight, collected the light from the landing and shone as she moved.
“Where is the boy?” she asked. “Another sleeps in his bed.” She stroked her cat. “And he had little strength to give.”
Frank’s throat tightened. He coughed. “What boy?”
The woman smiled and stepped toward him. Her voice was quiet, a cold breeze. “The boy who lives beside my cage. The boy who roused me from the maddening dark. The dream walker. The pauper-son. I have sampled his blood.” Her eyes widened, looking through the walls around Frank. “Such blood!”
Frank’s hand drifted toward his back.
“I could name his sires two centuries past. Fine bait you set for me, Francis, fifth of Amram’s sons. A blood-vintage with strength enough, with life enough, to waken hope in a dried-up queen. Where is the boy?”
The woman stepped closer. Frank backed carefully across the landing toward Grandfather’s room, gripping the knife handle behind him. He opened his mouth to yell, to warn his wife. No sound came. His tongue knotted, cramped, and tightened behind his teeth.
The soft chill of her voice washed over his face. “Your eyes betray you, Francis.” She stood in front of him. “You would warn him? He cannot be far.”
Frank struggled against the tangle in his tongue, against the numbness drifting through his limbs. He found an old strength.
Surging forward, Frank brought around his blade, a blade older than Kansas, older than the magic in the door behind him, as old as the evil he faced.
Words from another lifetime climbed up his throat and freed his tongue.
Dotty seemed almost surprised that she was done. She looked like she was still thinking.
“But I thought the boy was Dad,” Penelope said. “Didn’t you marry him? Why did you say he only stayed for a while?”
“What? Oh, yeah, I married the boy. He’s your daddy. But he left Henry first. He went away to college in Cleveland and studied literature. After a year, I followed him.”
“What happened?” Anastasia asked. “I didn’t know Dad was the boy. Why didn’t you just say that instead of calling him ‘the boy’ the whole time?”
Dotty shrugged. “I thought you’d figure it out,” she said. “As for the rest, Henry uncovered the little cupboards in the attic, and he and Henrietta have gone through them. Your dad’s looking for them.”
“But does he know where they probably are?” Anastasia asked.
She didn’t get an answer.
Old windows rattled with her father’s voice. Above them, the ceiling shook.