The Eighth Door

I didn't open it. I want you to understand that I'm not telling you that because I'm proud of it. I'm telling you because it matters, later, that on the third night I stood six feet from the eighth door and I did not touch the handle. Something in me — some old animal part that the reasonable part keeps in a cupboard — that part said no, clearly and once, the way you'd say no to a dog about to step into a road. So I went back to bed and I lay with my eyes open until the window went grey. And in the morning the door was gone. The landing was a landing again. Bathroom, bedroom, bedroom, box room, wall, window, next door's gutter. I stood there in daylight with a mug of tea going cold in my hand and I pressed my palm flat against the end wall, the wall where the door had been, and it was solid and cool and papered in the same faded stripe as the rest of the landing, and the paper was not new and not cut and not disturbed. It had been there longer than I had. So I did what I do. I got the notebook. I wrote the date, and under the date I wrote: counted 8 rooms in the night. door at end of landing. gone by morning. And then, because the notebook is where I keep myself honest, I made myself write the other sentence too, the reasonable one: probably a dream. very tired. and I underlined very tired twice, the way you'd hold something underwater. But here is the thing I didn't write, because I didn't notice it until that evening, and by the time I noticed it I didn't want to write it down at all. I went to make supper and I reached up to the shelf above the kettle for the little brass carriage clock. It had been my grandmother's. It didn't keep time anymore — it hadn't for years — but it had sat on every shelf of every flat I'd ever had, and unpacking it on the first night and putting it up there had been the single moment of that whole rainy Tuesday when the house had felt like it might, eventually, be mine. The shelf was empty. I went through the boxes. I had only nine, and seven were already flat and folded by the back door, and the other two held things I hadn't found places for, and the clock was not in either of them. I went through the cupboards. I went through them twice. I stood in my kitchen as it got dark and I tried, the way you try to recall a face, to picture the carriage clock — and I could, I could see the brass of it and the little bevelled glass and the hands stopped at twenty past four — but the picturing had gone strange at the edges, gone soft, the way a dream goes soft the longer you're awake, and a horrible quiet thought arrived fully formed and sat down in me. I wasn't sure anymore that I'd ever owned a carriage clock. I knew I had. I knew it. But knowing a thing and being able to feel that you know it are not the same, and the feeling had been taken out, cleanly, the way you'd lift a tooth, and left a socket I could put my tongue to. My grandmother. A clock. Stopped at twenty past four. The facts were all still there in a row. They just didn't belong to me with any heat anymore. I got the notebook. I held the pen over the page for a long time. And in the end I did not write down the clock, because writing it down would have made it a thing that had happened, and I was not ready, on the fourth night of my cheap new life, for it to be a thing that had happened. I went up to bed early. I did not put the landing light on. And I lay there, and I did not count, I refused to count, I held the not-counting like a breath — and somewhere past midnight, without me, the house counted anyway. I felt it. I felt the number land. Eight.