Chapter Three

Timothy stayed with me that first day as sort of a nanny, I guess. He was a very pleasant nanny, though, and being in an unfamiliar place, it's nice to have someone around who will try to make you feel at home. Milton was out on a project or cloistered in his study. Timothy was nonspecific, but he implied that they amounted to the same thing. My uncle wasn't going to be around a lot.

After ‘meeting the staff,’ Timothy had declared it was time for ‘regular human things,’ so we watched a movie. I had trouble imagining Milton sitting down to enjoy a comedy, but they actually had a huge selection. The living room was practically a theatre, and I'm sure the film was good, but I was preoccupied with thinking about my dad. It amazed me that I had agreed to go so far away from him, but part of me was relieved that I was no longer close enough to visit. I hate hospitals and hated seeing my dad there, half-alive. But I was ashamed of that relief.

My other preoccupation—even more immediate, more immense--was magic. I had spent a not inconsequential portion of my life reading about it in novels and seeing it on screen. Like everyone else with even an ounce of heart, I had daydreams aplenty about what I might do if I had the chance to be inside one of those stories. Now I was, and my mind couldn't cover all that ground. It was like trying to…eat a castle; not just impossible, but nonsensical. I mentioned this problem to Timothy about halfway through the movie.

"It is important," he told me, "never to take anything too seriously. The bigger something is, the more you'll want to devour it all at once, and all the more reason not to do so. The world hasn't changed, and it isn't going to change. It is simply the way you see things that is undergoing a revolution." He smirked. "Take deep breaths.

“Thanks, I think,” I said, but I didn't think Timothy was focusing on the film any more than I was. We sat on opposite ends of a vast couch, but I caught him watching me on several occasions. I looked away first, embarrassed for whatever reason. He had told me outright that he would not give me a tour of the house, saying I would need to be introduced to it gradually. He talked about the building like it was a shy recluse, but aside from that weirdness about reflections, it seemed perfectly mundane. Not anthropomorphic, just unnaturally tidy. However, having seen the golems, I wasn't going to cast any early judgments over what could and could not be an earnest warning, even if it sounded like a joke.

We spent the afternoon together, and then Timothy made dinner. I could have helped. I've been cooking forever, but it would have felt invasive. I wasn't comfortable enough yet to be tooling around in the kitchen. Upstairs later, I tried to settle in. I missed my books, and I was anxious about my dad, but I was also excited. It didn't bother me that the computer in my room had no Internet and that my phone had no signal. Tomorrow, I vowed, I would see the rest of the house.

I had the usual dreams, the mirrors and the tunnels underground, fading as dreams do. They lost all potency under the influence of sunlight.

Breakfast was Lucky Charms, of which there was an abundant supply. Timothy informed me that I would have the morning to myself while he ran errands for Milton. He admonished me again about wandering alone in the house, which only made me more determined to go exploring, as it would have done to anyone. Honestly. Then with quirked grin in place, the sorcerer’s apprentice disappeared into the pantry, never to return, as if to make a point.

I went to the ivory Door as soon as he had gone.

It was on the second landing leading up to my room, and on the way up I tried to envision what my bedroom looked like from the outside. I couldn't. It was on the fourth floor and by all rights it should have risen out of the rear of the house like a battlement. My steps slowed as I approached the landing, and I experienced a sense of disassociation, as if I had just seen the climax of an outrageous optical illusion. From the outside, the house was one-story and my tower didn’t exist.

So maybe a little wariness could be warranted. Was it an illusion? Or could they bend space? There could only be so much inside, however contorted it was. I would just have to be careful. I would keep track of the rooms I passed through.

The Door was nearly seamless in its frame, sealed by mystery. I had to pass by it every time I went to or from my room, but I wasn't supposed to open it because “there is no telling where it might open to. “Whose idea had that been? It was the equivalent of, “Yes, this is the tree of knowledge, thank you for asking, and no, you may not taste of its fruits. “It was as irresponsible as saying to a pack of children that the woods out back were actually the Forbidden Forest, and they were not to enter it at the peril of their lives. How could you expect anyone not to enter, having heard that? If it was so dangerous, why not lock it? Sorcerous enough for magic doors but not for magic keys? Couldn't afford that last trip to Home Depot? There was no way that Timothy was not using my newbie status as an excuse to mess with me. I may have only known him for a day, but he would so do that.

No choice about it. I had to see what was behind this Door.

My fingers never quite reached the knob. I felt the prickling of spider’s feet dancing on the back of my hand, and I was unsure. What if this was a test? Maybe the Door wasn't dangerous in itself, but one of the prerequisites of living with sorcerers was being possessed of slightly more self-restraint than a first-year student at Hogwarts. If I was unable to resist opening this Door when I had been unequivocally told not to--that it might even kill me to do so--wouldn’t the sorcerers know right off that I wasn't worth trusting with anything actually important? How do you give responsibility to the girl who just had to open the mysterious Door?

I had no inkling of the full extent of magic’s power, or of Milton's, but power of any kind results in temptation, even if it's only proximity to power. Maybe the lesson here was that living with wizards meant sometimes having to leave a question unanswered. I could always open it tomorrow.

Now that I thought about it, this was probably a closet. If it had really been dangerous, both Timothy and my uncle would have had to have been idiots, or sociopaths, to leave it open. The only calamity to follow my turning this knob would be me being outed as a moron.

Yet, I still wanted to open it. There was this draw of a pleading undertow, a liquid current tugging at my fingers, demanding that I see what lay beyond this blank white face. That seemed like rather a bad sign.

So I went downstairs. I could still explore the rest of the house. At least there hadn't been any references to maybe dying if I did that . How big could it be? I wasn't worried.

This was the beginning of my exploring.

Starting in the kitchen, I took my time walking from room to room. Well-appointed and well kept; if anything, the only oddity was the lack of oddities and the absence of the personal touches that distinguish a home. No pictures, no awards, no notes or papers, knickknacks or miscellanea; everything store-bought and everything pristine; plenty of nice things and nothing extraordinary. What did I care about surround sound and sofas? I wanted a sorcerer's secrets. I wanted unicorns!

Ten minutes in I noticed something strange. Having completed my survey of the first floor–two dining rooms, an office and a lounge--I went back to the kitchen and out into the movie room where a table caught my eye. It was a coffee table in front of the couch, squat and bulky with a wrought iron frame. It didn't fit. Had it been there before?

Something tickled in my memory, goading me into examining it more closely. Soon, I found myself on the couch, mouth open, stunned. I knew this table.

It had been in our backyard. On his bad days, my dad would sit by it and stare at nothing, waiting for the sun to set. At first I had been too young to understand what he was doing or what was wrong. I would sit outside with him, not asking questions I knew wouldn't be answered. It wasn't that he ignored me, exactly, in those moods. It was more like he wasn't there.

But I knew this table, with its stylized serpents crawling along the edges of the ironwork over the stumpy, lizard-like legs. Even scuffs and vegetable residue were as I remembered them, unchanged from years ago. A fresh scrap of plant matter was caught beneath one clawed foot.

When had he gotten rid of this thing? I would have been what, ten? It had been around the same age that I first realized what he was doing out in the weather on those winter evenings. He was holding a vigil. He was waiting for the woman who was not coming back. The sun would set and he would return to himself, noticing me as if for the first time and ask what I wanted for dinner. The only thing that mattered to me was that he came back at all.

Those could be bad days for both of us, feeding on morsels of uncertainty, both of us holding our separate vigils. When I was little, he had adored me, his Abby girl. Even then I had known there was someone else that he loved too--someone he loved more. Seeing this table brought up a surge of old emotions; that he might leave me, that I would be alone. I had left all that behind in the dust of adolescence. Only now, he had gone for real.

I absolutely did not flee the room. I did not run, but I wasn't walking either. I meant to go to my room, and I took the steps two at a time. Blinking hard, I didn’t notice that I came to the little hall a full two landings short of what I should have, and it was only when I passed through my bathroom door that I realized it was not the bathroom door.

It shut with an audible click .

I was in a wide room with a marble floor, like a square dance hall. The ceiling was a mirror reflecting the checkered marble. I was not a part of the image it showed. I kneaded my eyes, mentally knocking myself over the head for the carelessness of my mistake. Here was the something special I'd been looking for; something hinting at the hidden. Now that I'd found it, I didn't want it anymore. I wanted to lie down and reread something charming and distant, a fantasy to escape my fantasy. I had been reminded of something bigger than magic or unfolding mansions. I had been reminded that this time my dad might not be coming back.

Trying to go back, I found the door locked, and I began to be afraid. I was like a baby bird; hatching, drying, looking about, and once it has taken the measure of its surroundings, flapping to get free. Panic is the thing with feathers.

The knob turned, but the bolt would not move. I shook the door in its frame, and the sound of it rattling was like a woody chuckle against the silence of the hall. That table had not been in that room to begin with. I was sure it hadn't. The house had picked it out of my mind, and the house had drawn me up here.

Maybe I should have been more attentive to Timothy's ground rules. After a few deep breaths, I called his name. “Timothy!"

My voice echoed obnoxiously in the wide room, making me feel pitifully small and forlorn, like I was being teased. The door remained locked, and I didn't call again.

My breath quickened until it approached hyperventilation. I was half oppressed by the notion that not only was the house capable of change but of thinking , of having prejudice and preference all its own. Timothy had suggested this--had stated it outright actually--but I hadn't appreciated the reality of it until this moment. Golems or no golems, there had been something too alien about the idea of a house that was in some way conscious for me to accept it on account. This was only my second day!

Then I was angry. I was angry at myself for getting trapped and for nearly giving in to hysteria, and I was angry at Timothy--mostly as a matter of principle. This anger seemed to come from someone else, like an emotional equity loan. I was hardly ever angry over anything, but this flowed through me like heat in my blood; living warmth to drive away the clammy chill of fear.

I became calm.

There were double doors painted a smug and dissonant green waiting at the opposite end of the chamber. I couldn't go back so forward it was, just like I wanted before I had been thrown by my memories. I accosted the doors with all the force of my borrowed defiance. They gave way eagerly onto a long corridor, as long as the whole house was wide. There were four or five doors placed along each side of the hall, well-spaced from each other. I guessed it was the spine of the second story.

There was something intimidating in all that unknown space. “Okay, house," I said, not at all sure that this was the right thing to do. "What did you want to show me?"

No answer. I hadn't expected one--hadn't wanted one and would have been terrified if I had gotten one--but the corridor itself was beckoning. I resolved to go to the end of the way, ignoring all the detours, because there was another set of great muted green doors lording over the exit, seeming to signal the next stage of adventure. I went straight to them, though it took an awfully long time to do it with that prickling between my shoulder blades of untold, unknown eyes. I didn't hesitate in seizing one brassy handle to tug it open and let myself through.

There was a long corridor, as long as the whole house was wide, with four or five doors on either side spaced at healthy intervals. It was obviously the same hall and the same doors, with a floor of gleaming hardwood that I'd failed to regard on my first pass.

I didn't even try to go back. It would have been too depressing. I began to check the rooms. There was a massive wainscoted sounding chamber, with the upper half of one wall all glass, so that sky-stained light came down in a deluge over the grand piano that was this room's sole occupant. I ran my hand over its light, slick surface, recalling the period a few years before when I had wanted to play, but we couldn’t afford lessons.

An exit tucked into the far corner connected this room to a smaller chamber crammed with boxes and binders and sheaves of unbound papers, all covered in the most immaculate and illegible script I had ever seen, dotted with symbols my vision glazed around. I could only see them out of the corner of my eye. There was another door here that, if my mental map was correct, should have returned me to the main corridor. It did not.

A flurry of other doors and other rooms followed, so many that the ranch house could not have comprised them all if it had been twice its size. Running the gamut from simple to grand, there was a hall of marble pilasters next to a whirlpool bath, a musty attic beside an unfinished basement, state rooms, dining rooms, and even a gallery bare of all but a single rectangular painting. It depicted sprightly fairies tending a clump of brilliant flowers. Looking closely, I saw that the flowers, too, were fairies and that the dew upon the petals was their tears.

Faster and faster I went through doors without number, my calm dissipated, my panic fluttering with all its fervid might.

After what seemed like hours, I came to a room with a checkered tile floor. Hulking shapes were draped in white cloth, and Milton was rising from a black pit on the farther side. I was so overwhelmed with relief at seeing him that I didn’t even blink about the whole ‘black pit’ thing. A bushy bronze eyebrow rose at the sight of me as my feet slapped to a halt on the tile, my voice gasping, “I…got…lost.”

The sorcerer wore a brown corduroy suit. The hair was swept back into the copper ponytail; his eyes were flashing gold coins. He didn't seem to move in a hurry, but he crossed the distance between us in a blink. His hand squeezed my arm so tightly that I yelped, but the intensity of his glare stifled any other protest.

"You were warned." His voice was deep and resonant. It stroked a finger along the ax keen edge of menace. All of my relief vanished under that look, and I found myself wishing that I was lost again. I had virtually no memories of Milton from my childhood, nothing to gauge this reaction by, and that little bird had awakened, flapping and screeching in my chest.

"I'm sorry," I stammered, but his face remained a thing of metal. He pulled me by my arm, practically wrenching it out of the socket, through another door… into the kitchen.

Timothy stood at the table, preparing sandwiches. He glanced up as we entered, not surprised.

"Keep an eye on her," Milton commanded in his baritone. The pressure left my arm and in the turning of a knob the sorcerer was gone again, leaving me with the apprentice.

Timothy's eyes crinkled, one half of his mouth stretching into that infectious smile. "He's a bear, isn't he?" Timothy said in a commiserating tone. Brown bread collided with ham and onions. "Lunch?" he inquired.

And that was the end of my exploring.

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