The Room Behind the Nursery

I found the room behind the nursery on the third night.

Or the room found me. I'm no longer certain the distinction matters.

The nursery was on the second floor, at the end of the corridor that had, until now, refused to be the same length twice. But on the third night — my final night, according to the solicitor's instructions — the corridor held still. It presented itself honestly: four doors on the left, three on the right, and at the end, the nursery, with its door slightly ajar, as if someone had just stepped out.

Inside, the nursery was preserved with the same uncanny freshness as the rest of the house. My old rocking horse. The bookshelf with its cargo of Grimm and Andersen and a paperback of The Secret Garden so creased its spine had turned white. The window, the rug (braided, oval, the colors of autumn), the child-sized chair that faced the wall as if it were sitting in some kind of punishment.

The wall the chair faced was blank.

Except it wasn't. Not anymore.

As I watched — and I'm telling you exactly what happened, even though my reliability as a narrator has, by this point, deteriorated to the point where you should trust nothing I say and everything I feel — a seam appeared in the wallpaper. A vertical line, floor to ceiling, so fine it might have been a crack in the plaster. Then a horizontal line at the top. Then another at the bottom.

A rectangle. A door. Cut into the wall with the precision of a wound made by a surgeon — clean, deliberate, almost kind.