The Door in the Alley

by Adrienne Kress

  The pig was small, maybe around elementary school pig age, and had a panicked look in its eyes. It was jogging down the sidewalk right in Sebastian’s path. And when it noticed Sebastian coming directly for it, its expression turned from panic to pure terror. It looked left, then right, and then, determining that its life was in immediate danger, ran out into the street.

  Working purely off an instinct he didn’t even know he had, Sebastian launched himself after the pig, picking it up in his arms and rushing to the other side of the street just before a minivan whooshed past. He held the pig tight in his arms, panting a little, and looked down at it. The pig still looked petrified, its hat now askew, but for some reason it didn’t struggle. Instead it seemed just to resign itself quietly to this moment of sheer terror, and froze.

  “My pig!” called out a voice, and Sebastian turned to see a man fly out of the alley and into the street, much in the same way the pig had. The man wore a tweed suit, but the jacket was unbuttoned and flapping about as he ran. His hair was white, and tufts sprouted from different parts of his head without any consideration for symmetry. And he ran not in a straight line across the street, but in a zigzag fashion, so that despite the man’s fluster and panic, he took quite a while to succeed in crossing the street.

  Finally he arrived to where Sebastian stood holding the pig, and he doubled over, panting hard. He placed his hands on his thighs and looked up for a moment as if he was going to speak, then bent over again, holding up a hand indicating he needed another moment before he could say anything. Sebastian and the pig just watched him as he did this several times, attempting to speak but not speaking. And finally Sebastian thought maybe he should be the one to talk first.

  “Sir…,” he started, but the man held up his finger, giving an extra-loud wheeze. “Sir, I…” The man poked the air hard with his finger as if to make sure Sebastian was aware of its presence. So Sebastian fell silent and looked down at the pig again. The pig looked up at him, still terrified but now seeming also mildly confused.

  Finally the man straightened himself and, removing the pocket square from his jacket, wiped his forehead and sighed. Then he said, “That’s my pig.”

  “Yes, I gathered that,” replied Sebastian. “Would you like him back?” He stretched out his arms, but the man took a step backward.

  “Oh, no no no. No. No.” He pressed his lips together. “Yes.”

  “Okay…so here.” Sebastian took a step toward him.

  “No no no no. No. You must bring him. He’s never this still when I hold him. No. I can’t take him. He’ll just run away again.”

  Sebastian slowly brought the pig back to his chest. “How long will this take?”

  “What? What do you mean by that?” The man stared at him as if offended. “How insensitive! How…Oh. ‘How long will this take?’ Not long. Not long at all. I’m just around the corner.” He gestured to Sebastian to follow him, which clearly Sebastian couldn’t reasonably do as walking in a zigzag went against everything he believed in. Instead he walked across the street as the man made his jagged journey to the other side. The man bent over again to catch his breath in wheezing gulps.

  “Why don’t you just walk in a straight line?” asked Sebastian, feeling a little concerned for the old man’s health.

  When the man stood upright again he gave Sebastian a look and said slowly, “I don’t see what that would accomplish.”

  “Uh…getting to places faster?” replied Sebastian just as slowly.

  “And what is the point of that?”

  They stared at each other, and Sebastian had an odd feeling that the man was finding Sebastian just as bizarre as he was finding the man.

  “Maybe we should just get this pig back to wherever,” said Sebastian finally. The man nodded, gave him one more look, and turned slowly. And suddenly he was off zigzagging, and Sebastian had to just stand there and watch until the man finally went where he was trying to go.

  That’s when Sebastian’s heart sank.

  In all the confusion, with the pig and the teeny hat and the zigzag man, he had completely forgotten about the thing he had been trying to forget about. In one way, it meant he had done an excellent job at avoiding it up until now; in another, it meant that his guard had been down. For, sure enough, the man had turned down an alley. The only alley that existed on this street. That connected to another street. And there was only one thing down that alley.

  Sebastian approached it with caution, his expression slowly morphing into the one the pig had been wearing all this time. Terror. He stood at the end of the dark passageway and peeked his head around the corner only to see the man standing right by the door. And right under the sign that read…

  The Explorers Society

  “Come on come on come on. He is a pig, after all,” called out the man, opening the door.

  “What does that even mean?” Sebastian called back.

  “It means…he is a pig.” Once more the man gave him that look.

  Fine, thought Sebastian. The sooner he followed him the sooner it would be over. He took in a deep breath, squeezed the pig close, and made his way down the dark alley to the man and through the door he held open for him. The man followed, closing the door behind him.

  Sebastian found himself standing in a small dark foyer, no larger than a midsized elevator, with the strange man at his side. The walls were paneled with dark wood, and a long staircase loomed before them, carpeted with a dark red, almost black, runner. A single dusty lightbulb dangled from the ceiling.

  “Going up!” announced the man. And suddenly they were. Going up. The floor and walls and light stayed around him, but the staircase fell away as they rose in what had turned out to be an actual elevator—one that happened to be missing a few of its walls.

  They traveled upward, rushing past floor after floor of oddities. Sebastian only caught glimpses, but from what he could see there were statues, a room of mirrors, something furry. They kept going and going, and Sebastian was certain they’d have to reach the top eventually. Wouldn’t they? And just when he was sure they would go crashing through the roof, they came to a sudden stop. In what appeared to be exactly the same space as before, though Sebastian was well aware that wasn’t logical.

  Sebastian followed the man forward and glanced at the stairs as they walked past them. “Where do those stairs go?”

  “What stairs?” replied the man, turning a corner and leading them down a dark hall, the walls of which were covered in empty picture frames.

  “The stairs back there.” Sebastian glanced back.

  “Those aren’t stairs.”

  Sebastian blinked. “They aren’t?”

  “No. We showcase a series of life-sized paintings of stairs here at the society headquarters. It’s called ‘Up and Down.’ Each one has a slightly different ratio of height to width meant to express the inner turmoil one feels at the foot of a staircase. You thought they were real?”

  “Yes….” Confusion coiled itself around Sebastian’s brain and squeezed. Obviously he had thought they were real, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked the question.

  The man let out a blustery laugh. “They don’t even look real! Stairs don’t look like that.”

  Sebastian’s brain was now being strangled. “Actually they look exactly like that.”

  “Son, you might be good with pigs in hats, but you are clearly not very bright.”

  Sebastian wanted to respond to that pronouncement that certainly he’d been called many things in his life—“too serious,” “ahead of the curve,” “Sebastian” (his parents didn’t believe in nicknames)—but “not very bright” had never been one of them. Instead, though, all he could do was sputter as the man flung open a door. The hall flooded with bright pink light, which Sebastian learned, upon stepping through into the room, was caused by a massive neon sign of an ampersand.*2

  “What’s that?” asked Sebastian, staring at it in awe. He was so stunned by it that he was barely able to take in the rest of th
e room, noticing only briefly all the animal cages (from within which squawks and squeaks could be heard) as well as the long table full of hatmaking supplies.

  “Enough!” barked the man, violently grabbing the pig out of Sebastian’s arms. The pig erupted into a fit of ear-piercing squeals and flailed its pig legs about, struggling to get free. The man fought his way across the room to a large pen tucked into the far corner. “Your questions are ridiculous!”

  No, they aren’t, thought Sebastian, feeling more hurt than he understood was reasonable. He had always prided himself on asking really good questions. He quickly analyzed the questions he’d been asking and acknowledged that, yes, maybe he should have been more specific, but hadn’t it been kind of obvious what he was referring to? He stayed lost in his thoughts until a short round woman with tight curls of gray hair came barging into the room.

  “Where is David Copperfield?”

  Sebastian was sure that was a way worse question than the one he’d just asked. But instead of reprimanding this woman, the man looked scared. He flashed a nervous smile and didn’t say a thing. Sebastian found his reaction both amusing and satisfying. It was nice finally getting to see the man as flustered as he felt.

  “I asked you a question, Hubert!” said the woman, her hands on her hips and her eyes narrowing.

  “I, um, I…”

  “So help me, Hubert, if I see so much as a brim of a little hat…”

  “No, no, no. There were no hats involved!”

  A soft echoey meow came from somewhere near Sebastian’s ankle. He glanced down and saw a calico cat, its tail sticking straight up into the air, with what looked to be a miniature knight’s helmet hiding its head.

  The woman slowly pointed at the cat, never breaking eye contact with Hubert.

  “That’s not a little hat!” he protested, his voice cracking. “It’s a little helmet!”

  “Take that off him this instant!”

  Hubert looked perfectly defeated. He crossed over to Sebastian and bent to pick up the cat. He glanced at the woman, and then sighed deeply, removing the helmet from the cat’s head. The cat looked at Sebastian with an expression that was a cross between amused and annoyed, and then hopped out of Hubert’s arms and trotted to the woman’s side.

  “You!” she said when she had given the cat a good scratch behind the ears—to which the cat responded enthusiastically. “You!” she said again.

  “Me?” asked Sebastian, startled and a little unsure whether she did indeed mean him.

  “Yes. Are you a friend of Hubert’s?”

  “Uh, not really.”

  “Excellent. Come with me. It’s time for tea.”

  * * *

  *1 I mean, that would be really weird, wouldn’t it, if one day let’s say a bird landed on the wire by your bedroom window and he was wearing a fedora? It would also be weird if he had an old-fashioned camera and spoke like a 1940s reporter. Because you don’t want anyone taking pictures of you through your window. That’s intrusive.

  *2 Okay, so here’s the thing: “ampersand” means this: &. That is to say, it is the name for the symbol that represents the word “and.” So why is it “ampersand” and not “and-ersand,” I ask you? Why??

  For some reason that escaped him (for there simply had to be one somewhere), Sebastian dutifully followed the woman out of the pink-lit room and into the hallway. He followed her back the way he’d come until they were once again facing the painting of the ascending stairs. With barely a pause the woman grabbed hold of the side of the painting and pulled on its frame, opening up what was evidently not a painting, exactly, but a painted door, and started up the stairs that had been hidden behind it.

  Sebastian stopped and looked at the staircase with suspicion, watching as the woman climbed quickly and disappeared into the darkness beyond. He glanced down and noticed David Copperfield looking at him with an equal amount of suspicion. They stared at each other for a moment. “Okay, okay,” he said. And he started up the stairs.

  It was a long staircase. And just as Sebastian was wondering if he might wind up climbing for the rest of his life, he found himself walking into a warm natural light. When Sebastian’s eyes adjusted to it he saw an open door at the very top of the stairs. He continued his climb until he reached the top; then he stepped through the opening and stared. He was standing on a rooftop terrace with a truly magnificent 360-degree view of the city. Flowers were everywhere, in pots and boxed planters, but they also seemed to sprout out of the roof itself. They poured onto a cobblestone pathway that led to a large expanse of thick glass. Sebastian stopped where it began. In the middle of the glass patio grew a large tree. Or rather, what appeared to be the top of a large tree—Sebastian could swear it looked as if the tree continued down through the roof, into the society itself. And as Sebastian tentatively approached the edge of the glass floor and looked down through it, he was pretty sure that was exactly what it did.

  The tree stretched down through the building to what Sebastian could only guess was the ground floor of The Explorers Society. He looked up at its branches, which reached into the sky and caught his breath. Sitting above him in the tree’s leafy canopy was, for want of a better word, a tree house. It wasn’t much more than a platform—it had no roof or railings—but it was certainly built to be climbed into and sat upon. It was made of what looked like a rich cherry wood and had a rope ladder hanging from each of its four sides.

  Sebastian inched closer over the glass rooftop and the words of the woman he’d followed began to make slightly more sense. He could see that on the tree house platform there was a table covered with a fine white tablecloth along with two wrought-iron seats painted white, with pale blue cushions. The woman was sitting in one of these chairs, looking at him with obvious impatience. Before her was a full tea service: teapot, cups, saucers, milk and sugar, and a three-tiered display of little cakes and sandwiches. All of which Sebastian discerned as he tentatively climbed a rope ladder up to the platform.

  David Copperfield bypassed the ladders and climbed the tree.

  “Please have a seat,” said the woman.

  Once again, without quite understanding why, Sebastian did as he was told.

  “I’ve already poured us two cups.” She waved her hands over two cups of steaming tea, each sitting on a little matching saucer. The saucers in turn matched the floral teapot that sat next to the cakes and sandwiches. It was all so…perfect.

  “Oh yeah, you have,” said Sebastian, staring into his cup and wondering how she’d known to have tea prepared for him when she’d only just met him and when she’d had time to pour him a cup of tea and why he cared so much about the pouring of tea into cups in the first place.

  “Milk? Sugar?”

  Sebastian shrugged. Maybe. Maybe not. He’d never had tea before. He thought it strange to create something that was incomplete. If tea was meant to have milk and sugar in it, why wouldn’t it be made that way in the first place?

  The woman’s expression turned from expectant to calculating, and then she nodded. “I think we’ll do a bit of both. I think you’ll like it better that way.”

  “Okay.”

  She added the milk, plopped two sugar cubes into the drink with the aid of a pair of silver tongs, and passed it over to him. He took the saucer carefully in his hand, watched as the cup and the liquid within it shook dangerously, and felt much relief when he finally placed both cup and saucer safely on the table.

  “Have a cookie,” said the woman.

  Sebastian did as he was told and took a cookie and placed it on his saucer. He watched the woman add a drop of milk to her tea. She stirred it gently with a spoon and smiled at him. “Go on,” she said, “give it a try.”

  Sebastian took a sip and found he rather did like tea with milk and sugar.

  “Good?”

  He nodded and she smiled. He took a bite of his cookie and then took another sip of his tea.

  “Okay. Just so you understand what’s going to happen,” bega
n the woman, “I’m going to call the police and have them come arrest you.”

  Sebastian sputtered and gagged on the tea. He felt a hotness inside his nose as the liquid found other ways to go than just down his throat. It caused a burning both in his mouth and behind his eyes. They watered a little, and finally, when he couldn’t hold it in any longer, he erupted into a fit of coughing.

  Eventually he was able to speak. “Arrest me?” he squeaked, and looked at the woman wide-eyed. “But why?”

  “For trespassing,” she replied matter-of-factly, leaning toward the tiered sweets tray. Her hand hovered over the little cakes, her fingers dancing in the air for a moment, as if they were the ones making the decision, not her. Eventually they chose a small pink cube. The woman took a bite and smiled approvingly at their choice.

  “But I didn’t trespass.” His voice rose with every word. “I was asked in. I…I didn’t even want to come in!” Sebastian could feel his cheeks heating up and his heart starting to race. He was flustered. He always got this way when things were unfair. There was no weapon against unreasonableness.

  “That’s all rather immaterial, I’m afraid,” she said, taking another sip of tea. “Only society members are allowed in. It’s a very clear rule.”

  “But I didn’t know that. Why should I be punished for breaking a rule I didn’t even know existed?”

  “So if you murdered someone, but didn’t know you weren’t supposed to, you think you should not be punished for it?”

  “That’s totally different.”

  “How?”

  Sebastian inhaled deeply, intent on explaining his reasoning, but as far as he could think, she was, unfortunately, correct. He had to take a different tactic. “Well, why should I believe you? How do I know it actually is a rule?”