by Kate Milford
The house made old-house noises around him, subtle creaks and squeaks that seemed almost like a voice. “Let me into the map room,” Pantin said quietly. Then louder: “Let me into that room! Why won’t you let me into that room?” He thought he knew why, of course, but it wouldn’t do to confirm it. Not if the house was really listening.
A new sound overlay the creak-and-squeak: a sort of slither of wood against wood, accompanied by the ticking of many clocks. Pantin didn’t have to open the notebook to know that the parlor now lurked behind the nearest door in the wall he was still leaning against, the one he had come through to arrive here, overlooking the solarium.
“I know you’re keeping me out of that room,” he said. “I don’t know how to convince you to let me go there.” Then, in a fit of total honesty, “I think I might go mad if I can’t go in.” Or perhaps I’ve gone mad already, he thought helplessly, believing I can talk to a . . . a moving parlor.
For a long moment, there was nothing: no new sounds and no movement other than the circling bird on the other side of the glass. Then the air around him shifted, and somehow the gallery shifted too, in a way Pantin could understand only as a sort of sigh. The wood-on-wood slither came again, taking the clock-ticking away with it. Pantin took a deep breath and opened his notebook to the page with this gallery on it. He turned the page and looked down at the sketch he had begun of the other gallery, the one with the rust-colored carpet.
Now, I don’t know why the house’s answer to Pantin’s asking for access to its most vicious chamber was to make him pass through another similarly malevolent space first. Perhaps the house or the clock parlor or whatever entity had the most influence at that moment decided that it had better show Pantin what he was asking for. Perhaps the house figured if the boy couldn’t manage the bloody gallery, he certainly couldn’t survive the map room. Perhaps it decided the boy must have some sort of death wish, in which case the house was fully within its rights to decide to set his inevitable end in the gallery, where the carpet was already spoiled beyond fixing and blood splatter didn’t particularly show up against the flocked red wallpaper.
Who can know these things, really? We spend our lives passing through spaces, not wondering what they think of us or what logic they possess, other than the logic we imposed on them as builders or occupants, which is nothing more than a reflection. Surely places, if they survive for long, develop their own logic. Their own personalities. Their own senses of strategy.
In any case, Pantin grabbed his lantern, scrambled to his feet, opened the door, and flung himself into the red gallery without a clue as to what he was in for. It’s possible the house did him one last favor on his way through the doorway, because his foot caught on something right at the threshold and he landed on his hands and knees. His light rolled away and went out, flashing its last flicker on the sharpened, moving blade of a pikestaff. The blade, which had been in motion since just before the boy had opened the door, missed his head by inches and embedded itself in the door frame hard enough to send splinters flying. One of those splinters nicked Pantin’s ear as he rolled sideways screaming and saw the suit of armor motionless by the door, bent into an unnatural curve with one end of the pole clutched in its gauntlets and the blade still stuck where it had landed.
He spotted the second suit of armor moving in the dimness out of the corner of his eye, but the moment he looked straight at it, it stopped. At a sound behind him, he whirled to find the suit with the pike motionless, but its blade was now free of the door frame. Another wheeze of scraping metal yanked his head around to see a third suit standing stock-still in the middle of the gallery, right between Pantin and the curving staircase that led to the foyer. A fourth suit behind the third had frozen in the act of stepping away from the wall opposite the balustrade.
More sounds behind him, and Pantin spun again. The second suit was much closer now, and it carried a huge, gleaming battle-axe. But in pivoting, Pantin had turned his back to Three and Four, and he could hear both of them moving. He turned to check on the first one, and not a moment too soon. Number One froze with the pikestaff over its shoulder, and it’s likely that with even a second more, it would have swung for Pantin’s head, and that would’ve been the end of this story.
The underlying geometry of the house might’ve been incomprehensible, but the logic behind the suits of armor was crystal clear to Pantin, who had played Stop and Go in the schoolyard plenty of times and who had no problem accepting the idea that otherwise-inanimate objects might be able to move when one wasn’t looking. He scrambled backwards across the gallery until his shoulders touched the balustrade, turning his head rapidly from left to right to try to keep an eye on all four suits. He couldn’t quite do it; the suits had been at this for a good hundred years, and they knew where all the sightlines were. And they were fast—they didn’t fail to take advantage of every half-second Pantin’s eyes were elsewhere.
By the time the boy was on his feet again with his back to the railing, Number One was halfway across the gallery with its pike ready to strike and Numbers Two and Three had made some good progress toward him from the opposite ends of the space. Behind Three, Number Four had taken up a sentry position at the top of the stairs. Pantin suspected that was a bit of a bluff, since he was pretty sure all he’d have to do to keep the suit immobile was walk up to it, looking right at it, and keep his eyes on it until he was safely down on the first floor. But it hardly mattered, because he’d also have to pass Three to do that, and once he was past, he’d have to keep his back to Three in order to keep his eyes on Four. Not to mention if he kept watch on Three and Four for any extended period of time, he’d have his back to Two, and Number One was a yard away with its very long weapon at the ready and needed only a few seconds’ worth of inattention to strike.
So, with his eyes on Number One, the closest suit of armor to him, Pantin reached for the banister at his back and hoisted himself carefully up onto it. When he was sitting and stable, he shifted and swung first one leg and then the other over, finding toeholds between the uprights and staring at the blade of Number One’s glinting pike. He could see all three of the others peripherally now, but just barely.
Pantin began to edge his way along the outside of the banister toward the stairs, feeling blindly for places to put his feet. He could feel a thrumming energy, as if all four suits were coiled animals waiting to strike the second he blinked.
Finally, when he thought he was out of reach of the pike, he transferred his stare over to Three and Four, keeping Number One just barely in the corner of his eye. But now Number Two was out of eyeshot, and free. Pantin forced himself not to look as Two clanked to life, because now he was even with Number Three, who held a short, gleaming sword at the ready.
Number Two flashed into the same peripheral space as Number One and froze dead.
Pantin exhaled and kept edging along. He passed Three and reached the place where the banister curved to meet the stairs and angled down. He stepped onto the first stair, climbed over that banister, then backed down three steps more until he could see all four suits of armor.
He walked rearwards all the way down, just in case, then experimentally turned his head when he was at the bottom. He heard clanking and turned to find all four suits of armor standing in a sentry line at the top of the stairs. But they didn’t try to follow him down, nor did they attempt to throw their weapons after him.
Pantin’s legs gave out. He sagged to his haunches and crouched there for what felt like an hour, until his pounding heart began to calm and the numb, shocked tingling in his body began to dissipate. He raised his fingers to his neck where the splinter had cut him, and winced.
As if to get his attention, a clock he hadn’t heard before tolled, and Pantin, still crouched on the floor, turned to his left to look through the open doorway into the map room. The light spilling from it was gentle and warm and welcoming. He walked over the threshold.
It was the most captivating chamber he’d ever been in, f
ull of carpets in rich, vivid tones and deep, sink-right-into-it furniture in leather and velvet. The bookcases had glass fronts, and the desks had curved, carved legs. Every surface held something fascinating: navigational instruments, globes, boxes of expensive-looking drafting equipment. The walls were papered in a pattern that called to mind gentle, rolling waves, and framed maps and assorted bits of cartography hung everywhere. Some were as small as a book page. Others were bigger than Pantin himself.
He walked up to one of the smaller pieces on the wall, a beautiful collection of the sorts of monsters that he had only ever before seen cavorting at the edges of maps. Some of them here were peeking out from behind a hand-drawn square of rope enclosing the word LEGEND. Inside the rope, under LEGEND, was a handful of symbols meant to help a reader interpret the map.
Most of the creatures surrounding the rope stared eastward, as if the whole group were tracking something beguiling just out of view beyond the dark wood of the frame. One, however, leaned over the top of the symbol box, its claws hooked into the Es in LEGEND, and stared straight out of the picture at the viewer.
It wasn’t quite a dragon, and it wasn’t quite a tiger, and it wasn’t quite a goat. Its horns curled almost all the way from its forehead to the corners of its wide, fanged mouth, and Pantin couldn’t decide if the tendrils framing its head were tufts of hair or tentacles. He leaned in, suddenly fascinated with figuring out what those waving bits were meant to be. Closer and closer, until only a hair’s breadth separated his nose from the glass over the creature.
A puff of warmth gusted gently past his cheeks.
Pantin bent nearer still, staring at the tendrils and trying to work out whether he was seeing suckers or just stains on the paper. Another puff of warm air feathered his face, this one carrying a whiff of salt water and rotting meat. Enthralled, Pantin barely registered it. Up close, the tendrils seemed almost to wave as the creature’s head loomed larger, taking up more and more of the boy’s field of vision.
Another balmy puff of sea and carrion ruffled Pantin’s hair. He didn’t notice.
There was no glass. He didn’t notice that, either, nor the fact that his hands now gripped the frame like a windowsill as the top half of his body angled through it. In fact, he might have been halfway down the thing’s gullet before he noticed anything, if not for the fact that the creature, which was capable of holding itself still for truly stupefying lengths of time but which hadn’t had a fresh meal in years, couldn’t stop itself from drooling.
A single tepid drop fell onto Pantin’s hand. He glanced down, the spell of the creature’s waving tentacles broken, and frowned at the spot of damp between his knuckles. Only then did he register that his top half appeared to be leaning through a window and into perilous proximity of a monster.
Pantin flung himself backwards as the creature’s mouth snapped shut. The world warped, and as he fell on his backside onto one of the map room’s beautiful rugs, the aperture that had somehow opened up between himself and the marginal monster became nothing more than a bit of a map in a mahogany frame again.
It’s a measure of how accustomed Pantin was becoming to witnessing the impossible (or perhaps just how exhausted he was) that his first thought wasn’t This room will kill me if I let it—that thought came later—but instead That’s it! That’s what I’ve been looking for! The thing whose inside is different from its outside!
But no, he realized as he approached the map again, cautiously. There was no lock here. Something about this picture or its frame held a portal, which was miraculous, certainly—but the peddler hadn’t wanted a portal. He didn’t want just any old miracle. He wanted a keyhole. A . . . what had he called it? An adit-gate.
Pantin sighed and turned back to the rest of the beautiful room. Well, he thought, there are plenty of cabinets here to try. But this room will kill me if I let it. And he began opening things. Rolled maps, flat maps, decaying maps and incomplete maps and unfinished maps. Cartography fashioned of lines, of dots, of yarn and sticks, of shaped wood and linen and skulls, of gloves and spheres. And the map room held itself still and waited.
Now and then, one of the pages he unrolled made his fingers tingle strangely or felt oddly chilled, as if it had just been brought in from the cold. Once, he slipped as he climbed up onto a table to reach a portable lap desk on a shelf and found himself tumbling to the floor. This was a near miss: there had been a map already unrolled on the table’s surface, and what had felt like a bit of odd clumsiness had, in actuality, been Pantin’s left leg falling into the painted landscape. Only because he’d been leaning to the right to reach the portable desk had he merely fallen off the table rather than tumbling into the map, in which the legendary carnivorous beast that prowled the prairie could actually be seen by anyone who looked closely enough. Or at least, the paths it trailed through the waving watercolor grasses could be seen, but then, anyone who looked that closely was probably already falling in, and this beast didn’t always wait as patiently as the tentacled monster did.
Pantin had picked himself up and glared down at the map on the table. “No, you don’t.” He swept it to one side and moved on. But after that, he was a bit more careful as he passed in the shadows of more maps and more marginal monsters and occasionally unrolled more doorways into the habitats of terrible things. All around him, the room waited. Soon, soon, it whispered silently to its cartographic bestiary. Soon. Be patient.
At last, Pantin reached the side of the room opposite the arched entrance and paused. He looked around for anything that could be opened that he hadn’t already tried. On the wall behind him, the largest framed map hung at a slight angle from the bent nail and frayed twine that supported it, its top edge tilting a few inches away from the rolling-wave wallpaper and looming into the room. Pantin had deliberately kept himself at a safe distance from this particular piece, which was a darkly beautiful representation of a forested hinterland. Or at least, it had seemed like a safe distance.
Without warning, the twine broke and the map crashed to the floor, where it stood up on its lower edge for a fraction of a second before falling forward into the room. Pantin half turned, but he barely had time to raise his hands before the map toppled right over him. And then, in the space of two breaths, he found himself crouching in a dense, cold forest, and for some reason holding a decomposing, lichen-rimed tree branch in both upturned hands.
Now the thought was clear as a bell: This room will kill me if it gets the chance. Except he wasn’t in the room with the soft, warm light anymore. Now he was in the dark and the cold amid sharp tangles of undergrowth, and there were noises of large bodies in the bracken and not enough light to see beyond the nearest overhanging trees.
Instinctively his hands uncurled to let go of the branch; some part of his brain had noted that it was damp and rotted and wouldn’t make much of a weapon, and given the sounds coming through the trees, Pantin was going to need one. But just in time, the boy stopped himself. In the cold dark, there was one faint source of light: a narrow trickle painting the downturned backs of his hands. The light under the branch was different from the illumination above and around it.
The noises got louder and closer, and the unseen things began to shriek at one another. Desperately, he raised the branch, which he realized was much heavier than it seemed it should’ve been, and just as if he’d raised a shutter covering a window, the map room became visible before him. Pantin flung himself under the branch and through the opening, feeling his body roll across carpet instead of forest floor.
Behind him, the top edge of the map fell to the ground with a puff of old-room dust and forest-scent.
Pantin scrambled backwards until he collided with the chair by the desk. Then he leaped away from that, terrified the rolled maps on the surface might tumble off and catch him. He stood, thought he might fall again, and reached for a low bookcase, the nearest piece of furniture without maps either on or hanging above it.
This room will kill me if it can, he thought for th
e third time.
“Enough,” he said aloud through chattering teeth. If it wasn’t daylight outside yet, if the other boys were still out there waiting, and if they tried to hassle him about coming out early, Pantin decided he felt perfectly up to throwing a few punches. The peddler would have to contain his disappointment too. Pantin had evaded murderous suits of armor and animate cartography. He was done being intimidated by mere humans. And he was done with the house on Fellwool Street . . . assuming the house would deign to let him leave so easily.
At that moment, Pantin made an accidental discovery. As he waited for his breathing to return to normal, he looked down at the top of the bookcase he was leaning on. The only things on it besides his shaking hand were five books sandwiched between two bookends shaped like the bow and stern of a ship. Because he couldn’t quite bring himself to try to stand on his own yet, Pantin let his eyes roll over the spines. One of the titles leaped out at him: Bournefont’s Cartography: Legends and Keys.
Keys. And then he remembered having seen the word Legend inked inside the symbol box on the map fragment with the monster that had attempted to eat him only a few minutes ago.
Pantin took the book cautiously from its place and began turning pages. It was illustrated with pages upon pages of cartographic symbols and their meanings. In some examples taken from actual maps, the symbol charts were labeled Legend as they had been in the fragment with the mesmerizing monster. In others, they were labeled Key.
Inside this house, there will be an adit-gate, the peddler had said. Let’s say a sort of cabinet that, when opened, shows you something other than the inside of it.
Maybe you couldn’t call a map a cabinet, but Pantin thought these particular ones fit the spirit of the peddler’s request nonetheless. And now that he knew the word key could be applied to cartography, too . . .