The Extraordinary Book of Doors

by Nydam, Anne

  A voice directly behind the boys said, “I don’t think you’re going anywhere right now.”

  Chen and Matias spun and saw Ammon Blank standing right beside the elevator door, smiling. Pure shock sent them stumbling several steps backwards.

  “I thought you might try something like this,” he said, advancing on the boys before they could run, “So I came back around the other way and waited for you.”

  As Chen and Matias hastily backed up another step into the stained glass room, Chen realized with dismay that they had let themselves be cornered. There was no other way out of this little gallery, and now Ammon Blank stood blocking the doorway in front of them looking surprisingly menacing for someone so ordinary and nondescript.

  “Playtime is over,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s really original,” Matias replied scornfully, but Chen thought his voice sounded a little strangled, as if he were trying to suppress panic or anger. Even if getting chased by Ammon Blank was supposed to be part of the plan, Chen definitely did not feel safe having a potential murderer this close, with nowhere left to run.

  Blank took another step toward the boys, who backed up ever closer to the dimly glowing Tiffany lamps at the back of the small room. He said, “You can’t escape. Give me the Book.”

  Despite his best effort, Chen heard his voice squeak as he replied, “I’ll yell for the security guards. They’re right around the corner in the rotunda and they’ll be here before you can do anything to us!”

  “But you see, I don’t need to do anything. Because if I do nothing, the man in the vault dies. It’s just that simple. A magician always makes sure to hold all the aces.”

  He snapped his fingers and a playing card appeared in his hand. He flicked it around toward his audience; it was the ace of spades.

  “Okay, that is kind of cool,” Matias gulped.

  Chen said, “If we give you this Book, will you let Mr Green go?”

  “I told you, the man goes free once the Franklin money is in my bank account. And not before.”

  “No! If I give you the Book you have to let him go now. Right away! He could be dying in there while you wait for the bank to open tomorrow!”

  “Let me remind you that you’re in no position to bargain. You’re in my way and I’ve waited more than long enough to get what I want. Hand over the Book before I lose my patience.”

  Chen looked over at Matias. His face appeared slightly green, but Chen hoped that was just because of the dim light coming through the colored glass around them. Matias nodded slightly. Chen nodded back and held out the Book.

  In an instant, Ammon Blank had whipped it out of Chen’s hand and stuffed it away in a thin portfolio.

  “Now don’t try to interfere again. Just stay out of my way, or I might put you in a safe place, too,” he warned, and marched out of the Tiffany room and into the larger gallery next door.

  Matias turned to Chen, eyes wide, and hissed urgently, “He’ll be portaling back to his apartment any second now. We’ve got to warn Polly!”

  XIX. The Room of Many Doors

  Working by touch in the dark, Polly moved everything out of the secret compartment at the back of Ammon Blank’s wardrobe, and onto the floor of the wardrobe beside her. After she had felt around in the dust and the darkness one last time to satisfy herself that she had emptied the hidden space, she shuffled backwards and pushed open the wardrobe doors to see what she’d found. As the wardrobe doors opened, the secret door shot closed and the hidden compartment disappeared again.

  Most important of all was the Wreath Book. Polly gave its cover an affectionate pat. Then there was the gold salt cellar that had been stolen from the chateau in France, in the shape of a big clam shell held aloft by lounging nymphs. There was also a huge scepter, the top of which was shaped like some sort of golden castle or cathedral, covered in figures of people and animals. This must be the St Salvator’s Mace Ammon Blank had stolen from the chapel in Scotland. But there were other things, too, including a small elaborately framed painting of a bearded chap in a top hat, a very expensive-looking gold wristwatch, and a green glazed pottery horse. They were the sort of thing, Polly thought, that’s easy to grab and worth a fair bit of money. Ammon Blank must have stolen them all on his various trips through magical doors.

  Polly’s first thought was to steal everything right back from Ammon Blank. Of course, she wasn’t really stealing anything, she reminded herself hastily. Ammon Blank was the thief; Polly was just recovering things. Wasn’t that what they’d all agreed?

  She took one of the silk-lined magician capes and spread it out on the floor of Ammon Blank’s bedroom. Working quickly, and humming under her breath, she loaded the stolen treasures onto the cape and began to bundle it up as securely as she could. The mace was too long to fit neatly into a folded cape, and she cringed at the clank as the ceramic horse knocked against a gold nymph.

  She stopped humming and muttered to herself, “Mom’ll be madder if I damage a piece of art than if Ammon Blank damages me. Because nothing matters as long as the art is fine.” Stealing a lot of things all at once was obviously harder than stealing them one at a time. Except that she wasn’t stealing, right?

  She squirmed a little. She didn’t know where the chap in the top hat was stolen from. Technically she didn’t even know that it had been stolen at all. Maybe it really was Ammon Blank’s. After all, surely he was entitled to keep some of his own possessions in his own secret cubby.

  She put the portrait back into the wardrobe, on the floor in front of the closed door of the secret compartment. And then what about these other unidentified items? They had to go back, too. If she took them she might really be stealing. Maybe she could call the police and tell them to come search Blank’s apartment. But if the police were coming to search the apartment, they ought to find all the stolen goods, right? Polly felt worried and indecisive, unfamiliar emotions. “I’m turning positively Chen-like,” she thought.

  She glanced at Blank’s clock and realized with a jolt of alarm that it was 6:36. She’d been here dithering for almost half an hour. Ammon Blank might be back at any moment, and more importantly, Raphael might be suffocating in a safe even as she sat here wasting time worrying about whether or not she was a thief. There was no time for this. There was no time to go back to Tobal and his cautious plans. It was time for her to go straight to Raphael and set him free.

  But to go to Raphael she still needed to get her hands on the Ornate Book. She set the salt cellar and the mace back in the wardrobe next to the other items. If police searched the apartment they would certainly find these things all here together.

  Then she picked up the Wreath Book, found Plate XXXI for the Ornate Book, and turned the key.

  Chen and Matias met Ms Whitaker coming across the rotunda.

  “Where’s Uncle Tobal?” yelped Matias, earning a disapproving glare from a museum guard. “Did you give it back to him?”

  “Yes, dear. He’s in Dutch paintings, I think,” Pearl answered eagerly, and Chen led them across the foyer, through a long gallery of Baroque art, and into the smaller grey-green-painted room where Mr Salceda, his back to a seventeenth century Dutch gentleman with an enormous white collar, sat on a bench with an antique book open on his lap. The wizard looked up as Chen dashed into the gallery.

  Matias, a few steps behind, called out breathlessly, “Uncle Tobal, he got our book! He cornered us and made us give him the decoy book! He might be back in his apartment already!”

  But Chen was too scared about Polly to bother with explanations. Skidding to a halt in front of Tobal, he grabbed the real Dragon Book from the wizard’s lap, threw it open to Plate XXXII for the Wreath Book, and jabbed the key into the hole.

  Tobal made some exclamation and tried to grab his Book back, but Chen didn’t hear. He was already leaping through the doorway.

  As the page closed behind him, Chen realized that he was not in Ammon Blank’s apartment. He was nowhere he’d ever been before. He felt as if
he were somehow in the middle of an inside-out book, with the edges of the pages facing towards the center of the circular room all the way around. The room was bright, although there were no lamps that Chen could see, and he felt a deep thrumming all around him. The pages, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, moved as if they were rotating slowly, or as if a breeze was passing gently around and around the room, ruffling the pages as it passed. Each page was a door, life sized this time, and although they were all black and white woodcuts as in the Books, they were not only the doors Chen had seen in the Books before. Every possible kind of door was here: the criss-crossed planks of a barn door, the vented metal of a school locker door, the rusted bars of a prison door, the deeply carved wood of a Malian granary door, the glass and chrome of a modern office building door, the paper screen of a Japanese shoji…

  But Chen was not alone in the room of many doors. Polly and Ammon Blank were both here, too, both holding their Books open in their hands, both looking as stunned to be here as Chen was.

  After an instant Mr Blank’s look of dismay turned to a sneer as he realized that Polly was eyeing the Ornate Book in his hand.

  “You’re too late,” he said, “I’m the one with the key to the Franklin fund, I know the password, and I’ll be going to the bank first thing tomorrow morning to collect the money. Your stupid friend isn’t getting out of the safe until I have every penny, and all three of the Books – which you two children have so conveniently brought me. What excellent assistants you make.”

  “Raphael is not stupid,” Polly retorted fiercely.

  Chen just said, “Where are we?” He felt as if he were inside a huge kaleidoscope. The only colors were black and white, but the white somehow felt as if it really were composed of all the colors of the rainbow blended into pure, diamond-faceted light. “And how did we get here, anyway?”

  Polly and Mr Blank didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the pages of life-sized doors encircling them, or to Chen. They were too busy sizing each other up. Ammon Blank was the first to move, coming toward Polly with his hand out-stretched to seize the Wreath Book. Polly backed up until she reached the edges of the huge pages circling the room. She put a hand behind her and touched one of them, a filigreed Chinese door, and pushed it gently aside. The page swung smoothly, and Chen caught a breath of the scent of evergreens as the door opened a few inches.

  Polly, however, did not go through the Chinese doorway but slid between it and the next sheet of paper, and disappeared from view. Ammon Blank stepped forward more quickly to catch her, and Chen blurted, “Hey, Mr Blank! Over here!”

  As the magician-thief spun toward him, Chen saw the enormous pages move again, obscuring the exact place that Polly had hidden. But now Ammon Blank was heading for him instead. He took three steps to the nearest pages and pushed them apart. One of them, the rough wooden door of a barn, creaked a little as it moved, although the motion was still as easy as the smoothest of hinges. Carefully avoiding the crack of light that marked the opening into another place, Chen slipped between the two pages.

  Mr Blank’s voice was loud and near. “You can’t hide. I’m going to find you, and I’m going to find the last Book. If you make it easy for me, I won’t hurt you…”

  Chen could hear the thief ruffling the paper, poking his hand between the pages, trying to find the children. Chen turned sideways and squeezed himself farther back between the pages. At his back was the barn door, smelling faintly of manure, but his cheek was pressed against the creamy white back of the page in front of him. He reached even farther into the crevice until his fingers found the inner edge of one of the doors. He inched toward it.

  Mr Blank’s voice continued, “But the harder you make this, the angrier I’m going to get.” His arm reached into Chen’s narrow space, his hand feeling back and forth.

  With one final squeeze, Chen managed to wriggle through the gap between the hinge edges of the pages just as Ammon Blank’s fingers brushed the spot where he had been. He found himself in a sort of narrow grey corridor between the curved exterior wall and the pages, which were all now pointing away from him toward the center of the room. It felt, he thought, like being squeezed into the spine of a hardcover book, in that arched space between the cover and the pages. He had to shuffle along sideways, which was awkward, but he was pretty sure that he was safe back here. No full-sized adult would be able to fit between the bound ends of the pages. Still, he couldn’t just stay here. Somehow he’d have to get to Polly and get them both safely back to the museum. Drawing in his breath to make himself as skinny as he possibly could, he squeezed into the gap between another two doors.

  When Chen came back to the center of the room, he peeked out from between the pages. Ammon Blank was now on the other side of the room, where Chen glimpsed Polly dashing between two more pages. A few tinkling notes of melancholy music floated into the room from the Japanese paper screen door that swung gently open as Polly pushed its woodcut picture aside. Mr Blank rushed after her, flipping doors open and shut as he tried to find her.

  As Chen watched the doors that displayed themselves briefly, each in turn, he suddenly thought he recognized the door to the garden in France that he’d been to first. He shook his head, feeling slightly dizzy, and decided he couldn’t be sure. After all, even at the time he’d had enough difficulty recognizing which door that was. But could he really find some doors he knew here?

  He tried to focus on the individual doors that moved gently in and out of sight. That one, there, was definitely the metal studded door with the black marble pillars through which he and Polly had found the old library. And there was the gracefully arched door he was sure was the second plate in the Books. He also thought he recognized other doors, doors that had no business being here at all, like the door of his own old house with its oval leaded glass window, and his grandfather’s apartment door with no window but a tiny peephole. He was definitely feeling dizzy now.

  Then Polly reappeared, farther around the circle, and Ammon Blank spun towards her again. Chen ran a few steps forward, ready to do something – he just had no idea what.

  Blank looked back and forth from Polly to Chen as all three of them now stood, evenly spaced around the circle of infinite doors.

  “You just don’t get it, do you,” Blank gloated, “This isn’t going to end until I get what I want. Everything I want. But the trick is that I already hold all the aces. I’ve already won, or you’d be the ones with the money and the Books.” Blank held up two Books triumphantly, the Ornate Book through which he had come, and the Dragon Book he had forced Chen and Matias to give him in the museum. Then his triumphant expression suddenly slipped away and he spun to face Chen. “Wait a minute; how did you get here? What Book do you have?”

  Chen involuntarily backed up a step again, closer to the encircling doors. “This one,” he said nervously, holding up the real Dragon Book. “I tried to go through it to the Wreath Book to find Polly.”

  “And I tried to go to the Ornate Book to find Raphael,” Polly added quickly before Mr Blank could move toward Chen. “You must have tried to go through the Dragon Book portal to go back to your apartment, because that’s the page you used to get to the museum… and we all opened our portals at exactly the same time. A complete interlocking circle of portals.”

  Blank didn’t answer. He was looking from the book in his hand to the one Chen held.

  Chen glanced from side to side anxiously, wondering how long he could hide back behind the pages again, and how he could escape from this place altogether. And then, to his relief, he recognized another of the woodcut doors that riffled into view, a pleasant-looking door with a pretty flowering vine and a cat napping on the front step. He inched toward Mr Salceda’s door cautiously.

  “That’s enough,” Blank snapped, “I’ve worked hard enough for these stupid Books and the Franklin money. They’re mine, and I want them now. If you don’t give me both the Books right now, I swear that man will die in the safe, and you’ll die in there
with him. I’ll get rid of you all!”

  And that is the moment when each of the three people in the round, thrumming room did something Important. Not that any of these things was meant to be Important; each was really just a small, impulsive movement. Together, however – and this is often the way with Small Things – together they became Important.

  1. Chen Connelly reached out to the huge woodcut picture of the door of Tobal Salceda’s house and the best way he knew to get away from Ammon Blank and get back home.

  2. Ammon Blank lunged toward Chen and the Dragon Book, intent on the last missing pieces of his plan for total control of the magic and the money.

  3. Polly Goggin lurched toward Blank with a furious retort on her lips and a desperate rage in her heart.

  Just as Ammon Blank reached out his hand to seize the Dragon Book, Chen was grasping the magical door. The page swung as if on the smoothest of hinges, and instantly through the opening darted a quick, small shape.

  Just as Uber dashed across Blank’s path, Polly was shouting, “No!” and shoving the thief with all her strength. Ammon Blank tripped headlong over the cat and the Books flew from his hands as he reached out both arms to catch himself. His flailing hands met another of the infinite doors, which swung open under his touch, and he tumbled through the portal.

  “Magnificent,” Polly said breathlessly, slapping the paper door shut behind him, “That got rid of him.” And she picked up the Ornate Book from the floor where Blank had dropped it, and began flipping quickly through the pages, looking for the woodcut plate of a vault door.

  Chen couldn’t take his eyes off the door through which Ammon Blank had disappeared. Blank didn’t have a Book any more, but what if he could simply walk back through the door and come after them again? These doors were just paper, after all. They hardly seemed capable of holding back a murderous magician-thief. All around the room the huge pages were gently moving again, and Chen was afraid that if he looked away he’d lose track of the door through which Blank had disappeared.