100 Cupboards

by N. D. Wilson

  Henry was already examining the cupboard labeled “24.” Its name was “Cleave,” and its surface was a rough, darker wood. There was no latch anywhere and no keyhole.

  “Does the book say how to open it?” Henry asked. “There’s nothing on the door.”

  “Try hitting it.”

  Henry made a fist and thumped the door. Nothing happened. He felt around its edges. Small hinges were on the right side. At the top, his fingers found a groove. It still had loose plaster in it. He cleared it out with his fingertips, then pulled.

  The door opened with a pop and a cloud of dust. The small cupboard looked empty, but the back was hidden in darkness.

  “Nothing,” Henry said.

  “Reach inside.”

  Henry thought about saying something nasty. Instead, he stuck his hand in the cupboard and felt around.

  “There’s a back,” Henry said. “It doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “Push on it.” Henrietta stood up on the bed next to him and leaned in.

  “You’re breathing on me,” Henry said.

  “Oh well.”

  “It smells awful.”

  “Oh well,” Henrietta said again.

  Henry was straining against the back of the cupboard. He thought he felt it budge, so he bore down and pushed harder. The bed began sliding away from the wall.

  Suddenly the back of the cupboard gave, and Henry smacked his face on the wall as his arm went all the way through. His fingers, in some other place, closed around a fistful of hair. The head that owned it jerked and yelled. Henry let go and jumped back.

  Henrietta was sitting on the bed, shivering. “Henry! Shut it! Quick!”

  Henry started to.

  “No, the other one,” Henrietta said. “Over there. Something just reached through and grabbed me.” Henry looked back at the wall. Two cupboards were open—24 was the one he had just been reaching in, but 49, just above it and to the right, was also open.

  “Oh my goodness,” Henry said, and he laughed.

  “Why are you laughing? Shut it!” Henrietta stood up to do it herself. Henry reached back into number 24. His hand came out of 49 and grabbed at Henrietta’s face. She stifled a scream and slammed the door on it. Henry yelped and fell back down on the bed, sucking his knuckles and laughing. Henrietta looked down at him with her fists on her hips.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  Henry answered with more half-stifled laughter.

  “Was that your hand?” she asked. “It wasn’t funny if it was.”

  “Yeah, it was,” he said, and sat up grinning. “It was really funny. You should have seen your face.”

  “I hope I hurt your hand.”

  “Not bad.”

  Henrietta turned back to the wall. “How does that work?”

  “I guess the two cupboards are connected,” Henry said. “Anything that goes in one comes out the other.” Henry jumped back up. He forced his face into a serious expression before shoving his left arm into the cupboard as far as it would go. Most of his arm came out of the other cupboard. He reached over and began to feel his own face, then bugged his eyes at Henrietta. He spread his fingers and reached for her.

  “It’s coming,” he said.

  “Stop it.”

  “It’s coming!” he said, and twiddled his fingers.

  “Stop it!” she said, and slapped his hand. But she was smiling now. “That is really weird.”

  “Let’s do it with Blake,” Henry said.

  “Don’t be mean to the cat.”

  “It’s not mean. It’ll just be funny.”

  Blake had long since removed himself from the bed and was sitting by the door.

  “C’mere, Blake,” Henry said. He hopped off the bed and scooped up the cat. “Do you want to do magic?” He held the cat up to the lower open cupboard.

  “Don’t make him if he doesn’t want to.” But Blake didn’t mind. The cupboard didn’t seem at all unusual to him. He stepped in, and almost immediately his head emerged from the upper cupboard while his tail twisted and swung from the lower. He seemed to have found just the sort of spot that he enjoyed. He turned his head back and forth, then lay down and began licking his paw.

  “He likes it,” Henrietta said.

  “Of course he does, it’s hilarious,” said Henry. “Where’s the other one? Was it number 2?”

  “It’s 3, all the way at the other end, by the corner.”

  The two of them left Blake contentedly halved and scrambled to door number 3. Its paper tag said “Mistra.” The door was smaller than most, and darker. It wasn’t black, it just seemed dirty. Henry was wondering how he would clean it when Henrietta spat on it. She picked one of Henry’s T-shirts up off the floor and began rubbing.

  “You should take your laundry down, or Mom will come up to get it,” she said while she scrubbed.

  “I take it down all the time,” Henry said. “And I bring it back up.”

  Henrietta raised her eyebrows. “Sheets?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you taken your sheets down?”

  Henry nodded. “Once.”

  “Mom’s doing sheets tomorrow. Oh, look.”

  Henry already was. Silver inlay swirled around the edges of the door, then stretched toward the middle in what looked like branches. In the center was a half-dollar-sized circle.

  “Do you have your knife?” Henrietta asked. “You got it out of the black cupboard, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Henrietta looked at him. “Where is it?”

  “Why?” Henry asked.

  “I need it.”

  “What for?”

  “Just give it to me.” Henrietta turned back to the door.

  “Fine.” Henry crawled over the bed, found the knife on the floor, and brought it to Henrietta. She pushed the blade under the smooth metal circle in the door and it popped up. Underneath was a metal ring. She hooked a finger through it and pulled.

  “It’s a drawer,” she said. And it was. The drawer slid out, and they both scootched back. Henrietta pulled it all the way out, set it on the floor, and bent over to look in the hole. It was too dark, so she reached in and fished around with her hand. Her eyes narrowed.

  “What is it?” Henry asked.

  “I think it’s warmer. I can’t really feel anything else.”

  “What’s in the drawer?”

  They looked together. There was an old and tattered cloth, some nearly-dust mouse droppings, small bones next to gray shards of what must have been skin, two dead beetles, and a fly.

  “Well, that’s a little boring,” she said. “What do we do now?”

  “Go to sleep?” Henry asked.

  “No. We have to try the compass locks.” She moved to the edge of the bed and spun one of the knobs before looking around for the journal. She picked up the one on the blanket and set it back down. “Did you put the other one somewhere?”

  “No. You had it.”

  “I know I had it, but did you take it?”

  Henry snorted. “Why would I take it?”

  “I don’t know. Did you?”

  “No.”

  On the floor below them, something thumped. Both children froze.

  “Oh no,” Henrietta whispered.

  “What is it?”

  “I think Dad’s awake.”

  “Maybe he’s just going to the bathroom,” Henry said.

  Henrietta looked at him and smiled nervously. “But I left Grandfather’s room open.”

  “What?”

  “And the light on.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was excited about the journal. I ran right up here.”

  “Well, hurry up and go turn the light off and shut the door,” Henry said. “And if your dad catches you, then tell the truth.”

  Henrietta jumped up and ran out of the room on her toes. Henry listened to her feet on the stairs, waiting for Frank’s voice. There was more thumping, and Blake ran out of the room. Henry stood
up and looked at the compass knobs. He fiddled with them, twisting each and trying to watch all of the doors at once to see if anything happened.

  Nothing. The doors were still. The floor below him was still. No creaks, no voices, no sounds. No Henrietta. Henry waited. He waited until he knew it had been too long and then, suddenly, he worried.

  He walked down the stairs as softly as he could. At the bottom, he listened but didn’t hear anything, so he stepped onto the landing. Blake was gone, Grandfather’s door was open, and the light was still on. Henry walked slowly across the landing, past the girls’ room and Aunt Dotty and Uncle Frank’s room and then the bathroom. He stepped over the mess in the floor and looked into Grandfather’s room.

  The door was only halfway open, so he could see just a slice of the space. He moved closer and peered around the door, an inch at a time. No one. Some of the books were on the floor. That could account for the thumping. And then, as he stepped all the way into the room, he saw something that he understood far better than he wished.

  A cupboard door, beneath and beside Grandfather’s bookshelf, was open. The opening was small, but big enough for a person to fit through. The light from the room didn’t seem to penetrate it. On the floor outside the door was a shoe and half a pair of glasses. They weren’t Henrietta’s.

  Henry knew what kind of cupboard this must be, and he suddenly understood how someone had been able to live in the house unseen. He knew what he should do. He should go wake up Uncle Frank, hand over the journals and the keys, tell him everything, and apologize.

  Instead, he dropped onto his hands and knees, took a deep breath, and crawled into the cupboard.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Henry’s eyes were shut, and he expected, once he opened them, to find himself in another place. Instead, he ran into the back of the cupboard. He squirmed his way out and sat on the floor, confused and rubbing his head.

  It was the middle of the night, he was in Grandfather’s bedroom, and Henrietta was missing. Henry examined the shoe and the broken gold-rimmed glasses. He was not the Henry who would have sat there two weeks ago. He didn’t once tell himself that Henrietta was probably down in the kitchen or in the bathroom. He knew she had gone through the cupboard, and he thought that someone else, someone he may have seen, had gone with her. Or taken her.

  Henry was worried, and his heart was trying to fly in his chest. He was worrying that he wouldn’t figure out how to follow Henrietta through the cupboard before she got hurt, and that he might not be able to get her back before her parents woke up.

  He got onto his hands and knees and felt his way back into the cupboard. There was nothing inside but a funny smell and the solid back. Henry climbed out and began pulling at various books on the shelves around the cupboard, hoping one would trigger a mechanism and open the back. None of them did. He pushed on every bit of wood that looked secretive, and still nothing happened.

  Henry walked to the door. He didn’t want to leave the room, but he needed to find the journal Henrietta had been reading. He went as quietly as he could to his room. Once there, he moved the old journal and rifled through his blanket, shoved aside his posters, and then dropped to the floor to look under his bed. There it was—open, face down, some of the pages bending. He pulled the journal out without looking at it and hurried back downstairs. He sat on the floor beside the cupboard and looked at the first page. His eyes struggled with the handwriting but began to adjust after several lines. He skimmed over it as quickly as he could.

  To Frank and Dorothy,

  I have written all that I know about the cupboards in this book. In my other journal, there are some helpful things that I will not repeat here for the sake of time, as I would prefer to have finished this before I am dead, though I may not. The doctors would bury me now, and my body seems to agree, as it already turns to dust. Here also, I intend to be as honest as I have always been deceptive, though honesty will no doubt damage your memory of me.

  The cupboards were first assembled by my father, and the process was the work of his life. I have, after struggling through his papers, assembled the stories behind each of his acquisitions and his choice of this place for his house. The cupboards’ functions vary a great deal, shifting because of grains, origins, etc. Some allow the passage of light, some of sound, and some remain as dark and silent as tombs.

  Of course, the house was designed after his studies and was meant, for many reasons, to culminate in the cupboards. There are things he did not discover until much later and things he would have changed, like the location of the primary entrance (he could never get one to work on the same wall as the cupboards, or even the same floor), but he never had the energy to attempt a second house design. I have restructured and rebuilt the house as much as I was able and opened the last of the cupboards.

  I will attempt to explain how things function as they are. I do this not because I would recommend that you exploit your access to these places, but because my father ran great risks and was damaged in many ways for the entirety of his life as a result of his experiments, studies, and exploration. He left me to undergo the same process, making the same discoveries, though I was able to avoid much through a careful reading of his notes. While I would not recommend you attempt any exploration, neither can I tell you not to without hypocrisy, something you may be surprised to hear, as hypocrisy was at times natural to me. I understand that the cupboards cannot remain hidden forever and can hardly expect that you have forgotten them, as memories such as the ones you formed as children are not easily struck from the mind’s page. You will rediscover the cupboards, and you will find it necessary to explore them. This is written so that you may avoid harm, such as is possible in such undertakings, but particularly the mistakes made by my father and myself.

  Henry turned the page, glanced at it, and then, impatient, flipped to the middle somewhere and began reading again.

  I cannot explain it, and though he was first and foremost a mathematician, he was never able to come up with a stable formula for the passage of time in a cupboard relative to the passage of time here. His journals are littered with attempts. He found that time passed differently through each of them, at varying and apparently inconsistent rates. This by itself accounts for much of my father’s sickness, or so he thought. For myself, as I so early chose only one to pass through, I did not experience nearly the temporal upheaval that he did. And, of course, after my first experience, I never traveled without the rope, which I have always left coiled beneath the bed. It is not necessary for one with magic, but it was woven “elsewhere” and aids the mind of the weaker traveler.

  Henry stood up and walked over to the bed. Beneath it was a pile of brown rope with one end tied to the bed leg. He sat on the edge of the bed, flipped toward the back of the book, and found the page Henrietta had shown him—a list of the cupboards, each one next to a compass-lock combination. He flipped back a couple of pages.

  Of course, many combinations lead nowhere. They might, if additional cupboards were found and aligned, but they do not now. When the locks are set to any of these empty combinations, the back of the main cupboard will be as solid as any other. Nothing could pass through it, because it terminates in our own space. The benefit of this, as I quickly learned, was that no thing could pass through from the other direction, either. I could go nowhere, but I also would not wake to find myself sharing a room with a noble-hog, as happened to me twice. Before I set the compass locks permanently to what would become my second place, I would never sleep unless the locks were set to an empty combination and the back of my cupboard was solid. This, of course, does not prevent things from entering the cupboards in the attic. But they would need to be very small and also strong enough to force the door open from the inside (the most startling variation on this was the boy Henry).

  Henry coughed and read the line again. There he was, a simple parenthetical, an offhand comment. His eyes flew back over the words and hurried on, hoping for some kind of elaboration.


  Once I had permanently set the combination with plaster, I would still frequently wedge the door shut when I was not using it. I have copied all the combinations for the cupboards in the next pages. When one of their combinations has been set, you will find no back to my cupboard. The back is still there, as is the wall that supports it, but the cupboard meets with another place before it meets with the wall.

  Henry sat very still. There were no answers to the questions flooding his mind, but he had found the mechanism of the cupboards. He did not know how it worked or why, but he believed that it would.

  It was very late. He wanted to read both journals from front to back to front. He wanted to know exactly who he was and where he came from. But Henrietta had disappeared. He had no time.

  Henry knew what he had to do next. He was going to go upstairs and guess which cupboard Henrietta had gone through. Then he was going to crawl through a small door in his dead grandfather’s bedroom. He might be crawling home and not know it. He might crawl into some place worse than Endor.

  He felt strange leaving his grandfather’s room. He didn’t shut the door, because Henrietta still had the key. He didn’t turn the light off, because he didn’t want to come back to a dark room. When he reached the attic, he sat down on his bed and stared at the compass locks. If he understood what the journal had been saying, the combination that he set would determine which cupboard, or place, he would go to when he crawled through the larger cupboard downstairs. Henrietta had turned a knob before they heard the thumping, so the combination must have let something through. Henrietta had gone downstairs to turn the light off and shut the door to Grandfather’s room. Whatever it was must have taken her back through the cupboard.

  “Or she followed it,” he muttered out loud.

  And then Henry had turned the knobs again while he was waiting, after she’d gone downstairs. That’s why the cupboard was closed.

  Henry’s chin crept toward his chest. He felt his jaw tense. His eyes watered a bit and then shut completely as he yawned, a long, sprawling yawn. He wasn’t tired. He certainly wasn’t bored. He was nervous, more nervous than he had ever been. He yawned again. He took slow, deep breaths, but they weren’t enough. His body kept yawning, his hands were cold, and his spine prickled. At least he wasn’t panicking or throwing up. Yet.