What she did see—finally—was a door. Just a few yards up ahead and to her left.
She walked slowly toward it, the rotting smell getting worse and worse. It was coming from inside. The door was open just a crack, the darkness beyond complete. She knew, of course, that now would be a good time to turn around and leave, and not the way she’d come in, but out the front door, running.
But now Nora needed to know. Even more than she needed the scarf, she felt a burning need to see for herself what was on the other side of that door, inside that room from which wafted what could only be described as the smell of death. Her lips parted so she could breathe through her mouth instead of through her nose, and she considered pulling up 911 on her phone, just in case what she found inside warranted it, but then she reminded herself that, regardless of what she found in there, she was the one breaking and entering.
So instead of calling for help, she turned off her flashlight so as not to alert Ms. Martin (or anyone else who might be in there) of her presence and slowly pushed the door open, the darkness beyond, darker even than the dark of the hall, growing wider and wider.
The first thing Nora ever wished to steal was a silver hand mirror.
It happened when she was eleven and her sister Gretel was soon to turn sixteen, back in those early days when such an age gap might as well have been a generation. Among Nora’s very earliest memories, for example (bright flashes of image and feeling), was the memory of her big sister leaving home (leaving Nora behind) to ascend those dark, towering steps onto the loud, yellow bus that stormed her off to school.
It meant, too, that Nora’s fashion sense was based almost entirely on her big sister’s taste, and only partly since most of what she wore were Gretel’s hand-me-downs, dresses stretched into shapes she’d never fill, as Gretel was tall and broad while she was short and narrow. Nora genuinely saw her big sister as the height of coolness, the ultimate teenager, but before Gretel was all that (and beneath it all and most crucially), she had been the stabilizing, sheltering presence in her little sister’s life. Little Nora’s truest home. The one she trusted above all else as their parents tried and failed in every way to grow into adults.
So it was simply too much for Nora when, out of nowhere, came charging an enemy that no one, not even big, sturdy Gretel, could defeat. A rare blood disorder that would leave her, at best, seven months to live, and there was nothing anyone could do. No one in their economic position, anyway.
Though of course everyone did their best, as one does. Their mother gave interviews and took pictures of her dying daughter in a variety of locations in order to raise money for Gretel’s comfort up until the end. And it was while attending a lavish dinner party in her honor, hosted by an elderly, wealthy couple (their faces and names long since faded from Nora’s memory), that the sisters came across the hand mirror.
They were in a guest room that was being used as a closet, coats piled high on the bed. Gretel had just outlived the seven months forecast by her doctors but was visibly failing and needed help taking off her coat, so Nora was helping her, holding her up while pulling on a sleeve. It took every ounce of her strength, both physical and emotional.
“Hand me that mirror, would you?” Gretel said suddenly. Among the few parts of her still intact were her vision and her love for things that shone.
Nora was just so happy to hear her speak. Following her sister’s gaze, she retrieved the silver hand mirror from atop the ornate vanity at the far end of the room. The mirror was part of a set that included a silver tray and a silver hairbrush with bristles that looked like they came from an animal (though she wasn’t able to picture the animal with quills so translucent).
The hand mirror flashed coldly in the light, radiant and heavy in her hand, so heavy she had to help Gretel hold it up.
Look into its glass face.
See herself.
The way her skin draped sheer as silk over her skull. How its glow had dimmed, along with the color of her lips and cheeks, a dying of her light, except for in her eyes, which burned with a radiance difficult to behold. Like looking into the sun.
“I’ll get you one just like it,” Nora said, looking away. She was referring to the mirror. “For your birthday,” she added, thinking of her sister’s birthday the following week. She hadn’t gotten her a gift yet as Gretel hadn’t been projected to live that long.
“Don’t worry about it,” Gretel said now with a chuckle. “I don’t need it. And neither do you. People like us don’t have things like this, and we don’t need them.”
Nora disagreed. Not at the moment she didn’t, but a few days later, after Gretel died, among so many other thoughts and such pain, she found herself deeply regretting that she hadn’t just stolen the beautiful thing for her sister when she had the chance. Her sister who deserved it more than anyone.
It was a mistake Nora would never make again.
She kissed the saint whose name she had never known on the necklace her sister had been wearing the day she died, then stepped through the doorway into the dark room. Walking slowly, with one arm outstretched so she wouldn’t run into anything, she used her other hand to cover her nose and mouth. She couldn’t see anything at first but could almost taste the incense on her tongue, and whatever was rotting beneath it.
A wave of nausea rolled through her. She stopped short as her outstretched hand found a wall, and she began to walk alongside it, careful not to touch it with her red fingers. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that the room was narrow but long, so long she couldn’t see the end of it. Couldn’t see much at all aside from the wall to her right, the moonlit outline of a curtained window, and the dark, leafy shapes of more plants. Plants of all heights, from teacup-sized pots bearing a single flower to what looked like small trees.
She kept her eyes on the ground just ahead of her, not wanting to step on anything, so she didn’t see the cobweb she walked into. But she felt its soft netting clinging to her face and neck. Disgusted, she tried to peel it off, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t seem to get hold of the long, gauzy strands.
Or rather, they dissolved in her fingers, leaving behind a fine dust ... that crumbled into air. Reeling, she stareddown at her hands, seeing nothing at all now but still feeling that ethereal graininess between her palms that she gradually recognized as incense smoke. Twists of it she had pulled from the air; that was how thick it was here. She seemed now to have reached the smoke’s source, but when she looked around, all she saw were potted plants and the long room stretching into darkness. (And though it unnerved her how long it was, hadn’t she thought the same of the coal chute and the hall? And hadn’t both of those ended?)
Just as she was reminding herself of this, though, a soft breeze came blowing out from the darkness at the end of the room. Cool and fresh, it rippled the hairs around her face, sweeping away the smoke and the smell of the rotting thing beneath.
Her eyes watered at the crispness of it. This was not the night air her favorite luxury perfumes tried to capture (the vastness, the danger) but the real thing, and it made no sense here. Forgetting her bloody fingers, she reached out to the wall for support.
But it wasn’t there. And she fell onto her outstretched hand, then back onto her elbow.
Pain screamed up her arm, but she stifled the cry that threatened to escape her mouth, because greater than her pain now was her fear of waking Ms. Martin. Something was so very wrong here, Nora understood this, and suddenly she felt certain that the old woman was behind it. But how? What was she doing?
For the first time in her life, Nora decided she didn’t need to know the answers to these questions. She was finally ready to turn around and leave, empty handed. And what a relief that was, a comfort she clung to as she ground her teeth against the pain in her head and now in her elbow, as shehauled herself up to her feet and headed back in the direction from which she’d come.
She found herself turned around, though. Ever since stepping into this room, she had walked alongside the wall, but now there was no wall; no matter how she spun (and spun and spun), she couldn’t see it, nor could she feel it with her hands, searching the dark in wilder and wilder gestures until she had no choice but to admit (brokenly sobbing) that she was lost. She was lost inside the room.
