The Door That Wont Open

The first thing Marcus noticed about the new house was that it had too many stairs. Their old house, the one in town, had one staircase and that was it. This one had three. There was the main one in the hall, big and wide with a wobbly bannister that his dad said he would fix and probably never would. There was a little narrow one at the back that the people who used to live here must have used to go down to the kitchen. And then there was the third one. The third one was at the end of the upstairs hallway, past Marcus's room and past his sister Daisy's room, and it went up. It was steep and it was dark and it had a door at the top of it. A small white door, smaller than a normal door, the kind of door you have to duck a bit to go through. "That's the attic," Mum said, when Marcus asked. "Don't worry about it. It's locked." But here is the thing. It wasn't locked. Marcus checked, that first night, when everyone was downstairs arguing about which box the kettle was in. He went up the steep dark stairs and he turned the handle and the handle turned all the way round, easy, like a handle does when a door isn't locked at all. The door just wouldn't open. It wasn't stuck either. Marcus knew stuck. Their old house had a back door that stuck and you had to lean on it and shove. This wasn't that. When he pushed this door it didn't wobble or strain or give even a little bit. It was like pushing the wall. It was like the door wasn't really a door, it was just a picture of a door painted onto something solid, except the handle turned, and a painted handle wouldn't turn, would it. Marcus stood at the top of the steep stairs for a while with his hand on the handle. The hallway light didn't really reach up here. It was cold too, colder than the rest of the house, and the house was already pretty cold because Dad hadn't worked out the heating. He told Daisy about it the next day and Daisy was nine and didn't care. She said maybe it was painted shut. Marcus said paint doesn't do that. She said maybe there was furniture against it on the other side. Marcus said then how would anyone have got the furniture in. Daisy didn't have an answer for that and she went back to her tablet. So Marcus tried to forget about it. He really did try. He had a whole new house to explore and a new school starting Monday that he was not looking forward to, and a door that wouldn't open was not the biggest thing on his mind. But then there was the third night. Marcus woke up at — he checked his phone — 3:14 in the morning. He didn't know why he woke up. He just was awake, all at once, the way you are when something has woken you but you don't know what. He lay there in the dark in his new room that still smelled like the old people's house and he listened. And he heard it. From the end of the hallway. From up the steep dark stairs. A sound like a door opening. Slow. A long quiet creak, the exact sound a door makes when it swings, the sound that door at the top of the attic stairs had absolutely refused to make for three whole days. And then, very soft, from up there in the dark above the house, Marcus heard footsteps. Not coming up. There was nobody up there to come up. Coming down.