42a Clark Street
The building at 42a Clark Street stood on the corner where two old cobbled lanes met, and it was the strangest building Daniel Arden had ever seen.
It was five stories of pale, carved stone, rounded at the corner like the prow of a ship, with wrought-iron balconies curling around every floor and tall, shuttered windows looking out over the street. At the very top, above the rounded corner, rose a little tower crowned with a black slate dome, ringed with iron spikes and finials like the top of a chess piece. An ornate stone cartouche sat just beneath the dome, carved with leaves and scrolls, and in the center of it, where a name or a date should have been, there was nothing at all. Just a smooth, blank oval of stone.
The building was beautiful. Everyone said so. But nobody in the neighborhood liked to walk past it after dark.
Daniel’s Aunt Maggie had lived at the very top, in the apartment beneath the dome, for thirty-one years. And four months ago, on an ordinary Tuesday in March, she had vanished.
The police had found her door locked from the inside. Her reading glasses were on the kitchen table beside a cold cup of tea. Her cardigan was draped over the back of her chair. Her handbag, her coat, her shoes, her passport were all exactly where they should be. There was no sign of a struggle. No note. No witnesses. Margaret Lowell, sixty-eight years old, retired librarian, had simply stopped being anywhere at all.
After three months, the police stopped calling. After four, Daniel’s mother, Maggie’s younger sister, stopped being able to get out of bed. So Daniel, who was thirty-one and a schoolteacher and had never investigated anything more mysterious than a missing set of car keys, took a leave of absence from work, packed two suitcases, and moved into his aunt’s apartment at the top of 42a Clark Street.
The first thing he did was put a photograph on the mantelpiece.
He had found it in his mother’s things. It was old and faded, the colors gone soft and yellow. It showed two young women sitting together on the front steps of 42a Clark Street, squinting into the summer sun and laughing at something outside the frame. The younger one, with the braids, was his mother. The older one, perhaps twenty, with a cloud of dark curly hair and a yellow summer dress and a gap between her front teeth, was Maggie.
“I’m going to find out what happened to you,” he told her. “I promise.”
The second thing he did was meet the neighbors.
There were only five other residents of 42a Clark Street, and each of them was odder than the last. On the ground floor, behind a set of rusty iron shutters that were never opened, lived Mr. Abernathy, an ancient, stooped clockmaker who still repaired watches for a few old customers and wore a gold pocket watch on a chain across his waistcoat. On the second floor lived the Quint sisters, Edna and Olive, two tiny white-haired twins in matching cardigans who finished each other’s sentences and knitted ceaselessly. On the third lived Felix Hart, a gangling young cellist with ink-stained fingers who practiced the same mournful piece every night at midnight. And in a set of rooms half sunk below the street, at the bottom of a narrow flight of steps, lived the caretaker, Mrs. Okoro, a tall, silent woman with a ring of iron keys at her belt, who had kept the building for longer than anyone could remember.
All of them had known Maggie. All of them said kind things about her. And all of them, Daniel noticed, looked away when he asked what they thought had happened.
Only Mrs. Okoro said anything useful. She was mopping the black-and-white tiles of the front hall when he asked her, and she stopped, and leaned on her mop, and looked at him for a long time.
“The building is old,” she said finally. “Older than the street. Older than the city, some say. It keeps its own counsel.”She went back to mopping. “Go where you like, Mr. Arden. Look where you like. But don’t go below the cellar.”
“Below the cellar? What’s below the cellar?”
Mrs. Okoro did not answer.
It was a week later that Daniel first noticed the color.
He was coming home from the market in the early morning, and he stopped on the cobbles across the lane, the way everyone did, to look up at the building. And he saw that a patch of its pale stone, high up on the corner, just below the dome, was orange.
Not faded orange. Not rust. A deep, vivid, glowing orange, like paint just spilled, like a sunset trapped in stone. It covered the wall around his aunt’s windows.
“That’s been there since March,” said a passing old man with a dog, seeing him stare. “Since the lady at the top went off. Nobody painted it. It just… turned.” He shrugged and walked on, with his dog pulling him a little faster than usual.
Three nights later, Olive Quint disappeared.
Edna woke in the morning to find her sister’s bed empty and her knitting lying on the chair, the needles still stuck in it, a half-finished row of stitches waiting. The front door of the flat was locked from the inside. Olive’s slippers were sitting neatly beside the bed.
And when Daniel ran outside and looked up, the stone around the Quint sisters’ windows on the second floor had turned orange overnight.
The police came. The police went. They asked Edna whether her sister had seemed confused lately. Edna stopped knitting for the first time in anyone’s memory, and sat by the window, and did not speak.
Nine days later, the iron shutters on the ground floor were found standing open for the first time in forty years. Mr. Abernathy’s workshop was empty. His tools were laid out in neat rows on the bench. Every clock in the room had stopped at exactly 3:17.
The stone around the shutters was orange.
And on the twelfth night after that, at midnight, Daniel lay awake in his aunt’s bed under the black dome, listening for Felix Hart’s cello. It began, as it always did, mournful and slow, drifting up through the old floors.
Then, halfway through a long, low note, it stopped.
Not finished. Stopped. As if someone had lifted the bow from the strings and simply walked away.
Daniel was out of bed and down the stairs in his bare feet before the silence had even settled. Felix’s door was locked. He pounded on it. Nothing. He ran back up for the spare key his aunt had kept on a hook by the door for every apartment in the building, and let himself in.
The room was empty. A single lamp was burning. The cello leaned against a chair, its bow lying on the floor beside it. And the last note was still faintly humming in the strings, the way a bell keeps humming long after it has been struck.
Through the window, in the light of the streetlamp, Daniel could see the stone around the third-floor balcony slowly, silently turning orange.
Daniel did not sleep that night. He went back upstairs and tore his aunt’s apartment apart.
The police had searched it, of course. But the police had not known Margaret Lowell. Daniel had. And Aunt Maggie had been a librarian for forty years, which meant that she had never in her life let a mystery go unresearched, and she had never once written anything down where an ordinary person would look for it.
He found it at four in the morning, under a loose floorboard beneath her reading chair. A thick leather notebook, its pages crammed with her small, neat handwriting.
She had been studying the building for years. There were floor plans, copied from old city records. Newspaper clippings, brittle and yellow. Lists of names: residents of 42a Clark Street going back more than a century, with dates beside them. Some of the dates had little circles drawn around them. Daniel counted. There were eleven circles, scattered over a hundred and fifty years. Eleven residents who had simply vanished, from locked rooms, without a trace.
And beside each circle, in Maggie’s hand, the same word.
Orange.
The building, she had written, was built in 1871 by an architect named Augustin Clarque, whom nobody had ever been able to find anything else about. It was built on the site of something much older. A well, the old records said, though no one had drawn water from it in living memory. Clarque had laid the foundations of the building directly over it. And beneath the rounded corner, exactly beneath the dome, he had built a room.
Below the cellar, Maggie had written, and underlined it twice. Below the below.
The last page of the notebook was dated the night before she disappeared. The writing was shakier than the rest. Excited, or frightened. Daniel could not tell which.
It doesn’t take them, she had written. I was wrong about that. It calls them. The stone turns when someone has been called. Mine turned this morning. I think I can hear it now, at night, under everything. Like music from another room.
I have to see.
If anyone finds this — don’t be frightened for me.
Daniel sat on the floor of his aunt’s apartment with the notebook in his lap until the sun came up.
That morning, Edna Quint’s door was standing open. Her chair by the window was empty. And two balls of knitting wool, one in each of the sisters’ colors, lay side by side on the cushion, their loose ends tied neatly together.
There was no one left now at 42a Clark Street. No one but Daniel, and Mrs. Okoro.
He found her in the front hall, standing very still in the middle of the black-and-white tiles, with her ring of iron keys in her hand. She did not look surprised to see him. She looked as if she had been waiting.
“You’ve found her book,” she said.
It was not a question. Daniel nodded.
Mrs. Okoro looked down at the keys in her hand for a long moment. Then she worked one free from the ring. It was very old, black iron, heavy and plain, with a bow shaped like a blank oval.
“My mother kept this building before me,” she said quietly. “And her mother before her. We were told to keep the door shut. Never to open it. Never to let anyone go down.” She held the key out to him. “But your aunt went down anyway, without it. She found another way. And I have begun to think, Mr. Arden, that some doors are not meant to be kept shut forever. Only until the right person comes.”
She put the key into his hand. “Your stone turned this morning,” she said. “Did you know? All around the dome. It’s the brightest yet.”
The cellar was cold and damp, full of broken furniture and old coal dust. At the very back, beneath the corner of the building, behind a stack of rotting crates, there was a low iron door in the stone. It had no handle. Only a keyhole, and above it, carved into the stone, a smooth, blank oval, exactly like the one beneath the dome.
The key turned easily, as if it had been oiled yesterday.
Beyond the door, a narrow stone stair spiraled down into the dark.
Daniel went down it with a flashlight in one hand and his aunt’s notebook in the other, around and around, deeper and deeper, until the air grew warm instead of cold, and a faint glow began to rise from below, soft and orange, like the light of a fire seen through a closed door.
And he could hear it now, the way Maggie had. Something like music, very far away. Something like voices.
The stair ended in a round room. Daniel stood at the bottom of it and could not move.
It was the exact shape of the dome above, he realized, but upside down: a perfect bowl of carved stone, its walls covered in the same curling stone leaves and scrolls as the outside of the building. And in the very center of the floor stood an archway, tall and narrow and carved from a single piece of pale stone. At its peak, where a keystone should have been, there was a blank oval.
And inside the arch, filling it from edge to edge, there was light.
Orange light. Living, moving, swirling light, like paint stirred into water, like a sunset folded in on itself, slowly turning. It made no sound, and yet the music came from it. It gave no heat, and yet the whole room was warm.
And beyond it, through it, Daniel could see shapes.
They were blurred, as if seen through rippled glass. But they were there. Figures, moving. He could make out sunlight, and the edge of a street, and the pale curve of a building’s corner. A tall shape that might have been a young man holding something large and curved, like a cello. Two small shapes, side by side, that might have been sitting on a bench. He could not see their faces. He could not hear their voices. But they did not look frightened. They looked as if they were waiting for something.
Something glinted on the stone floor at his feet.
He bent and picked it up. It was a gold pocket watch, on a broken chain. Mr. Abernathy’s. Its hands were frozen at 3:17.
Daniel looked at the watch. He looked at the swirling light.
Then he drew back his arm and threw the watch, as hard as he could, straight into the archway.
The light swallowed it without a sound.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the watch came flying back out of the light, spinning end over end, and landed in the dust at Daniel’s feet with a soft clink.
He stared at it. Slowly, he bent and picked it up again.
It was warm. And it was ticking. The second hand was sweeping steadily around the face, and the hour and minute hands were moving, no longer stopped at 3:17, as if someone on the other side had wound it, and set it right, and tossed it back to him.
As if to say: it’s all right. Time works here, too.
When Daniel looked up again, one of the figures beyond the light had come closer.
She was standing just on the other side of the archway, so near that the swirling orange light barely blurred her at all. A young woman, perhaps twenty years old, in a yellow summer dress. She had a great cloud of dark, curling hair, and she was squinting a little, the way you squint into bright sunshine. And as she saw him, her face broke into a wide, delighted, laughing smile.
There was a gap between her front teeth.
Daniel knew that face. He had looked at it every night for a month, in a faded photograph on the mantelpiece upstairs. Two girls on the front steps of 42a Clark Street, laughing at something outside the frame.
“Aunt Maggie?” he whispered.
On the other side of the light, the young woman in the yellow dress lifted her hand. Not to wave goodbye. To beckon.
Daniel stood at the edge of the archway with the ticking watch in his hand and the warm orange light on his face. He thought about his mother, alone in her house, unable to get out of bed. He thought about the notebook. Don’t be frightened for me. He thought about the eleven circles, and the stone turning orange all around the dome, the brightest yet.
He looked back once, up the long dark spiral of the stair.
Then Daniel Arden tucked the watch into his pocket, took a deep breath, and stepped into the light.
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