The hearse was already gone when Maren Calloway turned onto the gravel drive.
She killed the engine of her rental and sat for a moment, hands resting on the steering wheel, listening to the tick and pop of the cooling hood. The late October wind carried the smell of turned earth and woodsmoke, and somewhere down the valley a dog barked twice and fell silent. The farmhouse stood on the rise ahead, its white paint flaking like old birch bark, the porch swing Eleanor had refused to replace still hanging crooked on its chains. The kitchen window faced east, toward the mountains. Toward the briar pine.
The place looked the way she remembered. That was the trouble with Hollow Pines. Nothing ever changed unless you gave it permission to.
Maren stepped out of the car, boots crunching on the drive. Her right heel found a soft place and she glanced down, half-expecting mud. Instead she saw something else. Tire tracks in the soft earth, fresh enough that the edges still held their shape. A second vehicle had come and gone since the last proper rain, and from the depth of the ruts, something heavier than her sedan. A truck, maybe. Or a small tractor.
She walked to the front steps, noted the screen door propped open with a chunk of firewood, and climbed onto the porch. The swing gave its long, familiar groan. Inside, the house breathed its particular breath of old paper, dried herbs, and the ghost of someone's perfume, lavender water, perhaps, or the rose talc her grandmother had kept in a tin on the dresser. The perfume belonged to a living woman. Maren had bought it for her last spring, the week before the stroke that was not, as it turned out, the end of anything except the version of Eleanor Vance who had been able to speak.
The week before the stroke that was not, as it turned out, the end of anything except the version of Eleanor Vance who had been able to speak.
"I expected you yesterday," her grandmother had written, on a pad of lined paper, in letters that leaned hard to the right as though leaning into a wind. "The reverend said you'd come. I told him I doubted it."
Maren had read the note on the plane, then again in the rental car, then a third time in the motel off the interstate where she'd spent the night not sleeping. She had carried it folded in her back pocket like a talisman, or a summons, and had not yet decided which.
The parlor was dim. Maren found the switch and turned on the single lamp beside the settee, a yellowed shade over a bulb too dim to drive the shadows from the corners. On the side table lay a folded piece of paper, weighted down by a river stone the size of a man's fist. She recognized the stone. She and her grandmother had walked the riverbed together in another century, picking through the wet gravel for the ones with the cleanest rings. This one had a chip on one side, near where the thumb would rest. The chip was hers. She had dropped it on the porch when she was nine, and her grandmother had laughed and said, "There now. It's got a story. That's better than perfect."
She picked it up. The paper beneath it was a note in Eleanor's handwriting, dated four days ago.
"Burial is arranged. Reverend Dodd knows what to do. Don't let them put salt in my mouth. I am not food. I am not a debt. Maren, if you read this before you arrive, do not delay. If you read it after, know that I am sorry for every kindness I failed to name while I had the use of my tongue."
Maren read it twice. Then she folded the note, slid it into her coat pocket beside the other, and went to find the telephone.
The line was dead. Not busy. Not ringing off. Dead, the way a line goes dead when someone has taken the pole hook off its rest and laid it in a drawer.
She walked through the house room by room, half expecting to find her grandmother in the kitchen, or in the chair by the parlor window, or in the back bedroom where the quilts were stacked three deep on the linen press. The bed in that room was made with the corners turned down in the hospital fashion, and a single clean nightgown lay folded on the pillow. The room smelled of soap and something faintly medicinal, the smell of a body recently washed by someone who had known how.
In the kitchen she found the tin of rose talc on the dresser. On the kitchen table, a plate with three slices of bread and a knife. The bread was dry at the edges. She counted the slices twice, then a third time. Three. Her grandmother had eaten a piece the day she died. She had laid out two more, perhaps for the people she expected to find when she woke, and she had not woken.
The clock on the wall said four-seventeen. The clock on the stove said four-seventeen. The clock on her phone said eleven-forty-two in the morning.
"Maren."
The voice came from the porch. She knew it before she turned. Theo Marsh stood at the screen door with his hat in his hand, the brim folded between his fingers the way he had always done when he came to her house as a boy, asking if she could come out and play. He had filled out since then, and the lines around his eyes had set in early, and his hair had gone the color of old pennies at the temples. But his voice was the same. A little hoarse. A little too careful with each word, the way a man gets when he has been standing in cold air for a while.
She opened the door. He did not step in.
"You're late," he said. "I'm sorry. That isn't fair. You're exactly when you are. I'm glad you came."
"Did you know?" she asked. "About the funeral. The date. Did someone call you?"
He looked at her a long moment, the hat turning in his hands. "Reverend Dodd called me yesterday morning. Said there was to be a service at ten this morning. I came up to help carry the pall. There wasn't much pall to carry. She'd asked to be buried in a shroud her mother had made. Cotton, undyed. Just a length of it, folded over her, and a string at the wrists. Reverend Dodd read from the Book. Mr. Harlow from the store put up the marker, plain fieldstone, no name yet. We sang 'Shall We Gather at the River.' Your grandmother would have hated it. She always said that hymn made the dead sound like they were being herded."
Maren listened. She had not moved from the doorway. Behind her, the kitchen clock ticked with its small wooden tongue. Outside, the wind had picked up, and the briar pine at the edge of the clearing leaned into it, its lower branches dragging the ground in a long slow sweep.
"Who knew?" she said. "Who knew she was going to die?"
Theo stopped turning the hat. He looked past her, into the dim of the parlor, and then back.
"She did," he said. "She told me herself, two weeks ago. I went up to bring her the eggs and the honey from my mother's hives, and she was sitting on the porch in her coat, though it was warm, with that pad of hers. She wrote down the day and the hour, and she told me to tell the reverend. She said she had been told by something she trusted more than her own pulse, and that she wanted her own arrangements and not the county's. She asked me to be the one to call you, when it was over. I said I would. I should have called sooner. I am sorry."
"You told no one else?"
"I told Reverend Dodd. He asked me not to tell the town. He said the town would want to know, and knowing would make it worse. He said there were things being kept, and that your grandmother had agreed to keep them, and that when she went the keeping would have to be shared out. He asked me to be there when the box went into the ground. I was."
Maren stepped onto the porch beside him. The swing touched her elbow. She looked past his shoulder toward the graveyard at the back of the property, a small fenced square behind the woodshed where the Vances had been putting their dead since before the Civil War. From this angle she could see the marker, plain and pale, the only fresh stone in the plot.
"I want to see it," she said.
"I'll walk with you," Theo said.
They walked without speaking. The path between the house and the graveyard was lined with flagstones Eleanor had set herself, decades ago, prying each one up from the riverbed and hauling it up the hill in a wheelbarrow. The stones were sunk deep now, and moss had crept into the cracks. Maren's boots slipped once, and Theo's hand came up under her elbow and then withdrew, polite, the way he had always been when they were young, even when she had been the one falling.
The grave was at the back of the plot, in the shade of the briar pine. The soil over it was tamped neat, and a single bunch of dried yarrow lay across the stone, tied with a bit of red thread. Maren knelt and touched the earth. It was cool, but not cold. It smelled of iron, and underneath that, of something green and bitter, the smell of roots breaking up through clay.
"She wasn't a bit afraid," Theo said, from behind her. "I want you to know that. When I came up that morning, she was sitting in the chair by the window with the pad on her knee. She had written everything down. The shroud. The string. The stone without a name. The hymn she did not want. She had crossed out 'Shall We Gather at the River' and written 'Nothing But the Blood' and then crossed that out too and left it blank. She said to let the silence do it. She said silence was the only hymn that did not try to make the dead behave."
Maren stayed on her knees. The briar pine shifted above her with a long, slow sound, like the deep inhale of something sleeping.
"Did she say anything else?"
"She wrote one more thing. She said, 'Tell Maren to look under the third stone from the left at the back of the woodshed. She will know which one. Tell her not to come alone, and not at night. And tell her I am sorry for the way the silence kept.'"
The wind picked up. A cone fell from the pine and struck the new earth with a soft thud.
"I haven't looked," Theo said. "I didn't feel it was mine to find. I thought maybe it was for you, or maybe for the reverend, or maybe for nobody. I am not brave the way you are, Maren. I never have been. I come up the hill and I do the thing in front of me, and I try not to think past it."
Maren stood. She brushed the dirt from her knees and looked at him for the first time since she had come out onto the porch. He was thinner than she remembered. The lines at his eyes had deepened, and there was a small scar at the corner of his mouth she had never seen before.
"How is your mother?" she said.
He looked away.
"Same," he said. "She sits in her chair. She knows my name. She does not always know my face. She talks in her sleep about a door in the floor of the kitchen that was never there, and she asks it, in her sleep, not to open until she has had time to put on her shoes."
The briar pine creaked again. Maren turned and looked up at it, into the dark mass of its lower limbs, into the place where the branches thinned and the sky showed through like dirty water.
"The third stone from the left," she said. "We will look this afternoon. When the light is on the yard and not in it."
"All right," Theo said. "I'll come back at three."
"No," she said. "Stay. Make a pot of coffee if the gas is on. Boil the kettle if it isn't. I want a witness, Theo. I have had too many things happen in this town that no one will speak of later, and I am tired of being the only one who remembers them."
He nodded. He put his hat back on. He went up the steps and into the house without another word, and she heard him strike a match and then the small blue roar of the burner catching.
Maren knelt again beside the grave. She did not pray. She put her palm flat on the earth, where her grandmother's chest had been, and she stayed there until the warmth of her own hand had soaked into the ground and the ground had given back nothing.
She stood. She brushed her knees again. She walked the long way around the plot, reading the other stones, names she had known and names she had not, dates that ran back to the early eighteen hundreds. The oldest stone was a small slate with a lamb carved on its face and the name JAMES VANCE, AGED 3. Maren remembered her grandmother telling her about the child. He had gone out one October morning to gather pine cones for the fire and had not come back. They had found his cap in the branches of a briar pine at the edge of the clearing. There had been no body. There had never been a body. The family had put up the stone anyway, and Eleanor's mother had told her that the stone was a kind of bookkeeping, a way of keeping a place for him in the record of the family in case he ever needed to come home.
The same briar pine had grown over the old marker, the way briar pines do, slow and patient, taking their time about the swallowing.
Maren turned her back on the grave. The wind had dropped, and the air had the still, expectant taste that comes before the first true snow. Above the tree line, a single crow crossed the sky without sound, and on the porch Theo had set out two enamel mugs and was pouring coffee from a pot she had not known still worked.
She went up the steps.
"Taste this before you drink it," she said, and he held out the mug, and she tasted, and it was good, strong and a little burnt at the bottom, the way coffee tastes when it has been boiled rather than perked.
"Your grandmother's pot," he said. "I found it in the back of the cupboard. The gas is on. I paid the bill last week when I came up to check on her. She asked me to. She had the money in an envelope on the table."
Maren sat in the swing. It creaked once under her, and then settled, and then creaked again with the small motion of her breathing.
"She knew," Maren said. "She knew the day. She knew the hour. She had time to wash herself and put on the gown and lie down on the bed and fold her hands. She had time to write notes. She had time to tie a bunch of yarrow and lay it on the stone she knew would mark her. She had time to arrange every piece of it except one."
"The third stone from the left at the back of the woodshed," Theo said.
"That," Maren said. "And the fact that the third stone is a stone at all. There is no third stone at the back of the woodshed. I would have known. I helped her lay that floor when I was sixteen. There were exactly seven stones, and they were all flush with the earth, and they were all in a row from left to right as you stand facing the back wall. There were no more than seven."
Theo sat down beside her. The swing took his weight and the two of them rocked for a moment in a slow, uneven arc.
"Then she meant for you to find something that isn't there yet," Theo said. "Or she meant for you to understand what isn't there yet. Or she meant for the not-being-there to be the message."
Maren looked at him. He did not flinch. He met her gaze the way a man meets a thing he has already decided not to turn from.
"Tell me about the door in the floor of your mother's kitchen," Maren said.
He was quiet a long time. The crow passed overhead again, and this time it gave one rough call, as though clearing its throat.
"She has been talking about it for years," he said. "Ever since your grandmother first went into the woods and didn't come back for three days. We were children. You remember. You were there. You were the one who found her at the old mill, sitting in the dry part of the race, holding a piece of slate against her chest like a baby. She would not say what she had seen. Your mother would not let us ask. After that, my mother began to dream of the door. She said it was made of black wood, with a brass plate at the top, and a slot in the plate like a mail slot, and a keyhole at the bottom, and that the wood breathed. She said in the dream she could put her ear to it and hear something on the other side that was almost like a voice. She said in the dream she was always putting on her shoes."
"And now she asks it not to open," Maren said.
"And now she asks it not to open," Theo said. "And the asking has gotten louder. And the part about the shoes has gotten longer. And I do not know what to do with any of it, and so I come up the hill and I do the thing in front of me, and I try not to think past it."
The coffee cooled in their hands. The briar pine leaned into the wind. The grave behind the woodshed waited under its small, pale stone, and the silence Eleanor had trusted was already gathering at the edges of the afternoon, patient and precise, ready to do its work.
The reading of the will took place on a Tuesday in the back room of Hadlock and Sons, where the wallpaper had yellowed at the edges and the radiator clanged every few minutes like a thing trying to be heard. Maren sat in a wooden chair that had been polished to the color of weak tea, her hands folded in her lap because she did not trust them to do anything useful. Across the table, Mr. Hadlock adjusted his spectacles and cleared his throat with the particular deliberateness of a man who enjoyed procedure. Behind him, on a shelf, a row of green leather volumes stood like tombstones for other people's endings.
Your mother left clear instructions, he told her. Very clear. She had her faculties about her almost to the last. Almost. He said the word twice, as though weighing it, and then he moved on.
The will itself was a short document. There was the house, of which Maren already held the deed. There was a tract of land up behind the ridge, to be held in trust until the question of the survey was settled, with a note attached in her mother's handwriting that read, Do not sell this land to anyone who asks about the well. There was a sum of money, modest and tidy, to be used for her keep and then for the cost of a stone, and then there was the room above the garage.
The room above the garage.
Mr. Hadlock paused and took a breath. He looked at her over the rims of his spectacles in that particular way country lawyers have, the way that says they know more than they are saying and they are not yet sure whether they like it. Maren returned his gaze and waited.
The garage sits at the back of the property, he said. Detached. The door is on the north side, as I expect you remember. There is a stair that runs up the inside of the west wall. The room is at the top of that stair. It is locked. Your mother specified that it was to be locked, and that the lock was not to be changed, and that the key was to be given to you with the rest. She specified that no one was to enter before you, and that no one was to be present when you did. He put a hand on a second envelope and did not open it. There are keys in this envelope, he said. There are three. Your mother described them in a separate letter, which I have read and which I will hand to you sealed. She asked me to read it aloud if she was not of sound mind at the time of her death, and I am afraid I must tell you that on the question of her soundness her physician and I were not in agreement, and so I will hand the letter to you unread, as she instructed, and I will not answer any questions about its contents.
Maren felt the room tilt, very slightly, the way a floor tilts on a train when it takes a curve too fast. She did not reach for the envelope. She watched her own hand lie still in her lap and thought, with a distant precision, that she had known this was coming. She had known for years. She had not known what shape it would take, but she had known it would take one.
She thought of the door in Theo's mother's dreams. Black wood, brass plate, slot like a mail slot, keyhole at the bottom, wood that breathed. She thought of her mother at the kitchen table with the cup of milk that always went cold. She thought of the way her mother had stopped asking questions and started answering them, in that last year, and how the answers had come too quickly, as though they had been prepared in advance.
She thought of a girl in a gingham dress on the edge of a flat stone, and she thought of the wind in the briar pine, and she thought of her mother's face when she had come back from the reading of her own mother's will, decades ago, and how her mother had stood in the kitchen with her hands flat on the table and her eyes very wide, and had said, only once, in a voice Maren had never heard her use before or after, She knew. She knew what I would find there.
Mr. Hadlock was watching her. She realized she had been silent for some time.
Is there anything else, she said.
There is one other matter, he said. He took a breath, and she could see him decide, in that breath, that he would not include the note about soundness in the record. Your mother left instructions that the room is to be opened within seven days of her death, and that if you are unable or unwilling to open it within that window, the key is to be returned to me and the contents of the room are to be considered, in her words, forfeit to the house. He paused. In her words, he said again. Forfeit to the house.
Maren looked at him.
That is an unusual phrase, she said.
It is, he said. He did not look away. Your mother was an unusual woman.
He pushed the envelope across the table. The envelope was thick manila, soft at the corners from being handled. She could feel the weight of the keys through the paper, three small hard shapes that pressed against her palm like teeth. Beside them, sealed with a wafer of brown wax, lay the letter.
She did not open the letter in front of him. She put it into her coat pocket and felt it settle against her ribs, warm from her hand, warm from his hand, warm from her mother's hand when it had been sealed. She stood. Mr. Hadlock stood. They shook hands across the table, and his palm was dry and cool and very firm.
When she reached the door of the back room he said her name. She turned.
The lock on the door of the room above the garage, he said, is not like any other lock on the property. I do not know who fitted it. I have asked. I have not been able to find out. He took off his spectacles and cleaned them on the tail of his coat. Your mother asked me, when she first came to me about this matter, to describe the keyhole to her, and I went up and looked at it, and I have to tell you that I am not certain I could describe it now. It is, he said, the kind of lock that makes you forget you have looked at it. That is what she asked me to report, and that is what I am reporting.
He put his spectacles back on. She watched his face for some sign that he was performing for her, that this was a piece of country theater meant to soften a blow, and she found nothing. She found only the face of a man who had been asked, years ago, to look at a lock and had looked at it and had not been able to remember it since, and who was telling her this because he had promised her mother he would.
She thanked him. She walked out into the street. The sun was low and the light came sideways through the sycamores and laid long bars across the sidewalk and she stood in one of them and felt the envelope against her ribs and thought, I am being given a room I do not remember entering, and a key I do not remember receiving, and a lock I will not be able to describe after I have seen it, and I am being asked to open it within seven days or lose the right to whatever is inside to the house itself.
The briar pine waited on the hill above the town, and the wind moved in it, and the town moved below her, and somewhere in the town Theo's mother lay in her bed with her hands over her ears, and somewhere in the woods the slate sat where the slate had always sat, and somewhere in the room above the garage a lock sat in a door and pretended, by the particular quality of its pretending, to be ordinary.
Maren stood for a long time in the bar of light. Then she turned and began to walk home, and the envelope pressed against her ribs with every step, and the keys inside it clicked faintly, like the bones of a small animal.
The mail had not, in any visible sense, arrived. Maren had watched for the postman since nine, and he had come and gone with the usual stack of catalogs and a folded bill from the electric company, and he had not brought her anything that looked like a key. She had sat at the kitchen window with her mother's tea growing cold beside her, and the afternoon had moved across the floor in slow squares of sun, and she had thought, with a kind of clinical patience, that she was perhaps losing her mind in the same quiet way her mother was losing hers. Not all at once. In increments.
The kettle ticked as it cooled. Her mother, in the next room, had begun to hum.
It was not a tune Maren recognized. It had the wandering, limping quality of something dredged up from very deep water, a melody that surfaced only in pieces, like the back of a whale. Her mother's voice, once so clear it could carry across a hillside, had thinned to a husk in the last year, but the humming came from somewhere lower than the throat, somewhere in the chest, and it was surprisingly full. Maren had heard her mother hum before, of course, in the kitchen, over the stove, with a wooden spoon in her hand and a far-off look in her eye, and she had always assumed it was the old Baptist hymns her own mother used to sing. But this was no hymn. This was something older, something with no words, and it went on and on with a patience that felt almost architectural, as if her mother were building something in the air with the notes.
Maren went still in her chair. She listened.
The humming stopped.
Then, from somewhere beneath her, from the registers that ran along the baseboard of the kitchen wall, came a sound so faint that at first she took it for the pipes settling. It was not the pipes settling. It was a voice, and it was humming the same melody, but with a different mouth, with a different shape of lip and tongue, and the notes it chose were slightly lower, and it held them longer, and it slid between them in a way that her mother had never been able to do.
Maren's hands went flat on the table.
The voice cleared its throat, gently, the way a woman clears her throat when she is about to speak to a child, and it said, in a register that was almost a whisper but not quite, "Little moon, little moon, where are you hiding."
The kitchen was very still. The kettle had finished its ticking. The square of sun on the floor had moved six inches to the left and was now touching the toe of Maren's boot, and she could feel the warmth of it through the leather, and she could feel her own heart beating in her wrists, and she could hear, very distinctly, the heating vent breathing against the baseboard.
"Little moon," the voice said again, and now it was almost fond, almost amused, the way an old woman is amused when she has hidden something and is pretending to forget where. "Little moon, come out, come out."
No one in the living town of Hollow Creek had called Maren that since she was six. It had been her grandmother's name for her, a private thing, a kitchen-and-bedroom thing, never spoken in front of company, because her grandmother had been a private woman, and because the name had been her grandmother's invention, a small piece of folk magic meant, her grandmother had said, to keep her safe. The town knew her as Maren. The school records knew her as Maren. Even her mother, who had loved the nickname once, had stopped using it after her mother died, because the using of it would have been a kind of haunting, and her mother had been a practical woman who did not believe in haunting.
Maren stood up. The chair scraped the floor. She walked, with great care, to the register, and knelt beside it, and put her face close to the slats.
The metal was warm. The air that moved through it carried the smell of dust and old paint and, faintly, faintly, the smell of a woman she had loved very much and had not smelled in twenty years, a smell of talcum and yard-grown lavender and the particular sweetness of an unwashed wool shawl that had been aired by a woodstove.
"Grandmother," Maren said, into the vent.
The humming did not stop. If anything, it grew a fraction more present, as if the voice on the other side had leaned closer.
"Little moon," the voice said, and now there was a shape to it that was almost a smile, almost a hand reaching out. "I have been waiting so long. I have been waiting in the walls."
Maren's breath caught. She pressed her hand flat against the register, and the metal was so warm it almost burned, and she could feel, through it, the faintest vibration of the voice, as if the voice were a moth beating its wings against the other side of the sheet.
"Grandmother, where are you."
"I am where I have always been, little one. I am in the house. I am in the linden. I am in the room above the garage."
Maren closed her eyes. She had known, somewhere in the part of her that knows things before the rest of her catches up, that the room above the garage had not been empty. She had known it the moment she had seen the envelope in the realtor's window. She had known it the way a child knows there is a monster in the closet, by the particular quality of the silence coming from inside.
"Grandmother, why did you give me the key."
"Because I could not give it to your mother, little moon. Your mother was always too brave to be careful. She would have opened the door on the first night and walked in without looking, and the house would have eaten her, and I would have lost her too."
"And you want me to be careful."
"I want you to be you. I have always wanted you to be you."
The humming swelled, then softened, then swelled again, and Maren could feel, in the rhythm of it, the shape of her grandmother's breathing, and she could remember, with a suddenness that made her eyes sting, the exact weight of her grandmother's hand on the back of her neck when she was small and had done something brave and foolish and was being scolded for it.
"Grandmother, what is in the room."
The voice was quiet for so long that Maren thought it had gone. Then it said, very softly, "A door."
"A door to what."
"To me, little moon. To me, and to the thing that took me, and to the town, and to the root of the linden, and to the lock that will not remember itself."
Maren's hands were shaking. She sat back on her heels and looked at the register as if it were a face.
"Grandmother, the realtor said the room was empty."
"The realtor was wrong. The realtor is always wrong. The realtor looks at a room and sees the four walls and the floor and the ceiling, and he writes down that it is empty, because he is a man who counts, and there are no things to count."
"But you are in there."
"I am not in the room, little moon. The room is in me."
The voice began to fade. Maren could feel it withdrawing, like a tide going out, and the smell of talcum and lavender thinned to nothing, and the warmth of the register cooled to ordinary warmth, and the kitchen was just a kitchen again, with a square of sun on the floor and a chair pushed back from the table and her mother's humming, faint and bewildered, starting up again in the next room.
"Grandmother," Maren said, and her voice cracked. "Grandmother, wait."
The vent breathed once more, softly, and then was silent.
Maren knelt on the kitchen floor for a long time. The square of sun moved off her boot and went on across the linoleum and touched the leg of the table and climbed the table and went out. The room grew dim. Her mother's humming wandered and stopped and wandered again.
Then Maren got up, and went to the drawer by the stove, and took out the small flashlight she kept for power outages, and put it in her pocket, and took down her coat from the hook by the door, and walked out onto the porch, and stood in the cold evening air, and looked up the hill at the briar pine, and felt, against her ribs, the envelope with the keys, and thought, with a clarity that surprised her, that she was going to go up to the room above the garage tonight, and that she was going to open the door, and that whatever was inside, she was going to bring it home.
She went back inside. She kissed her mother on the forehead. Her mother did not open her eyes, but she reached out, blind and sure, and took Maren's wrist, and held it for a moment, and said, very softly, "Little moon."
Then she let go.
Maren walked out into the dark, and the hill rose before her, and the pine waited, and somewhere above, in a room she had never seen, a lock sat in a door and pretended, by the particular quality of its pretending, to be ordinary, and waited for her to come and try.