Chapter Two: The Ninth Door

She raised the discrepancy with the solicitor by telephone that evening, expecting an easy answer — an outbuilding miscounted as attached, a surveyor’s oversight from whichever year the plan had been drawn. He had none. The plan, he said, had been commissioned by Edwin Vellsted himself, only six years prior, specifically so that the estate would have an accurate record for exactly this situation. He read her the surveyor’s name and offered to have the man contacted directly if it would help.

It did not help, as it turned out, because the surveyor had died the previous winter, and his firm’s records — checked, at Margaret’s request, by a junior clerk who clearly thought the whole inquiry faintly absurd — showed a site visit, a set of measurements, and a floor plan showing six rooms on the first floor, filed and paid for without complaint. Nobody, in six years, had ever disputed the count. Nobody, apparently, had ever needed to walk every first-floor doorway with a tally sheet the way Margaret now had, twice, arriving at seven both times.

On the second morning she did something she would later describe, in the report she eventually wrote for reasons that had stopped being professional, as the only sensible thing left to try: she walked the first floor a third time, touching each door as she counted it, the way a child counts stairs. Six doors matched the plan precisely — position, width, the direction each one swung. The seventh did not appear on the plan at all, and stood, she now noticed for the first time, at the end of the corridor in a recess she had previously assumed was simply an alcove for the small table and vase that sat in front of it.

She moved the table. Behind it, unmistakably, was a door — narrower than the others, unpainted where they were all a uniform ivory, and cold to the touch in a way that made her draw her hand back before she had decided to. It had no handle on this side. It had, when she knelt to look, a keyhole, and through the keyhole, nothing that could be called a room in any ordinary sense: only a darkness that did not seem to end at a wall, though the house’s exterior proved, beyond any argument, that a wall had to be there.