There were always a few children, however, whose eyes lighted up when they were given costumes to wear and lines to say, and now the occasional theatricals in the basement of the Old Dragon’s House were performed mostly by children and teenagers playing all the parts, with local kids joining in, and an audience consisting of parents and friends. The lost children thrived in that company. Most of them did well in school; all of them went on to do well enough in life. For when you’ve been in good plays, you know how to work together with others and do your own part as well as you can and trust others to do theirs, and that’s all you need to know in order to do well enough in a job or a marriage.

  Harty had never married, but stayed on in the house with Herry and his wife, Cecilia. And when Cecilia died of breast cancer, Aunt Harty became surrogate mother to the four children and soon thought of them as her own. They were already teenagers before the transformation of the house to theatrical orphanage, but they loved what their home had become and didn’t mind that when they came home for a visit there was rarely any room for them in the bedrooms. They might have slept in the big old bed in the front of the attic, but Harty didn’t like to have people traipsing through her papa’s train room to get to it, and so they’d end up sleeping on couches here and there—and, eventually, as their own families grew, in the nearby Holiday Inn.

  But Michael was not one of the grandchildren—the grandchildren always had homes of their own in faraway cities and came to Mayfield only to visit. Michael did call Herry and Harty “Gramps” and “Granny,” but it wasn’t true. They were actually his great-uncle and great-aunt.

  Michael’s real grandmother was Portia Ringgold, Lolly’s daughter by her third husband, a soldier who died of the flu after World War I. Portia was killed by alcohol in her fifties, though technically the cause of death was listed as “falling in front of a subway train.” Michael’s mother, Donna, was beaten to death by one of the “uncles” who came and went in her short, drug-addicted life.

  Michael wasn’t there for that sad day, however, for Herry and Harty had got wind of what was happening in their niece’s life, and had offered to take care of Michael “for a while” so Donna could “recuperate.” That was why Michael had no memory of calling anyone Mother. He knew only Gramps and Granny, and his only home was the little room at the back of the attic. They put him there because, as Gramps said, “The kids on the second floor come and go, but you’re with us forever.”

  And that was why Michael Ringgold grew up in the Old Dragon’s House.

  At first, of course, he didn’t know that was what the house was called. To him, it was simply “home.” That’s what Gramps and Granny called it. “I’m home!” “In our home we have certain rules.” “We try to help these boys and girls feel at home.” “This is a home, not a gymnasium!”

  He wasn’t aware yet that other people’s homes didn’t have theaters in the basement, or sad and angry children coming and going from time to time on the second floor, or locked doors in the attic from which strange sounds emerged at odd hours of the day or night, or a warm place on the backstairs where, when he sat very still, he could feel the throb, throb of a beating heart.

  He did know, however, that Granny didn’t like him to sit there in the warm place. Every time she saw him there, from earliest childhood, she would say, “What are you doing, boy? Why aren’t you playing?” She would assign him some errand or, once he had learned to read, make him get a book and read something aloud to her—which was nice, he was proud of being a reader, he didn’t mind that.

  What he minded was the interruption. So when he heard someone coming down the narrow hall toward the back stairs that led to his attic room, he would scamper up to his bed and pretend to be sleeping. It never seemed to fool them. He tried pretending to be just waking up, but it was no good. “You were sitting there again, you dreamy dreamy boy,” said Granny. Or, “He was in that place again,” one of the visiting kids would call out.

  Finally, when he was four, one of the visitors took pity on him and told him how they knew. “It’s a wooden staircase, you moron,” he said. “They can hear your feet when you run up to your room.”

  Oh.

  Michael learned then to take his shoes off before he went to sit in the warm place. Then, when he heard someone coming, he walked up the stairs very slowly, stepping only at the outside edges of the steps so there were no creaks. It worked. Now the only time he was ever caught in the warm place was when he fell asleep there, and that hardly ever happened.

  Because even though it was, as Granny assumed, a place for dreaming, it wasn’t sleeping dreams he went for. And it wasn’t because sleeping dreams were scarier—no, he had no nightmares as frightening as some of the dreams he had in the warm place. It was that the dreams in the warm place always seemed to make sense. They didn’t just go from one thing to another in the silly way dreams did.

  They felt like memories. Like he was thinking back on things he had done before. And whereas in sleeping dreams he always saw himself as if he were watching his own body from outside, in these memories he only felt himself. His own body. Stretching, taut, exhilarating dreams of having enormous strength and yet being amazingly light and being on fire inside, all the time. Dreams of flying. Dreams of falling down, hurtling toward the ground so fast that his vision went white and he came to himself gasping, as if he had just woken up, only he knew at the end of one of those dreams that he had never been asleep, for through it all he also remembered seeing the faded wallpaper and the part of the heavy-curtained window that his eyes were focused on even as he was moving through or over another world, in another body.

  He knew it was another body because when he was walking around in the house, toddling on his little legs and falling down or bumping into things, it was definitely not the body he had in those dreams. In real life he was not strong and he could not fly and he never, never felt the fire inside.

  Maybe in a weaker child that might have been an irresistible drug, to have those dreams in the warm place on the back stairs. But Michael Ringgold was strong without knowing it. Not strong of arm—he was as tough as any kid, but no tougher, and no one would mistake him for a blacksmith’s apprentice. His throw could get to first base and he could chin himself up into a tree, and he didn’t think to try for more. But there was another kind of strength which he had in good measure, without knowing it. Michael loved dreaming that he could fly with the heat throbbing inside him, but he also loved running around outside with the other kids, or lurking down in the theater watching a play rehearsal or helping paint the scenery. He loved trying to steal cookie dough in the kitchen when Granny’s back was turned—he even loved getting rapped on the head with a spoon as he made it out the door with his mouth full, while Granny shouted after him, “You can get a disease from the eggs in that batter, you foolish boy!”

  Michael had the strength to do what he chose to do, despite his own desires.

  One night when he was seven he heard the sounds from behind the locked door. A humming sound, but with a bit of an edge to it. It sounded like Gramps’s electric razor. Or a shower running somewhere in the house.

  It wasn’t quite dark yet, because it was a summer night on daylight savings time, and so even though there were shadows in the room and he had never before dared to get out of his bed when the sounds were there, tonight he decided he had to know, and so—because he was strong—he simply ignored his dread and got up. He only wore shoes for school and for church, but even though his feet had calluses from running across asphalt and climbing trees and scrambling through brambles, his soles felt extremely naked and vulnerable as he crossed the little space between his bed and the locked door that led deeper into the attic.

  He turned the handle.

  It turned freely, but he still couldn’t open the door.

  The sounds did not stop, either. It was as if his little effort to pull the door open were not worth noticing.

  The keyhole was the old-fashioned kind, like the one on the door to the basement. But unlike the basement keyhole, this one seemed to have been plugged with something so he couldn’t see through. Nor could he see anything under the door. Which might mean that it was dark in the locked room, or it might mean that it, too, had some kind of obstruction to keep light from passing.

  So all his courage was wasted. He couldn’t get through, and he couldn’t see in.

  Only he wanted to see, and this was the time.

  What did he have in his dresser drawer? Whatever he had taken from his pockets all summer, stashed in the bottom drawer inside a cigar box. He chose two items: the tarnished baby spoon he had found by the creek behind the house, and the cheap little pocketknife he had got by trading four fine marbles to one of the boys who hadn’t stayed long at the house because he kept making fun of the kids who were serious about rehearsing the play. It was Gramps’s cut-down version of Macbeth, but the boy with the cheap knife never cared about it even when he was assigned to play Banquo, which meant he got to be a ghost in the dinner scene. And then he was gone, and Michael suspected he was the only person in the house who remembered him now at the end of summer, and that was only because he had this crummy little knife and somewhere in the past few weeks it had gradually dawned on him that he had been cheated.

  Well, the knife wouldn’t cut, and it wobbled in its handle, but maybe it could poke through whatever was blocking the keyhole.

  And it did. One punch, straight through, and the blade broke and was stuck there in the keyhole.

  Great. Now when Granny came up to clean, she’d see the blade sticking out and know that he had tried to break in. Only he hadn’t, he just wanted to see.

  Well, no, if he had been able to jimmy the lock, he would have opened the door. That was the truth and if he couldn’t tell the truth to himself then he really was a liar like that one visiting girl said he was, when Michael told her that he said his prayers every night without Gramps or Granny watching over him to make him do it.

  I want to see in there. And I don’t want to get caught for having tried.

  So he used the handle of the baby spoon. It wasn’t the best tool—needlenose pliers were what he needed, and just imagine trying to explain to Gramps why he needed them. But the spoon handle did the job. By prying with it, he got the broken knifeblade to wiggle and finally come loose.

  And now there was a hole, so tiny and narrow—thin as a blade, of course—that he couldn’t actually see anything through it, except for one thing: There was light in that room. Bright light. Dazzling light. And all that buzzing, whirring, rushing. What was in there? Why would Gramps and Granny leave a light on in there?

  There was a big attic window in the front of the house, and Michael had wondered for a long time whether the locked room ran the whole length of the house. But that wasn’t the light of dusky evening coming through the keyhole, it was like a very bright naked bulb, a hundred-watter like the one in the basement storage room that you turned on by pulling on a chain that Michael could only reach by jumping. If there was always a light in the locked room, it would be visible through that front attic window, and if it were visible, there had been plenty of overcast and stormy days when Michael had been outside and would have seen that the attic was lit.

  So the locked room didn’t have any windows.

  It’s my brother in there, thought Michael. My secret brother, who already lived here before they brought me. The crazy one who actually killed my mother and they couldn’t tell me about it because it was too terrible. He’s chained in that room only they don’t know he’s broken the chain and he’s just waiting for me to open the door so he can grab me and tear out my throat with his teeth like a wolf.

  Or maybe it’s my mother’s body there, like Snow White when the dwarfs laid her out in a glass coffin to lie there looking beautiful till the prince came to kiss her awake, only the prince can’t get there because the door is locked.

  Or maybe the attic crawlspace would get him there.

  There was a low door in the wall at the foot of his bed that Granny said led into the crawlspace. “We don’t store anything there, it’s just in case we get a dead rat or a bird’s nest in there and we need to clean it out. Don’t you go in there because the floor isn’t finished and you’ll put your foot right through the ceiling in the bedroom below and then we’ll have to saw your leg off just to get you out.” She said it with her I’m-pretending-it’s-a-joke-but-take-heed look, and so of course he tried to get in there the second her back was turned, but even though he could turn the primitive wooden latch easily enough, when he tried to push the door open, it jammed against something immediately and he couldn’t even see in.

  Now, though, standing at the locked door, he looked over at his bed, whose foot was jammed in under the slope of the roof so he sometimes bumped the ceiling with his feet when he turned over too quickly in bed. And in that moment, perhaps because he actually wanted to know it, he understood exactly why the door hadn’t opened. It was bumping into the continued downward slope of the ceiling. The door didn’t open into the crawl space, it opened into the room.

  Of course, that meant that to open it, Michael would have to move his bed. He had never tried to do that on purpose before—just accidentally before he learned just how angry Granny could get when she caught him lying on his back in the bed and shoving against the ceiling with his feet. “If I wanted footprints on the ceiling I would have moved to Australia where they walk around upside down all the time!” she said. And then she shoved the bed back into place with such vigor that the footboard of the bed made two indentations in the ceiling so the only real damage was what she had caused her own self. She hadn’t liked it when Michael pointed this out to her, and so he learned a couple of lessons that day.

  How quietly could he pull the bed out from the little door? And how far would he have to pull it before he could get through it?

  The answers were: With only a couple of slight scraping sounds, and about a foot and a half.

  He was sweating from the exertion of pulling the bed when he stuck his head through the opening and looked around.

  It was very, very dark. But the longer he leaned there, his body half in, half out of the crawl space, the better he could see. There was light coming up from the outer edges of the room—faint light, because it really was full dusk outside and soon there’d be no light at all.

  He could see the rafters like corduroy, row on row, with thick dust piled on them like snow on a fence rail. He thought of falling down through the ceiling. He thought of getting half there and realizing it was too dark to go on and then having it be so dark he couldn’t find the door to get back into his room and then he’d feel a hand on his shoulder and a voice would say, “Hello, little brother . . .”

  . . . and when he thought of that there was no way he was going in, not tonight. Tomorrow when it was light. And when the noises weren’t coming from the locked room.

  He pulled himself back into his little room. There was one horrible moment when the belt keeper on his jeans snagged against the doorframe and he thought he’d been grabbed. But then he was through the door and he slammed it shut—fortunately not making much noise because it was such a thin door and it didn’t actually have a jamb to bump against. Then he scrambled to his feet, got round to the head of the bed, and shoved it hard against the wall.

  Nothing could get through that door without moving the bed, and that would wake him up, so it was safe. Besides, he’d slept in this room all his life and nothing had ever come out of that little crawlspace door to get him anyway, had it? So why was he lying there under his covers, constantly lifting his head up to see if the door had moved. It had! No it hadn’t. But maybe it had.

  And then he woke up in the morning and didn’t even remember about the crawlspace until he was in the front yard enjoying one of the last days of summer before second grade. He looked up at the front of the house and saw the attic balcony and window, and wondered, as he sometimes did, whether his brother ever looked out the window at him playing and hated him—and that was when he remembered the crawlspace last night. Only had it really happened? Wasn’t it just a dream? Well, today he’d go in there when it was daylight and settle the question for once and all.

  But he forgot about it again. He forgot it over and over except when he was too far away or too busy with something to bother running upstairs to do the experiment. He kept not doing it until he was away at school every day and then he really did forget. And then one of the visiting kids told him that all houses made weird noises at night. “It’s just wind coming out of the toilet drainpipes,” the girl said. “That and the house settling down to rest at night.” And now that he thought about it, Michael realized that toilet drainpipes probably all made sounds like that from the wind whistling over them so it wasn’t coming out of the locked room at all, it was from the pipes, and that was that. Mystery solved. Of course it wasn’t his brother. He had no brother. That was just a nightmare.

  One night, halfway through second grade, Gramps looked at him and said, “How tall are you anyway, boy?”

  “Tall enough to pee standing up,” said Michael, “but not tall enough to shave.”

  The visiting kids at the dinner table laughed and snorted.

  “I hate it that you taught him to say that,” said Granny.

  “I didn’t,” said Gramps. “It’s just the simple truth.”

  “It is so crude to use words like that.”

  “You heard your Granny, Michael. We have to call it ‘chin depilation,’ not ‘shaving.’ ”