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.’ ”

  “I’m this tall,” said Michael, standing up beside his chair again like he did during grace.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Gramps. “Birds’ nests are in grave danger from you now, young man. You’re soon going to have to duck going under bridges.”

  “I’ll just step over them,” said Michael.

  “You’re not that tall,” said one of the kids, a serious boy with round scars on his arms.

  “It’s a brag,” said an older girl. “They always brag.”

  “It’s a joke,” said another girl.

  “Nay,” said Granny, “ ’tis a jest, a jape.”

  Which was the cue for Gramps to do his gorilla act, saying, “I beat on my jest because I am one of the great japes.” Only when he had finished and Granny spooned him on the butt and he fled back to his chair did he finally come to the point.

  “We have an empty room on the second floor,” said Gramps. “I think you’re too tall for that little bed in the attic anymore.”

  “I like it fine, Gramps,” said Michael.

  “Yeah, he lives up there with his pet chicken,” said one of the older boys. Another boy immediately made a choking sound.

  Gramps glared at them both and they wilted a little, so Michael knew there was something bad or dirty about what they had said, though for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Gramps and Granny didn’t do anything about it for a few weeks, but then one day when Michael came home from school, he found that all his stuff had been moved down into the little bedroom right at the foot of the back stairs, directly beneath his attic room.

  It broke his heart, but he tried to hide it, and he must have done pretty well, because it wasn’t till he was crying alone in his bed that he heard Granny’s voice saying, “Good heavens, Michael, why are you crying?”

  But he couldn’t answer, he just clung to her for a long while until he wasn’t crying anymore. “I’m OK,” he said.

  “But whatever were you crying about?”

  “It’s OK,” he insisted.

  “It’s not OK, and if you don’t answer me right now I’m going to go downstairs to my room and cry until you come down and ask me why I’m crying and I won’t tell you, either.”

  “I just . . . I just guess I’m one of the visiting kids now, that’s all,” said Michael. “I don’t mind, really.”

  “Why—that’s absurd, you silly frumpus. Why would you think that?”

  “ ’Cause Gramps said when I moved in, the kids on the second floor come and go.”

  “No, no—oh, you poor boy—you remember that? You weren’t even three, how can you remember that? But don’t you see? He was trying to reassure you because we thought that you might think that being up in the attic meant we didn’t love you as much as the other kids, but the fact was that the bed up there is a child’s bed and you’re the only person who could sleep in it and it was the only space we had for you then. Gramps moved you down here because you’re bigger, that’s all. But you’re not going to come and go, Michael. You’re our very own. Our last little boy of our very own.”

  “I’m not your own,” he said. “You’re not even my Granny. You’re my aunt.”

  “I’m your great-aunt, don’t you forget. Only we shorten that to Graunt, and then Graunty, and then Grauny, only that sounds so theatrical and phony that we changed it to Granny. So you see? I’m your Granny because I’m your great aunt.”

  “And I suppose Gramps is short for great-uncle.”

  “Not at all. It’s because he’s grumpy. We called him Grumps when he was a boy, and it stuck, only somehow over the years it just changed to Gramps.”

  “So what is my name going to change to? Over the years?”

  “I have no idea,” said Granny. “Won’t it be interesting to see? Over the years? Because you are going to be here for years and years. As long as you like. Until the day comes when you want to leave. To go off to college, or to get married to some nice girl.”

  “I’m not supposed to say ‘pee’ and you can talk about me marrying some girl?”

  “Hardly seems fair, does it.”

  And he didn’t feel like crying anymore and after a while he liked being on the same floor as the visiting kids and some of them even became friends, because they were almost his age.

  Now and then he still went halfway up the back stairs to the warm place. But after the first few weeks, he didn’t bother to go all the way up to his old room. It wasn’t his room anymore, was it?

  And down here, he never heard the sound of the wind rushing past the toilet drainpipes. He almost forgot about it. For years he almost forgot.

  Seventh grade. The year that Granny and Gramps put on Our Town, As You Like It, and Tom Sawyer. The year that Michael Ringgold changed from clarinet to French horn because the junior high band had fourteen clarinets and no French horn player at all. The year that everybody was Indiana Jones for Halloween, so Michael and Gramps worked for a week to put together his costume so he could go trick-or-treating as the Lost Ark.

  It was the year when they had such a blizzard the day after Christmas that the whole town of Mayfield shut down. The snow was no burden at the Old Dragon’s House, of course, because with a troupe of boys and girls on hand, and plenty of snow shovels to go around, the front yard and sidewalk were soon clear right down to the cobbles and bricks. The kids were enthusiastic about the labor, too, because they carried the snow into the back yard in wheelbarrows and soon made such a mountain of snow that they could slide down it in all directions on sleds, inner tubes, and the seats of their pants.

  It was great fun, and no one broke any bones this time, so the worst injury was probably the cut Michael got on his hand when his sled collided with another kid’s snow shovel. He didn’t mind—it was cold enough that his hands were too numb for the pain to be more than a dull throb—but the other kids began to complain that his blood was turning the snow all pink and it looked gross.

  So he went inside and Granny almost fainted and in a few minutes she had Merthiolate poured over the wound and was stitching it up herself—a skill she had learned from her mother, who had done her share of backstage doctoring during vaudeville days. “Hold still so I can line up the edges of the wound so the skin matches up. Otherwise you’ll look rumpled for the rest of your life.”

  “Will I have a scar?” asked Michael.

  “Yes you will, so I hope you’re not contemplating a life of crime, because it will make your palm print absolutely distinctive.”

  “I wish it was on my face,” said Michael.

  “I wish it were on my face,” corrected Granny. “And whyever would you wish for such a foolish thing?”

  “Scars are romantic.”

  “Romantic! Maybe once upon a time dueling scars were romantic. But sledding scars are definitely not. So I hope you’re not going to go out and lie down on Mount Snowshovel and let the sleds run over you.”

  “I never would have thought of it if you hadn’t suggested it.”

  She finished covering his palm with a bandage and winding it around with tape. “All packaged up so nicely we ought to put a stamp on it and mail it somewhere.”

  “Come on, this bandage is so thick I can’t even pick my nose.”

  “Well if you expect me to do it for you, think again.”

  “So are you going to help me get some mittens on?”

  “Apparently you are suffering from the delusion that you are going to go back outside and open up this wound after I went to all the trouble to stitch it closed.”

  “That was my plan, Gran.”

  “My plan is for you to stay here in the kitchen till you warm up. Whose plan do you think will prevail?”

  “How about if I go lie down in my room?”

  “That will certainly do, though I must warn you that if I look out back and see you on Mount Snowshovel again, you will have a nice set of scars on your squattenzone and I will stitch them all skewampus so that everyone who sees your backside will laugh at you.”

  “Who’s ever going to see my backside?”