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I did not discover the door. The boy did.

An archival box arrived the year after my grandfather died. It was labelled, in his square hand, with my name.

The manuscript itself was the size of a novella. Fifty-three pages of blue-inked script, titled “The Door Behind the Painting.” The protagonist was a boy of ten, who would spend his school holidays in his grandfather’s house, a weatherbeaten wood and cinderblock home with bright ocean light in the front rooms, and faint drifts of sand on faded cork floors. The house, as described, corresponded to the one I had visited in childhood, down to the loose bannister and the dusty bookcase on the landing wall.

The story proceeds without tricks. The boy wanders the house. He is alone in the afternoons: the grandfather insists on “quiet hours” for counting and recording numbers, work that is never specified. The boy whittles a boat’s hull from a carpenter’s pencil, drills a hole for a feather mast and sail, and sets it sailing in a concrete sink. He sneaks stale rock cakes from a low cupboard in the kitchen. One day he notices a nail behind a painting halfway up the stairs. Or, more precisely, he notices that the nail-head is new. The painting, a winter landscape of fields and a black hedgerow, has been rehung.

What follows is a sequence of small attentions that I suspect my grandfather copied from observation. The boy lifts the picture free. There is dust behind it that smells of mice and camphor. The wall is not solid plaster, as it should be, but a thin panel depressed by time. He runs his fingers along its seam. There is a string — twine, really — stapled, painted over. A tug, and the panel yields, tilting forward. The boy puts his eye to the loosened space and sees nothing more than darkness, a narrow breath of dark glowing faintly as if the house were lit from the inside of the wall.

He does not tell the grandfather. He returns at dusk when the record-keeping is underway. He squeezes through the opening and discovers a short passage where one could turn around only at the cost of scuffing one’s shoulders. The passage isn’t a passage at all but an apse of sorts, a half-closet, lined with shelves that do not hold linens or hats but notebooks bound in grey paper, each labelled in that same deliberate script: Stairwell, south; Stairwell, north; Stairwell, other. The first two notebooks contain accurate drawings of the stairs from opposing vantage points. The third contains a set of stairs that does not exist in the house yet is otherwise identical to it: only with a third sconce, a narrower window, a carpet patterned with foxes where the first had leaves.

The boy leafs through the drawings, turning the pages with cautious ceremony. He emboldens himself. Under the notebooks, wrapped in tissue, is a handbell the size of his fist and a key with no teeth. A scrap of paper says, Ring for Attendant. He rings. He waits. Nothing happens. He rings again. Silence. He pockets the key. (A key with no teeth is always the right key.)

It is at this point in the manuscript that the margins begin to fill with notes — my grandfather’s own, in pencil, blunt but precise. He enumerates doors and false doors, discusses the ethics of keeping a passage secret in a house that a child would visit, and offers a taxonomy of paintings suitable for such concealment. Portraits are malapropos, he writes, because of their tendency to observe. Landscapes mislead with space and so are preferable, although one should beware of streams, which pull the eye downward. It is also unwise, he notes, to conceal a passage behind a mirror. “It already doubles what ought not be doubled,” he writes, “and subtracts what must not be lost.” He does not say what those things are.

When I was a child, these would have read as eccentricities. As an adult, turning those pages, I felt the old house rise around me.

The story continues. The boy returns, night after night. The notebooks grow denser and stranger. Some pages record the stairwell as if from the perspective of the painting itself, seeing and being seen. Other pages describe stairs or stepladders that the boy cannot locate even when he paces the house with studied inattention, seeking to catch something in the corner of his eye. He becomes convinced that the house hides not one door but an arrangement of them, a mirrored architecture accessible only to drawings and to those tuned to their perspectives. He begins to draw his own maps, shaky pencil lines that the grandfather would surely have criticised for their looseness. These he hides in the apse among the grey books, contributing to an order he barely understands.

Nothing supernatural happens for several pages. I admired this restraint in the old man. He knew, as all faithful liars, that the first miracle is patience. On page twenty-six, the boy experiences a small shift: he removes one of his own maps — a clumsy plan of Stairwell, other — and finds that a representation of his wooden pencil box is now in the drawing where he had not drawn it. He puts his finger on that pencilled box and feels the depressed roughness as if the paper had an inside. He backs away, returns the map to the shelf, and takes instead one of the grandfather’s.

By now you are suspicious. I was. “I had quiet hours,” my grandfather had written in the margin, “for the same reason I kept a door locked.” If the boy had discovered the door, the old man had made it, or found it and tended it until it held its shape. It is not entirely surprising that he wrote the story. That he left it to me is.

I had not asked, properly or otherwise, to inherit a world.

I kept reading. The boy, adopting the habits of a conspirator, accelerates. He steals candle stubs from the junk drawer to illuminate the apse. He copies the grandfather’s hand to label his own notebook, Stairwell, neither, and skims the attic for paintings whose frames appear slightly loose. He finds one — and this is the part that rattled me — a small painting of a black hedgerow. It is a duplicate of the one on the stairs. This second painting too is hung on a nail too new for its surroundings. Behind it there is not a panel but a door in miniature, half the size of a proper door, fitted neatly to the narrow staves. He tries the toothless key, which fits because all keys with no teeth do, as I have said. The door opens inward.

He enters a room no larger than a pantry, though proportioned like a study, with a desk scaled for a child and a single chair. The desk holds a notebook. The boy opens it and finds, to his disappointment and then to his terror, lines of his own days written in red ink. The entries are neutral and scrupulous: November 12: Whittles. Returned bell to shelf. December 5: Lied about rock cakes. December 29: Stood before the painting three minutes without touching it. A blank space follows, just long enough for two more lines.

The boy flees. He does not return until the end of summer, at which point the notebook has filled the blank space without him: Did not return. January 24: returned. He feels chastened by the page, by the coolness of being known. He sits at the child’s desk as if to put his own hand to the red pen and discovers, with dread and relief, that the pen holds no ink.

At this point, I closed the manuscript and went to stand in my own stairwell. It was late, and the light from my flat was all hum and grain. I realised, not for the first time, that I had hung on my own wall a small painting of winter fields and a black hedgerow. It was not my grandfather’s, but a copy I had bought at a second-hand store years before. I took it down. There was dust behind it. There was a nail, an old one, bent slightly to the left. There was no panel.

I laughed. Then I put my palm flat against the wall as if pressing on an aquarium to feel the water behind the glass. The wall did not yield. I felt foolish. The manuscript lay on my table.

The next afternoon, I finished the story. The last ten pages are precise, melancholy. The boy, grown braver, returns to the small door and sits at the desk. He learns to read the notebook without flinching. On the final page, he finds a folded sheet in the desk drawer, titled Instructions for the Attendant. The instructions are exact and useless: Do not answer the bell unless rung twice with hesitation. Do not move the painting. Remember that all passages are true within themselves. He copies them in pencil into his own notebook. He closes the door with care. He grows up, presumably, as boys do in stories and out of them. The last sentence is not about him at all. It is about the painting.

There is a postscript, three lines, in which the narrator — my grandfather or someone wearing his voice — mentions that he has made another copy of the winter fields, smaller than the first two, and hung it where no one would think to look. The reader is invited to consider the ethics of leaving a house insufficiently mapped. Then a final flourish: a tiny figure in the far field has appeared, he says, a boy on the edge of the hedgerow, looking back over his shoulder.

I thought I understood the trick. The trick is that there is no trick, only a series of attentions that appear at first to be coincidences. I returned the manuscript to its box. I placed the box in my own stairwell, under the radiator, where it would absorb a little heat in winter and a little dust in summer.

At midnight, unable to sleep, I took down the painting again. I looked for a string inside the frame and found only splinters. I ran my fingers along the seam and felt only seam. I pressed, not hard, because this is not a detective story. The wall did not open. The nail held. I hung the picture back in place. In the reflection of the glass I saw the long tunnel of my hallway, which was only its usual length.

The following day, my landlord came to replace a cracked tile. While he worked, I idled by the stairs. The painting hung straight. The hallway smelled of wet grout and cigarette smoke. As he left, he handed me a small object he said he had found under the radiator, probably mine. It was a key. The key had no teeth.

I did not, then, immediately stand before the painting. I made coffee. I opened the manuscript. I turned to the first page and began to copy the sentences in my own hand, a useless and tender act. I wrote: The boy is ten. The grandfather counts his hours. There is a painting of winter fields and a hedgerow. There is a door. I wrote: I did not discover the door. The boy did. I went to the stairwell. I lifted the picture once more, and — this is how these things are — the second nail fell out. Its bright head ticked the wood floor like a metronome.

The panel, when I found it, when it opened, was only wood yielding to attention. Behind it a breath of darkness waited, faintly echoing. I peered inwards. It showed me my own hallway in a fine, grainy, winter light, as the dust had settled. Someone was standing at the far end, a child. He was looking over his shoulder.

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I have not yet rung the bell. I have not yet sat at the desk or opened the notebook. I tell myself this is because I am busy. But I keep the key in my pocket, and I feel as though I am an error in a column of figures. I feel the house recalculating around me. The air in the stairwell thins and then steadies.

I linger, as one lingers in doorways, not on one side or the other.