...A small naked bulb blinked on. James peered around and saw the bare concrete floor and white-painted concrete block walls of an ordinary basement. To the left of the stair, three rubbish bins were lined up along the wall. Along the right-hand wall he saw a large, gas-fired central-heating boiler, a deep janitor's sink beside it, and half a dozen large, empty wooden tea chests stacked in one corner. He saw no drip from the sink's tap, but still heard the thin but steady sound of water falling into a basin. Peering back toward the shadowy far corner to his left, where the sound seemed to come
from, for a moment he thought he saw a faint oval shimmer hanging motionless in midair. The shape was more a stirring in the air than a shine or gleam, but James's imagination shied away at the thought. A reflection. That was it. Or a shadow on the white-painted concrete blocks ...
The light bulb gave a faint pop! and went dark.
In the sudden darkness the oval something in the air was still there, but clearer and hovering like a gray glimmer of mist in a warm night. Through it James thought he saw a patch of gray stone wall instead of the painted concrete blocks he had seen with the light on. He stared blankly for a long moment. He rubbed his eyes. The patch did not go away.
James wavered for a moment between alarm and curiosity, then drew a shaky breath and took a cautious step forward in the darkness. At each step the strange oval appeared to grow wider, as if it were... morphing into a circle. James hesitated. What if whatever it was suddenly yawned wide and swallowed him? He twitched back a little and, when he did, it shrank, and he realized that if he didn't move, it didn't. He took a step back, then another forward. As he did, the faint shimmer that stirred in the cold air narrowed a step's worth, and then widened again.
Curiouser and curiouser, James thought, feeling a lot like Alice at the rabbit hole. He turned a little to the right and moved cautiously toward what he thought would be the rear wall. As he did, the mysterious shape grew still narrower, until it was no more than a thin line in the darkness. Another step, and it vanished. Half a step back, and it was there again: an uncertain thread of not-quite-light that glimmered on and off. James took a long step toward the back wall, keeping an eye on the spot where the line vanished. There it was again! Baffled, he moved still farther around to the left until he found himself facing another, brighter circle of shimmer in the darkness.
It took a moment for James to realize that the light he saw was not in the circle itself, but what lay beyond it. He was facing a dim view of a worn stone step, with a narrow landing just above, and a dark, arched doorway into the stone wall or building to his left. Beyond was another, shallower stair. At the top, the silhouettes of leafless trees stood out black against the moon-bright sky. The air held both the last faint bite of winter and the moist, earthy scent of early spring. He could see every silhouetted tree twig, and hear their faint clatter as they stirred in a whisper of breeze. Most dreamily strange of all, James could see at the same time both the moonlit stone steps in front of him and-- outside of and beyond and above the eerie circle—the open door at the top of Cousin Charles's basement steps and the warmer glow from the light in the ground-floor entry hall. He was still in the here , but not three feet away was a there .
James stood motionless. This is a dream , he realized in a rush of relief and disappointment. He had been excited as much as fearful, and even though he shivered a little from the cold, he thought, Don't let me wake up . Not yet. Not yet. He did not understand what he was seeing. How could the stone wall he had glimpsed from the other side of the circle be the same stone wall that rose at the side of the moonlit stair in front of him? He sidled around to the other side of the window in the air and watched the same thing happen as he went: His view of the circle dwindled to an oval, the oval to a line as thin as a thread of spider silk that shimmers on and off in dappled sunlight, and that line widening back into a shadowy circle. From either side the circle looked, more than anything, like—like exactly that: a window in the air. A window with faintly frosted glass. James edged a little nearer, to peer into its shadows.
Beyond the misty shimmer a sloping passage ran down between stone walls, shadowy on one side, moonlit on the other. The passage stair led downward through what James knew was—what he squatted down and felt was—a solid concrete floor. At the bottom of that stair he could dimly make out a door. When he inched even closer and leaned forward to peer at the shimmer, his forehead touched it, and he jerked back. The touch of it was… fizzy, like electricity in his hair. Close up, the look of it was gently fizzy too. He touched his finger to it and snatched it back again. The tip of his finger tingled a little, but it looked and felt fine. Moving around until all he could see of the circle was the thin edge, he stuck his left hand in on the downstairs side, then his right in on the upper landing side, and tried to grasp one hand with the other.
Both hands disappeared up to the wrists. They vanished, and no matter how he waggled them in the cold air, or where he groped, they did not meet. If he leaned around to look, he could see the one on that side, but not the other. And vice versa. His stomach gave an unpleasant lurch, but when he pulled his hands out again, both were fine except for the faint tingle.
James took a deep breath, leaned forward, and thrust his face through the pale fizz.
A colder draft of air from below brushed past his face, and with it came– much more clearly– the sound of water spilling into a basin. Without thinking, he stepped forward to feel with a foot for the stone step below, only to have his foot jar against the concrete floor and to find himself still in Cousin Charles's basement, on the far side of the window in the air. He had walked straight through it and could feel the almost-not-there tingle from his hips up.
James turned and stared up for a moment at the other-world landing one step above. O.K. It's like a window. You don't try to walk through a wall to get out through the window in that wall. You climb over the sill.
With the growing sharpness of his eyes in the dark and the faint light from the shimmer, James was able to make out the dim shapes of the wooden tea chests stacked in the corner beyond the gas-fired boiler, just beyond a pair of rubbish bins. Moving cautiously, arms outstretched, he crossed to the corner and pulled one of the boxes to the floor. Its size and smooth sides made it a little awkward to pick up and clumsy to carry, but he struggled with it across to the back side of the shimmer. If you were going to climb through a window with nothing to hold on to, you didn't want to pitch yourself down a flight of stone steps. You would climb up, to the landing.
The tea chest had no top, so James turned it to stand bottom up, and tested to see whether it would hold his weight. Then he took a deep breath, climbed on top, and crouched down to edge sideways through the shimmer.
Like launching yourself through a keyhole...
Text and image Copyright 2005 by Jane Louise Curry, with thanks to Cole Montgomery for playing the role of James.
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