"A Few Nights Before Christmas"

A Christmas Story

The sagging Victorian house where Addy lived with her brother and her mom was divided up into tiny, ornate apartments, and they were all empty in the late afternoon.  Addy was the first home and had let herself in with the key her mom had given her at the start of the school year.  Her brother, Foster, had gotten a job this school year working in a garage, and she was in the 5th grade now, so she walked from school alone and was the queen of the castle until everyone else came home.  Today, grey light glowed in the leaded windows; fuzzy and dim, it grew shadows in the corners of each room. She dropped her bag on the floor and called for their cat while making a beeline for the TV.  It was a routine she had and she did it everyday like an obsessive flicking light switches.   Door, "Lila!", TV, fridge, couch.  The cat and the TV came first because they broke the still silence of the house.  Most days, she called for the cat with a happy, light voice, but today Addy sounded tense and worried, and her voice was a muffled echo in the apartment's winter chill.

She loved walking home, up Manitou Avenue from the bottom of the school hill to their house perched above the town on Capitol Hill.  The town lay in a valley and everything in its limits sat along the avenue or ranged along the foothills that rose from the floodplain along which it ran.  The doors and windows of each shop didn't hold much to interest her, but they were full of life, and cheery as the town neared Christmas.  Usually, the walk after school was her favorite time of day, but today she has seen a cat, orange and still on the side of the road.  She made herself not look as she passed, but she knew it was dead.  Thoughts of Lila had bitten into her, and she had hurried home with dread growing in her imagination.

Lila did not come running from Addy's room today, her eyes sleepy and hungry at the same time.  Addy heard the cat make a noise from the bedroom, but it sounded like a strangled yowl that she had never heard from her before.  Her mind jumped in fear as she looked into the room where the cat sat on the bed, tail twitching, staring up towards the top of the wall.  There was nothing there that Addy could see, and she was used to the big grey cat staring into corners and at blank walls with her glowing yellow eyes.  She walked over and sat on the bed and the cat turned to stare at her.  Lila's expression was wide and intense, as though she was too scared to recognize Addy.  She reached out to stroke the cat's neck, and Lila tensed, sprang from the bedspread, and ran in the opposite direction of the kitchen.  The cat disappeared into the back of the house where her brother's room, a porch that had been walled in with windows all along one side, ran in a wide curve.

Addy sat with her heart slowing for another minute and then walked back into the living room and turned on the TV.  In the valley you didn't get much in the way of TV reception.  They had two channels, 5 and PBS.  She had actually gotten used to having limited choices and didn't usually feel bad about it.  The shows she watched in the afternoons were part of the routine: Tom and Jerry, Scooby Doo, 3-2-1- Contact, sometimes Wheel of Fortune, but mostly she just let Mr. Rogers play after the Blood Hound Gang wrapped up.  On Mr. Rogers days, she had to listen for her mom's car so that she could switch the channel fast.  Mom had caught her watching once and had gushed and then cried because Addy was"growing up so fast."  It was gross and left Abby with an ache in her chest that made her cry when she went to bed that night.

It didn't really matter what was on the TV, but it had to be on and it had to be cheery.  Addy liked to read.  A lot.  Lately, she had been reading scary stories and the kind of novels that made the librarian at school cluck her tongue and shake her head.  She didn't know why, but she craved to be lost in books where the characters were terrorized by the unknown and the supernatural.

The kitchen was pearly with the white cabinets and walls reflecting the grey light from the cloudy sky outside.  Later, in January and February, clouds would blow down the streets below the house, and the world would become a sea of swirling white punctuated by second stories and turrets.  It looked like a quilt with tufted ties lying between the hills.  Foster said it was just fog, but she had learned that the town was more than a mile above sea level, so surely the fog here would be clouds above the cities by the ocean.  It made sense to her, and besides, she had seen the clouds rolling down from the mountains and foothills, and everyone knew that fog came up from the ground.  That was a spooky thought, and she opened the fridge to chase it away.

The light was bright and happy, but there wasn't much to see inside.  She settled on a glass of milk and a slice of cheese.  As she turned away from fridge, big flakes of snow began to fall from the dark sky.  With Christmas less than a week away, all the kids at school were hoping for a white one, but the snow made Addy nervous.  Anything that might make mom or Foster late made her look at the clock on the wall more frequently, and so the time stretched and lengthened when it snowed or rained hard.  It was hard for mom's bug to get up Waltham street unless the trucks had come around to sand, and when the snow fell fast, the trucks couldn't keep up.  Mom had walked before when the road was too bad, but it was scary to think of her making a run up and around the face of Capitol hill on the narrow street with her tires skidding.

As she sat down on the couch with still no Lila, even though Addy's glass of milk was sitting on the floor, the news broke into Tom and Jerry to say that there was a winter storm warning in effect for the rest of the night.  Her mom was all the way across town, as far as you could be from their house, she thought, finishing classes for the day.  Mom was a student and an artist, and she was a waitress in a little Mexican food restaurant most nights.  Tonight she would rush in, give Addy a kiss, and begin getting ready for work while asking Addy questions about her day.  It was what mom did most school nights, except for Mondays when the restaurant was closed.  Addy loved Mondays.  Mom usually had homework to do, but she was there in the apartment.  Sometimes Addy sat with her mother while she drew sketches for paintings or sculptures.  Sometimes she sketched Addy, Foster or Lila.  Addy wished Lila would come in.

"Lila, here kitty, kitty," she called down the long apartment.  She heard an answering thump from down there.  It sounded like the cat had jumped onto something.  She heard the sound again, but louder, followed by a yowl from Lila.  Addy jumped up and ran into her room, just in time to see the cat leap from her bed and hit the wall it was pushed up against.  Or the cat should have hit the wall, because that is all that Addy had seen next to her bed since they had moved in last year, but now there was a door in the middle of the wall.  A door with an old-looking key sticking out just below the knob.  It didn't make any sense.  How could a door just happen like that?  Her bed was pushed longways in front of the door, and her quilt was bunched up there just below the knob and key.  The cat had fallen back to the bed, and Addy saw that her hair was standing up all along her back and neck.  Lila was either very scared or very angry, or both.

Addy stepped forward and shooed Lila from the bed.  As she looked up from the fleeing cat, the room seemed to blur and the door went out of focus for a hair of a second.  It happened so fast, that Addy wasn't sure she'd seen it, but her stomach was queasy all of a sudden.  She climbed onto the bed, watching it the whole time, and stood facing the door.  It was the same light oak that all the other doors and doorways in the house were made of.  There was dust on the top of the door jamb that she could just barely see as a fuzziness at her eye-level.  There weren't any other marks.  The door looked like it had been there for a hundred years.  At least that long.  Addy felt that flipping in her stomach again.  She knew that the door had not been there moments before when she first got home from school.  It had never been there before, so how could it be now?  She slid her foot, then her leg, between the end of the bed and the wall to the right of the door, and the bed stuttered out along the old hardwood floor.

She could now wedge herself in and bend down in front of the door.  Sometimes, in the old doors in the house, you could take out the key and look through the keyhole to the other side of the door, as long as there wasn't a key or something else blocking the hole.  Addy bent down thinking that the only thing she might see by looking through the keyhole was some part of Ms. Butts's apartment.  Ms. Butts lived in the apartment on the other side of the house from theirs.  Addy didn't know what she might see, but she thought she would know that it was the other apartment, and then she could begin trying to find out why Ms. Butts had put a door in her bedroom wall without asking her or anyone else as far as Addy knew.

She slowly drew the key out of the hole in the brass plate.  It had a pattern of lines coming out from the hole and it looked like a sun shining down.  When she looked through the hole, it was hard to tell what she was seeing.  She didn't see walls, or clothes, or any furniture, but there was light.  It looked like smoke was swirling and the light was bluish, but there wasn't anything making the light that she could see.  While she stared and strained to see any lines or other definition, a figure moved in front of the keyhole and away again.  Addy hadn't seen more than a brief blocking of the light shining into the keyhole, but she had the impression of someone walking in front of the door, just on the other side from her.

She reached up with a tight fist and knocked on the door to see if someone would knock back from the next apartment.  Addy hit the wooden door panel twice.  She waited a few seconds and then knocked again, the same rapid beat.  Now she waited longer.  She turned her head to put her ear up to the door and looked into the eyes of Harry Potter on his broom.  She had gotten the poster from the library during the summer read-a-thon.  Something clicked in Addy's 10 year old mind.  Magic was real sometimes.  Things that couldn't be explained sometimes happened.  It entered her head that she had recently forgotten about magic and the unknown world around her.  That was easy to do in the 5th grade and with an older, wiser brother who was brutally honest when he felt like you needed to "toughen up, butter cup!"  Very quickly she felt the return of belief in the mysteries of the world around her, and in that instant she heard the rattle of the old woman's voice calling softly, "Come in, come in."

Somehow, her hand was on the door knob, and it was turning.  The door opened away from Addy, and she found that she could not balance on the edge of the bed as it swung open.  She grabbed for the door frame with both hands, and she missed on both sides, the doorway seeming to widen away from her.  She had the briefest moment to worry about Lila following her, and that her mom would be thinking that Addy was lost, and then she disappeared through the glowing doorway.  There was no sound as the door swung closed.  No one cried out on the other side.

When Addy's mother arrived home, late but not very late, that night, she found a glass of milk sitting on the floor in front of the blaring TV and Lila laying on Addy's bed, which was pushed away from the wall for no reason that anyone could see.  The police looked for evidence of a struggle in the apartment, but, apart from the bed being moved, there was nothing out of place, and no evidence of an intruder, or of Addy, could be found.  The snow had fallen so hard and thick that night, that no one would have been able to see a person walking down the road.  The police questioned all of the neighbors, but no one had seen the little girl or anyone else come or go.  She was just gone.