Behind the Door Marked C

She did it on a Tuesday, at the unfashionable hour of three, when the Reading Room ran on the quiet machinery of one elderly man asleep over a folio and Penn at the far end of the corridor with her back to the world and a drawer open and her pencil moving in the small uninflected way it moved when she was, as she put it, tidying. Kettle was not in. Tomas was not in. Maro had gone out, twenty minutes earlier, with a paper bag and the air of a man who intended to be slow about a bun.

Iyla had, in her pocket, the list of small specific true things, and on the list, written that morning, the line: I am going to open the door today. She had put it there in ink, in the way one puts a thing on a list one intends, on pain of self-respect, to be able to cross off.

The door was brown. It had, in brass, the single letter C, and beneath the letter a keyhole of the older, larger sort, the kind that takes a key with a head you can hook a finger through. She had been told not to ask. She had not asked. She had, instead, on three separate Thursdays, watched Penn go through it with a flat tin tray and come back without one, and she had noticed, on the second of those Thursdays, that Penn did not lock the door behind her on the way in, only on the way out, and that there was, between the going in and the coming out, a window of perhaps four minutes in which the door was, technically, only closed.

It was, this afternoon, only closed. She had watched Penn go in at two-fifty-seven with a tray. She put her hand on the knob at two-fifty-eight. The knob turned.

The room behind it was dim, in the way a room is dim when it has been arranged, deliberately, not to be bright; the light came from low sconces along the walls, the colour of weak tea, and from one high small window at the far end which had been, she saw, frosted. The air was cold and dry and smelled faintly of cedar and of the particular nothing-smell of glass that has been kept clean for a long time. Penn was not in the room. There was a second door at the far end, slightly open, and from beyond it the small domestic noise of a tap running into a kettle.

The room was full of cases.

They stood in rows, the way cases stand in the unfashionable wing of a museum the public does not visit, and each case held, under glass, one thing. A single shoe, brown, with the lace tied in a bow she recognised as the bow taught by a particular kind of grandmother. A coin, on a little stand, the face on it not Aren's but a woman's, with a coil of hair and an inscription Iyla could not read. A baker's apron, folded, the brown so dark it had a green in it, the way a forest floor has a green in it, and along the hem a stain she did not, for one bad second, look away from. A child's wooden spoon. A length of blue ribbon. A brass key, smaller than her smallest finger, with a head shaped like a leaf. A pressed flower she had, she would have sworn, seen before in someone else's notebook. A drinking cup of green glaze with a chip on the right side as you drank from it. A fishhook. A playing card, face down. A button. A button. A button.

Each case had, at its base, a small white card, and on each card, in the upright near-black hand she had now learned to recognise without flinching, a line of writing. She bent to the nearest.

Apron. Brown wool, green undertone. From the city of Halun-Vesh. Author: M. Orrick, 1948–1971. World closed 1971. Author surrendered.

She straightened. She did not, at once, move to the next.

She moved to the next.

Shoe, child's. From the orchard country. Author: not known. World closed 1903. Author lost.

Coin, copper. Profile of the Lady Imris. From Aravell. Author: J. Sebbeck, 1912–1939. World closed 1939. Author surrendered.

Cup, green glaze. From the river town. Author: P. Whately, 1955–1969. World closed 1969. Author lost.

She walked the row. She walked it slowly, in the way one walks past a wall of photographs of people one did not know but might have. There were perhaps sixty cases in the room. There were, she counted without meaning to, eleven that had no card at all under the glass, only the object, which was the worse of the two arrangements; she understood, looking at the eleventh, an unlabelled brass thimble, that to be in this room without a card was to be a thing whose city no one any longer remembered the name of, and that the thimble was, in this respect, the loneliest object in the building.

She came, at the end of the row, to an empty case.

It stood at the corner where two rows met, on a small plinth of its own, and it was clean, and lit, and the card at its base was blank. She stood in front of it for what she would later, on the bus, decide had been forty seconds, and she did not, in those forty seconds, do anything in particular, only look. The glass had been polished that morning. She could see, in the lower edge of it, a small streak where Penn's cloth had stopped.

She thought of Halun's apron, which was, this afternoon, presumably still on Halun, in the alley, with the bread. She thought of Sefra and of the four-o'clock and of Tev's bell and of the nineteen stones of the Small Bridge and of Mehri the cat, who would be, by Lentar's hour, opening and closing the paler eye on the wall. She thought of the words Author surrendered and of the words Author lost and of the difference between them, which was, she understood, the difference between a door you had closed behind you and a door that had closed while you were still trying to find it.

She thought, with the small clean dread, that the case in front of her was the right size for a coin, and that she had, in a drawer in her kitchen, a coin.

From beyond the second door the kettle began, in the small considered way of kettles that have been recently filled, to tick as it warmed.