She slowed down, and it felt like we had only been walking a few moments, but it also felt like a long time. I was cold, but she lifted me down from her shoulders and gave me something warm to drink. I started to walk forward, but she grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back into the shadows where we stood. It was the darkest part of the night, and even the sounds of the forest came to a rest. She told me to wait. Ahead of us was the cabin. The one where you and Grandma and Tom and Shirley spent those summers. I couldn’t believe it.

I started asking her where the door was, but she stopped me, putting her hand over my mouth, and I pulled away—her hand was so cold. She stiffened, so I reached over and held on to her arm at the elbow, trying to prove that she wasn’t too cold for me. She softened when I did this, even reached up and patted my hand.

“The door must be here,” she whispered to herself, and she sounded frustrated. “This door is always causing all sorts of mischief. Would you like to go inside and see?”

A kind of fear boiled up in me so quickly I didn’t know what to say, but she told me it was okay, she knew I was afraid, and she would go with me. So I told her yes.

“What will we do if we find it?” I asked.

“Finding it is the first concern,” she said in a flat tone. “We’ll worry about what to do after that.”

The Door

From where we stood, the lake went on forever, shimmering in the night. We crept into the house real quiet and left the door open behind us, which I didn’t think was a great idea, but when I went to close it, she snapped her fingers and hissed to get my attention. She shook her head, so I left the door open.

Inside the house, it was beautiful, mostly because of the pale light reflecting off the lake and in through the windows. It seemed like a completely different place than the one you and I had visited. It felt like a dream world. We crept through the house, through an even darker hallway with no windows. I wanted to ask the woman where we were going, but when I started to talk she held one of her icy fingers up.

In that back room, it was so dark I felt like I was floating in space. It even felt like there were rooms and hallways that I hadn’t seen when we were there yesterday, like parts of the house were only visible in the moonlight when no one else was there. It was amazing. I heard the creaking of another door opening, and she whispered to me to watch my step. There were stairs, and we started walking down. We walked down the stairs for at least five minutes, not stopping. That’s a lot of steps, Grampy. At one point, she stopped and muttered that she could probably risk a match, and I heard a quick scrape and a hiss and the match burst to life. I almost passed out when I saw where we were.