William's Things

Opal slept on her belly like a dog all summer. It was too hot to open the drapes or the shutters, so she contented herself with lying in the cool darkness beneath her bed, or in the bare porcelain bottom of the bathtub with a book fanned open in her lap and her feet kicked up over the side. There was a little square window at the foot of the tub whose glass was all wavy; when Opal looked through it, she felt as though she were seeing a distorted reflection in a ripply pond. She liked to imagine that the weird, wobbly world behind the glass wasn’t an illusion at all, and that if she were to open the little window and crawl through, that the trees and houses and street lamps would all remain bent at strange, impossible angles, and that she would become a part of this interesting world too. Alas, the window looked as though it had never been opened, and Opal went back to her book.

It is easy to become bored when you’re eleven or twelve, though there is usually a quick fix for it. Opal finished her book and found herself at a loss what to do. She roamed around the new, old house that her parents had bought for her and her brother. They’d had a dog, Charlie, but he’d died shortly before they moved. Opal had missed him terribly at first, and then less and less as the days went on, and now he was in a tin can on the mantle beside a deck of her father’s vintage baseball cards and her grammy's candlesticks. She patted the can as she went by.

Opal’s father had left her a plate of pancakes as he did every morning before he left for work, and her mother had written a note on a napkin. Opal skimmed the note, which read the same as always: Be good, Opal - see you after work! and ate the cold pancakes. She glanced at the numbers on the fridge (Caleb’s daycare, her parents’ workplaces, 911), and then she dragged a footstool in from the living room and pushed it up against the fridge. If there was anything exciting lying about, it was bound to be on top of the fridge. But all that she found were some dead beetles, dry as mummies, and a thick, furry coat of dust. Opal coughed.

There were rooms in the house which she wasn’t allowed in; in particular, a wine cellar which could only be accessed from the backyard, and an attic whose stairs she wasn’t tall enough to reach. Opal knew that her parents hid the keys.

It only took about a half hour of snooping before she found them. The keys were all varying shapes and sizes; some were small and shiny and silver, others were big and clunky and black. Opal liked the look of these bulkier keys; she held them as one does precious stones. Then she hung the keyring on her belt like she’d seen prison guards do in films, and she went clanking from door to door in the house trying out all of the keys.

The first locked door that she came across was a bathroom closet that contained a fragile-looking mouse skeleton and an old ant trap. She hardly considered either a treasure, but she thought that she might come back with her father and have him help her collect the bones. After that, there was an old pantry in the kitchen, this one peppered with stale mouse droppings; there appeared to have been an infestation at some point. There were dusty jars of pickled food on the shelves. Opal wrinkled her nose. The next door was just two down from her own; she tried out five different keys before the lock responded to an old brass key, and then she went inside. Opal would have thought that the room was meant for storage if it were not for its faded wallpaper, which was covered in pictures of sailboats. She thought that it must’ve been a boy’s room at some point, and she wondered why her parents hadn’t just given it to Caleb. She walked over to a big wooden wardrobe at the end of the room (the only piece of furniture), and opened it. A child a little younger than her stood inside, peering out.

“Hello,” Opal said.

The child blinked at Opal. He stepped out of the wardrobe and looked around in a fearful way.

“Are you lost?”

The child didn’t say anything. He walked past Opal and out into the hall.

Funny, Opal thought as she followed him out. She followed the boy up and around and down the halls, and then she stopped where he appeared to have vanished, at the foot of the attic staircase. Someone had pulled it down.

Opal was a little afraid. She reminded herself that the house was just a house, and that if there were ghosts living inside that they couldn’t hurt her, a flesh-and-blood girl. With her little flame of courage, she ascended the stairs.

It was pitch black in the attic. Opal squinted around, but all that she could see in any direction was blackness. She began to take a step into the room, and then she felt a cold little hand slip into hers, and she was led forwards. With each step, Opal wondered if perhaps she shouldn’t have gone snooping around unlocking doors after all. When she realized that she could no longer feel the hand, she stopped. There was a pale shaft of light drifting down through the ceiling beams; Opal crouched down where it landed, and inspected a box marked William’s Things. The box was filled with toys. Puzzles, ping-pong paddles, race cars, army men, storybooks - any and everything a child could need to allay boredom! Chuffed with her discovery, Opal picked up a book signed William’s and began to read.