271.🕰️ THE SECOND ROOM

Chapter 01 - The Bread in the Clock

The first thing I noticed was the bread.

It was a heel of yesterday's loaf, the kind Emily usually left on her plate. She held it carefully in both hands as she crossed our dining room, stopping twice to listen. Then my eight-year-old daughter knelt in front of the grandfather clock and slipped the bread through a gap in the wood.

I'd come home early because a meeting had been canceled. My shoes were wet from the October rain, and I was still carrying my briefcase.

"Emily," I said. "Who are you feeding?"

She turned so quickly her cardigan caught on the carved foot of the clock. For a moment she looked almost angry with me, as though I'd interrupted something important.

"The man inside," she said.

I thought she was playing. Children make whole countries out of cardboard boxes. Emily, since her mother died, had made friends with a crack in the kitchen wall and a tree she called Mrs. June. I had learned not to laugh.

"What man, sweetheart?"

She looked down at the bread. "The one who coughs. He said not to tell anyone except you. But you were always gone."

There it was. A sentence so plain it might as well have been a door swinging shut.

My name is Daniel Bellamy. I was forty-one, ran a construction firm founded by my grandfather, and lived in a house on the Hudson that had belonged to four generations of Bellamys. I could tell you what a roof cost to replace down to the last nail. I couldn't tell you what my daughter did between four and six on a Wednesday afternoon.

I set my briefcase on the dining table.

"Move back, Emily."

"He doesn't like it when the clock strikes," she whispered.

I reached for the lower panel. The brass handle was ornamental. Behind the carved oak was a new-looking steel latch with a black sliding bolt fastened on the outside. Someone had drilled it into the original wood.

I knew every alteration in that house. I had approved the wiring, the new windows, the plumbing under the cellar. I had never approved that bolt.

The clock itself was one of the few things I remembered my mother forbidding the movers to touch. Its chimes used to interrupt Sunday dinner, and she would stop talking mid-sentence, count them under her breath, then resume exactly where she'd left off. When Anna was alive she complained that it ran seven minutes slow. I kept meaning to have it repaired. There were whole years of my life made from things I kept meaning to do.

I touched one screw. The metal was bright beneath a ring of black paint. Fresh sawdust lay in the grooves of the rug, almost concealed by the brown-and-red pattern. Emily couldn't have installed it. My father wouldn't have fastened himself in. The simple facts arranged themselves into a shape I didn't like.

"Did someone tell you to use this little door?" I asked her.

"Nobody told me," she said. "I heard a cough when I was looking for my red pencil. I asked if it was the clock. It said no."

"The clock answered?"

"The man. He said he was sorry for scaring me. I told him I wasn't scared of people. Just being alone."

I felt that sentence more sharply than the edge of the wood beneath my hand. In our dining room stood a child who'd been comforting a stranger through a wall while her father checked spreadsheets in hotel rooms. Her mother, Anna, would have known something was wrong before the second knock. I wasn't Anna. But I was here now, and the distinction between those two facts suddenly seemed to matter more than anything else.

A sound came from the other side.

Not a mouse. Not a pipe.

Three slow knocks.

"Daniel?" a voice said.

My father's voice.

For ten seconds I was nine years old again, waking before dawn to the sound of him fixing the old furnace. Then the present returned, brutally. Walter Bellamy had been missing for eleven days. The last message my wife, Claire, had shown me said he'd gone north to rest with a friend after a fall. There had been a phone call I couldn't return. A number no longer in service. I had been worried, but not worried enough to come home.

"Dad?"

"Don't pull the whole cabinet. The side is rotten. You'll bring it down on her."

Emily stepped away at once. I loosened the bolt with the little screwdriver on my key ring, but the warped door held fast. From the sideboard I took a fireplace poker and eased its flat end under the broken panel. The wood gave with a miserable crack. Pieces fell onto the rug.

"Stay clear," I said. "I've got you."

I drew the lower door outward until there was room for a person. The clock didn't open into gears as it should have. Beyond the wood lay a narrow black passage and the first steps of a stone staircase.

My father appeared from the darkness, one hand pressed against the wall. His cardigan was filthy. His gray hair stood in points. He seemed to have shrunk inside his clothes.

I reached for him.

"Easy," he said. "My knee."

I put one arm around his back. He smelled of dust and damp wool. When I helped him into the room, he gripped my sleeve with a strength that surprised me.

"Emily found me," he said.

"Why didn't you call? Why didn't you tell—"

"The phone's gone. And he locked the other door."

Across the room Claire stood in the doorway. She wore a green blouse and black trousers, the clothes she'd worn at breakfast. I hadn't heard her come in.

"What have you done?" she whispered.

At first I thought she meant the broken clock. Then I saw where she was looking: not at my father, not at Emily, but at the opening behind the pendulum case.

"Dad was locked inside," I told her.

Claire's hand rose to her mouth. "Oh, God."

Emily moved behind me. I felt her small fingers take hold of my shirt.

"Did you know about this?" I asked.

Claire shook her head, but her gaze kept moving toward the dark doorway. She looked less like someone seeing a secret for the first time than someone watching it escape.

My father eased himself into a chair. His hands shook badly enough that I had to steady the water glass I brought him. Emily stood at his knee, staring at his face.

"Grandpa?" she said.

He reached out and brushed a crumb from her cheek. "Hello, my brave girl."

"I thought you went to the mountains."

He swallowed. "So did a lot of people."

I wanted to call an ambulance, the police, someone with a reasonable voice and a procedure. Instead my father caught my wrist.

"Not yet. The stairs."

"You can barely stand."

"Daniel, listen to me. You have to look in the second room."

I glanced at Claire. She had gone still. Outside, rain struck the old sash windows with the hollow sound it made before a storm.

"What's in there?" I asked.

My father didn't answer immediately. He looked at Emily, who was still holding the last piece of bread.

"Sweetheart," he said, "did you feed the person in the second room?"