Catch up on previous chapters here.
Chapter Six: A Locked Room
Jill left the Music Room. She promised herself she would go back and visit later. She was starting to feel tired after the events of the day, but was determined to do what she could to find the treasure before she went to sleep. So, she started to explore the upstairs. She walked down each hallway and quietly, cautiously, opened the doors. Sometimes she would knock first to be polite, but, as she expected, met no one else in the house.
There were a dozen or so rooms upstairs along the east-west corridor, some large and some small like the Music Room. Rooms Jill determined to explore later were the Library, a massive room with overstuffed chairs, books on shelves along each wall standing more than two stories high with large ladders on rolling wheels, and a fireplace big enough for her to lie down in as she would have done, had there not been a large fire blazing in it at the time. The Games Room with its board games, trivia, and puzzles. The Planetarium with its glass covered ceiling and telescopes, and the Theatre Room, which had a stage, covered by dark purple curtains from which hung thick golden tassels.
The names of each room were engraved deeply into little wooden signs that were fitted against the oak finish of each door. Jill found three beautiful bathrooms with checkered floors and white freestanding tubs that stood on brass feet. She did not enter any of the rooms, but looked inside them from the doorway. It took all her self-control not to enter each room to explore; she forced herself just to look so she could get a feel for the place, before she tried to solve the clue left to her in the letter.
Jill saved the corridor, extended beyond the stairway, which led toward the back of the house, for last. Something, some faint impression, told her to wait to walk down that hall; somehow she knew that it was down this hallway she would come upon her treasure. When she finished exploring the other hallways, she came back to the sitting room at the top of the stairs and sat down. She warmed herself by the fire and after a few minutes of rest and a few more yawns, she stood up and started to make her way slowly down the remaining hall.
The first room she came to was called The Boot Room. Curious, Jill turned the door handle and peered inside. As with many of the rooms, the Boot Room was lined with shelves on every wall. These particular shelves had footwear of every kind. Shoes and boots for every possible activity or occasion. Shoes for running and hiking, shoes for dancing and walking, shoes for racing and climbing. There were flippers for people to wear in the sea. There were wide shoes that looked like tennis racquets with funny straps for people to walk on snow. There were boots with sharp metal blades for people to skate on ice. Sandals for the beach. Cleated boots for football. Soft looking slippers with hardened toes for ballet. There were shoes for children, for men, for women. Shoes, shoes, shoes.
Some places along the wall were empty, as though people had come, found the right pair that fit and run away with them. Jill had never been fond of shoes like some girls who had too many pairs to count, but there were some in the room she wanted to keep for herself upon her first glance.
On the opposite side of the hallway, Jill stopped in front of a door that said The Armoury. Perhaps with more curiosity than with which she opened The Boot Room door, Jill turned the handle. When Jill looked around the room, she could not suppress her astonishment. The room was filled with shining metal swords and shields, and battle-ready armour. Jill had never seen anything like it before. She had only read about weapons in books. She had never touched or held a real sword. Jill stepped into the room and walked along the walls. Above the racks from which the swords hung were paintings of noble men on horses, swords drawn and pointing in the air. There were paintings of battlefields, with kingly banners upon the heights blowing in the wind.
Jill stopped in front of a small painting set in a gold frame near the centre of the room. The painting was of a young girl on a white horse, who did not look much older than Jill. The girl’s hair was short, cut almost like a boy’s. She wore no armour but for a silver breastplate that had a flower engraved in white gold. The girl held a sword by the flat of the blade, which spread, across both her hands. The sword looked about as long as the girl was tall. Her hands were raised in the air, the sword above her head, as a sunbeam broke through the grey clouds and reflected light off of the edge of her blade. Behind the girl, on horses, were hundreds of men, in full metal, swords and bows drawn, ready to fight.
As Jill stared at the painting, a tear formed in her eye. Jill noticed a caption on the gold frame of the painting as she wiped the tear from her cheek; four simple words in plain text:
Jean d’Arc, heroine.
Jill felt heat and courage swell in her heart, a sensation she did not try to conjure up or to understand. Underneath the painting was a metal blade, almost the size of Jill, like the one in the painting. Before she could think, Jill put out her hand to touch the blade, which hung from the wooden rack toward the floor. She gripped the hilt of the sword and thrust her arms upward to release the weapon from the rack. Soon the hilt was over her head, the end of the blade pointing to the floor at her shins. Jill could hear her heart pounding loudly in her ears, her body tingled with excitement.
That’s when she realized the sword was much too heavy for her to hold alone, and the adrenaline coursing through her body, which had helped Jill pull the sword off the rack, would not help her hold the blade over her head much longer. Jill leaned forward and tried to slowly set the sword back on its rack, but she leaned too far. Her knees buckled beneath her as the sword pulled her upper body toward the ground. Jill looked between her feet when she heard the sound of spliced wood, not unlike the sharp, clear sound of wood being cut by an axe. The weight of the sword no longer pulled at her muscles. The hilt of the sword now stood midway between her waist and shoulder, a length of the blade had disappeared beyond the plane of the wooden floor.
Jill swallowed the lump in her throat when she realized how close the blade had come to slicing through her foot. She scolded herself before she stepped up to the sword and tried to pull it loose from the floor. It would not budge. Jill gave the sword a few more tugs then gave up trying. She sat on the floor and wiped away the drops of sweat that had formed on her forehead.
Feeling sheepish, she stood back up once she caught her breath, and looked at the painting again. “Well Jean d’Arc, guess I’ll have to come back later. I’ll have to figure a way to get the sword out from the floor. Until then, keep an eye on it for me, OK? Whoever you are, you sure make an impression.”
With that, Jill turned from the wall and walked back to the door and out of the room. There were only three other rooms in the hallway. The next door Jill came to was The Study. Convinced there could be nothing of interest and no treasure behind that door, she moved across the hall to a door that said Private in large letters. The words were written on a wooden sign that was different then all the other names of the rooms marking the other doors. Underneath the letters was an eyehole set in the wood so that a person on the other side of the door could check to see who waited outside of it in the hallway. Instantly curious as to what lay inside, Jill knocked twice. After what seemed like a few minutes, Jill, satisfied she had honoured the privacy of whoever might be inside the room, turned the knob and pushed against the door to open it. The doorknob would not turn. It was locked.
Frustrated, Jill pushed her ear against the door to test if she could hear any sound inside. She heard no sound at all.
“Well, Jill, you have two options, you can either kick the door down and see what’s inside, or obey the sign on the door.”
Jill briefly thought of running back to The Armoury and finding a small sword or battering ram, but was only half serious. As she turned away from the door, she decided to peer inside the eyehole and look in. She stood on her tiptoes and pressed her cheek into the door, then, shut her left eye tightly like she had just bit into a lemon and opened her other eye really wide. Jill moved her eye back and forth. She couldn’t see much at all. What she could see was fuzzy and distorted, like looking through a magnifying glass backwards, underwater, with very little light.
To Jill, it looked like there was some furniture against the walls, and candles burning in the centre of the room. Just as she was about to step away from the door, Jill thought she saw something move. A dark object in the corner? Before she focused her eye to the corner of the room where she saw the shadow move, her legs started to cramp and she had to return, flat-footed, to the floor. Jill realized she had been holding her breath the whole time she looked through the eyehole. After a few moments, Jill got back on her toes and looked through the eyehole.
When she peered through the glass hole, her breath stopped: she looked directly into a big, green eyeball! Jill fell back from the door and walked quickly toward the other rooms, keeping her eye on the door the whole time. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” Jill said weakly. “I was just curious to see if anyone else was in the house. I’m a visitor here. I thought I was alone.”
Silence. Jill took a step toward the door and cleared her throat. “I said I’m new here. I thought I was alone. My name is Jill. Hello?” Under her breath, she said, more as a question to herself, “Am I just imagining things?”
Jill stepped up to the door again, over her surprise. She knocked, but no one answered. She pressed her ear against the door, but heard nothing. Finally, she forced herself to look once more, through the eyehole. She peered through it for only a moment. In that brief glance, she noticed the candlelight in the middle of the room had been snuffed out. She saw only darkness: no moving shadows, no furniture, and to her relief, no eyeball. Only the hazy rounded view of a magnifying glass held backward underwater with no light.
Jill felt comforted to tell herself that nothing and no one was behind the door. She did a good job convincing herself she was just letting her imagination get the best of her, but could not shake, completely, the feeling that she was not alone in the house. The butterflies in her stomach and the beat of her heart told her otherwise.
© 2024 Andrew Kooman. All rights reserved.
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About Andrew Kooman
Andrew Kooman is a Canadian writer of fiction, poetry, plays, and films. His work has been enjoyed by audiences around the world and translated into lots of different languages.
He’s the author of the children’s books Popcorn Helmet and Simple Christmas Spectacular, the first two books in the Ramsey P. Heaton, Future Billionaire series. Andrew likes to make people laugh in church. His popular plays and skits are performed across North America and can be purchased at SkitGuys.com.
Andrew founded UnveilTV with his brothers Matthew and Daniel, where you can watch content that inspires you. You can follow all of Andrew’s latest work on his weekly newsletter Things I Wrote Down and find him on X and Instagram.