Page 7 of A Midnight Kiss on Ever After Street
‘There is.’
I wait an abnormally long time for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t. ‘Are you going to show me?’
‘Wasn’t planning on it.’
‘Seriously?’ I put my hands on my hips and give him the sternest look possible with half my face obscured by the mask. ‘You can’t say something like that and not show me.’
‘Maybe you should tell me why you’re poking around looking for a secret room.’
‘I wasn’t poking around.’ I slip the book I’m holding back onto its shelf to make completely sure that it doesn’t look like I was poking around, and then sigh because I was clearly poking around and he caught me red-handed. ‘Because the castle’s being sold and this might be my last chance. It’s like something from a fairy tale and I just wanted to know what it was like before it’s gone for good.’
‘Do you know what secret rooms around here hide? Ghosts, monsters, and spiders, and the only fairy-tale-ish thing likely to be here are the villains.’
‘I’d still like to see.’ I fold my arms. Surely no one can be so bad-mannered that they’d tell of a secret room but then refuse to show it?
His blue eyes run over me again for a minute and he shakes his head as though he thinks I’ve got a screw loose, and I’m certain he’s going to ask me to leave again.
‘May I?’ He holds a hand out towards the room, as if he’s asking my permission to come in, and I nod. Maybe he is a gentleman after all.
He steps down from the doorway and bumps into one of the tables and sets the lamp on it wobbling. ‘Sorry.’ He turns around to steady it, and I’m unsure if he’s apologising to me or to the lamp. Preferably the latter because I do that all the time, and apologising to inanimate objects makes him seem endearing and less standoffish than he has up until now.
‘Let’s see if I can remember where it was…’ he mumbles to himself as he goes to one of the bookcases on the opposite side of the room and runs exceptionally long fingers across the spines. ‘It was red. Purple? Brown? No, definitely red, up here somewhere…’
I love people who talk to themselves because it’s another thing I do all the time too.
He seems uneasy as he examines the shelves and then beckons me over. ‘For future reference, when looking for decoy books, the designers are often concerned they’ll forget which book is the decoy and leave certain clues for themselves…’ His finger rests on a red-spined leathery looking book, with gold printing for the title and author name.
‘Decoy by I. M. NotABook,’ I read aloud and then burst out laughing. ‘Oh my God, that’s brilliant. The previous owners must’ve had a cracking sense of humour.’
‘There’s a trick to this. Pull down and then to the left…’ He sounds as if he’s trying to remember it as he pulls the book forwards and down by the top of the spine, and then jolts it to the left. There’s a creaking noise and the unmistakable click of a lock opening, and the bookcase to my right shifts backwards slightly.
This castle is incredible. It really does have secret rooms! Talk about everything I dreamed it would be and more. If I didn’t love it already, I’d have fallen in love with it just for that. I go over and push on the shelf and it swings open to reveal a staircase that passes a window and curves upwards, like it’s some sort of tower.
And hasn’t been opened for many, many years.
I jump backwards as dust fills the air and a musty smell seeps in from the open doorway, and a spider scurries out of sight. I wave away cobwebs and peer upwards, but it’s dark outside and the window doesn’t let in enough light to see around the curve of the stairs.
My new friend stands next to me, keeping a respectable distance between us. ‘Well, the cleaners this week certainly didn’t find it. There you go, now you’ve seen it.’
‘Are you kidding? You’ve opened a bookcase to a secret room and you want to walk away?’ I raise an eyebrow and only then realise it’s ineffective with the mask on. ‘I’m going up. I’m not afraid of a few cobwebs.’
‘Your beautiful dress might be.’
I blush for no real reason. ‘Better cobwebs than the stuffy atmosphere downstairs.’
He lets out a laugh and then looks surprised that it managed to escape. He shakes his head and ducks through the doorway, taking the steps three at a time in long strides until he reaches the window, does something fiddly with the lock, and opens it, letting in the cool night air. He looks upwards and swipes a hand across the stairway, dragging down cobwebs heavy with dust.
He hasn’t invited me, but I follow him up the stairs. The walls are stone, the wooden boards of the staircase are a graveyard for dead woodlice, and his shoes leave footprints in the unidentifiable grime that’s settled in a layer over the floor. The stairs spiral around like we really are ascending a tower, and at the top, he fumbles until he finds a switch and a bare bulb flickers into life. Floorboards creak under our feet and I stand at the top of the stairs and look around as he crosses the room and throws open another window.
It’s a bedroom. A round bedroom at the top of a tower, like something out of a fairy tale. There’s a four-poster bed, a comfy-looking sofa that looks as if it was custom-made to fit the curve of the wall, bookshelves full of dusty books, and shelves of knick-knacks, stacked up board games and Lego sets from decades gone by. The air is thick with disturbed dust and I can feel it making my chest tight, so I go and stand next to him at the window and take a few gulps of fresh air.
There’s a moth-eaten item of clothing that may have once been a T-shirt on a chair nearby. He shakes it out and I stand back while he dusts the window ledge with it, and then leans on his elbows and looks out, pulling his suit sleeves up further and exposing more of his arms.
Even his wrists are gorgeous. What am I saying? The dust in this room must be scrambling my brain. I’ve never thought someone’swristsare sexy before in my life.
I put my hands on the window ledge and push myself up until I can see as far out as possible, and I’m looking down into the courtyard, past the gabled roofs of the lower parts of the castle. Wow. We’re in the first tower, the one that overlooks Ever After Street, and even though it feels high from up here, it’s one of the shortest towers at the front of the castle.
Just being here makes me want to spin around in a circle and sing ‘When Will My Life Begin?’ fromTangled. ‘It’s just like Rapunzel’s tower.’
