The Secret Room
The Secret Room
Antonia Michaelis
Translated from the German
by Mollie Hosmer-Dillard
Copyright © 2012 by Antonia Michaelis
Translation © 2012 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Originally published in German as Das Adoptivzimmer © 2004.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Michaelis, Antonia.
[Adoptivzimmer. English]
The secret room / Antonia Michaelis; translated from the German by Mollie Hosmer-Dillard.
p. cm.
Summary: “Achim, an orphan, is adopted and brought to his new home, where he discovers a magical room leading to another world—the world of the dead and the Nameless One, who is keeping his adopted parents’ dead son hostage. Only Achim can try to set him free”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-61608-960-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
[1. Orphans—Fiction. 2. Adoption—Fiction. 3. Dead—Fiction. 4. Supernatural— Fiction. 5. Grief—Fiction.] I. Hosmer-Dillard, Mollie. II. Title.
PZ7.M5798274Ad 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2012015601
ISBN: 978-1-61608-960-3
Printed in the United States of America
Cover and interior illustrations: Birgit Brandt
For the adopted boy who took out the garbage
so that he couldn’t be given back.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
In which a collision takes place
and a door is discovered
Chapter 2
In which I create shards
and someone is standing at the window
Chapter 3
In which I make a difficult
decision and learn to fly
Chapter 4
In which the sea is capped in white
and a song gives me a warning
Chapter 5
In which I wander through a tiled labyrinth
and have an asthma attack
Chapter 6
In which I encounter the Nameless One,
climb a ladder, and start to fall
Chapter 7
In which I stop falling
and see the inside of a nut
Chapter 8
In which Ines and I go shopping,
and I come to an astounding conclusion
Chapter 9
In which I sit in a cage
without a key
Chapter 10
In which I go for a walk in a tree at night
and make a bouquet of flowers
Chapter 11
In which I soak a sofa
and open lots of cages
Chapter 12
In which a fight takes place in a storm
and the tower collapses
Chapter 13
In which a kitchen utensil plays a key role
Afterword
CHAPTER 1
In which a collision takes place and
a door is discovered
I should have known.
My name is Achim, I’m eleven years old, and on that summer day when Karl was chasing me around with a piece of soggy bread, I should have known that my life would never be the same.
But I didn’t know. I woke up and didn’t know. I looked out the window onto the yard, where fog was rising from the field, and I didn’t know.
I still didn’t know when I pulled the blankets off Karl so that he wouldn’t stay in bed till next Christmas.
If this was a story that I had made up, I would tell it differently. I would say that the night before, I had had a strange dream ...
But I hadn’t.
I wasn’t expecting anything. I didn’t feel any differently than usual, not even for a split second. Instead, I rushed down the stairs just as quickly as ever so that I’d beat Karl to the breakfast room. The breakfast room was part of the orphanage where Karl and I lived.
It was a totally normal orphanage, or, well, I don’t really know what an abnormal orphanage looks like. Anyway, ours was just fine.
There was a big yard with apple trees, a television room, a basement where we had parties sometimes, and lots of nice little rooms with two or four beds in them.
And of course there were a bunch of grown-ups who made sure that we didn’t make campfires in the nice little rooms and that we brushed our teeth and got on the bus to school every morning.
Some of the grown-ups, like Maria for instance, were really nice. But they weren’t parents.
That’s what we all wanted: big, strong parents. A father who was a pilot, a train engineer, or a Nobel Prize winner, and a mother who baked hot rolls and who could eat any teacher alive. Siblings weren’t so necessary.
That morning, Karl shaped a small piece of bread into a little boat, with jam portholes and everything, and set it into his cup to float in his hot cocoa.
“Achim,” he announced. “I’ve decided. I’m going to be a sailor.”
“A sailor?” I asked skeptically and watched as the bread boat soaked up cocoa and slowly began to sink.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Karl. “And then I’m going to discover the twelfth continent. All by myself. You don’t need parents to do that.”
“What are the other eleven continents?” I asked suspiciously. “There aren’t that many of them.”
“By then there will be.” He grinned. “By then someone will have definitely discovered another couple.”
“You’re crazy,” I replied, smiling.
“Really? I am?” Karl was leisurely fishing the half-sunken boat out of his cup so he could throw it at me—but I didn’t wait around for him to do it.
I had already jumped up, dove under the table, come out on the other side, and started running.
“Just you wait!” I heard Karl call out from behind me. Some grown-up tried to stop us, but we slipped under his arms and, in a fit of giggling, dashed back and forth through the aisles.
At some point I zipped around a corner and was suddenly face to face with the front door and the green, sunlit yard behind it.
I was so caught up in running away and laughing and being scared of him catching me that I didn’t even notice that someone was standing there.
In the doorway.
I didn’t notice until I ran right into him.
He was a man, a pretty tall man, but I had been running so fast that I knocked him to the ground. A moment later we were both lying on the gravel path.
“I—I,” I stammered and sat up, gasping for breath. “I’m sorry, I...”
The man was looking at his hands and picking a few small, sharp pebbles out of his palms. He had curly black hair and looked at me with solemn gray eyes.
“And you are ... ?” he asked.
“A-Achim,” I stuttered. “My—my name is Achim.”
He nodded. “My name is Paul. This,” he pointed
his outstretched arm toward the front door, “this is Ines.”
I looked over at the door. Maria was standing there with a woman I didn’t know. Maria had grabbed hold of Karl and wrapped her arms around him so that he couldn’t get away.
The other woman was small and thin and pale. She had lots of freckles and her red hair was coiled into an unruly bun behind her head.
And all three of them were staring at us. Maria and Karl and the new woman too.
“This is Mr. and Mrs. Ribbek,” said Maria, as if that explained anything.
“Ah,” I said, as if I understood.
“We were just about to go look for you,” continued Maria, “because Mr. and Mrs. Ribbek have come here to get to know you.”
Then I didn’t say anything, not even “ah.”
Because no one had ever come to the orphanage to get to know me.
I had lived here for ages, since I was really little. But as a baby, I had been sick all the time. I was always coughing, and of course no one wants a baby that doesn’t work right when you take it home.
Maria’s always saying: “Achim, it’s a miracle that you’ve grown so tall. I remember the period when we thought you might be leaving us for good.”
But I hadn’t.
I got taller and paler and stayed sick. For a long time I thought that they weren’t distributing the air fairly, and I complained to Maria that I got so little of it. She laughed and said, “That’s your asthma.”
And I got an inhaler to help prevent asthma attacks and was really proud of it for a while. But not for long.
Sometimes people would come to the orphanage, choose one of the children, and take him out for ice cream, or to the movies, or to the park. Every weekend. The kids would laugh and wave as they drove away, and sometimes they went away with the people forever. I would stand at the fence with my inhaler and watch them go, feeling sad. Because no matter how often I pressed the inhaler, it couldn’t conjure up any people who wanted to go with me to the park or take me away forever.
Karl stood with me at the fence. No one wanted him either, even though he was big and strong and not at all sick. It’s like this: I think it’s really hard for Karl to be in a family. People have tried. Three or four times. He came back every time.
I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe he’s too big and too strong. Maybe he spun the mother and father through the air till they were dizzy.
I looked at the man with the curly black hair, the one named Paul, and wondered if he was feeling a little dizzy.
He was opening and closing his mouth and saying something, but I didn’t understand. I was tingling with excitement, my hands were damp, and my knees were trembling. These people wanted to get to know me.
I couldn’t mess this up. Otherwise the man and the woman would turn around and never come back.
“Wha-wo-would you also like to get to know Karl?” I said finally.
“Why not?” replied the woman with the red hair who smiled with all of her freckles. I could suddenly hear again, and slowly my knees stopped trembling.
“We could go get some ice cream,” said the man with the curls. “Or to the movies, or the park.”
So that’s how I got to know Ines and Paul, or how they got to know me. They came every weekend, all through summer vacation, and Ines brought her freckles and Paul brought his solemn gray eyes. And I, I made sure that Karl was never left behind, standing sadly at the fence.
All four of us were there for all of our excursions. We learned to say “Ines” and “Paul” to Ines and Paul, which was hard for me. Almost as hard as learning to ride a bike. Karl was much better at it. He was also better at playing ball in the park and better at singing aloud in the car, but the tradeoff was that he would sometimes drop his ice cream cone, and at the movies he would get so excited that he would crush the popcorn bag and the popcorn together into a big clump.
Ines and Paul didn’t seem to mind. I was never really sure what to make of them. Somehow they were a little crazy. When we played ball they sometimes fought like children, and other times they would fling chocolate sauce at one another—and I remember how Ines once wrestled Paul to the ground and sat on him, just because he claimed that she had bad aim.
The grown-ups at the school and at the orphanage were totally different.
Maybe grown-ups were like soda: there were all different kinds...
And then came the evening when Paul and Ines didn’t get into their car right away. Karl had already rushed off to find out what was for dinner, and I just wanted to say goodbye so I could go after him—but then Paul gently took me by the arm.
“Achim,” he said.
I looked up at him. His gray eyes looked more solemn than usual, and he didn’t look like he was going to be flinging chocolate sauce at anyone anytime soon. “Achim, we wanted to ask you something.”
“What is it?” I squirmed in his grasp. He wasn’t holding me tightly—it was more that I was squirming on the inside. I was starting to get an idea of what he wanted to say.
It welled up like a bubble in some soda and waited to burst on the surface.
“We’ll be back next Sunday,” said Ines. “And we wanted to know...”
She fell silent. Paul took a deep breath. “Would you like to come with us?” he asked finally. “Next Sunday? With us ... to our house?”
I swallowed.
“You know that we live sort of far away,” Ines added. “But we have a yard too, like the one here. With pears and cherries and blackberries.”
“And the ocean’s really close by,” said Paul.
I swallowed again. “But I have to go to school again soon,” I said. “It would be impossible if I were so far away.”
“You can go to the school near us,” answered Ines.
I swallowed a third time.
“Does that mean that you want me to really ... I mean, you want me to live with you?”
They both nodded.
I looked back at the orphanage, where Karl and Maria were standing in the doorway. So everyone had known but me. Karl waved and nodded, his head bouncing up and down, and he gave me two thumbs up.
I turned my gaze from Karl’s big, friendly figure in the doorway and said “okay” very quietly, because I knew that’s what everyone expected me to say.
But I actually didn’t want to leave Karl and Maria and the jungle gym and the apple trees in the yard.
On the weekends—sure. But not forever.
The next few days went by much too quickly.
Maria would tell me now and then that she was working on a lot of paperwork for me and that there were always new letters from Paul and Ines with documents and forms that they had filled out and checked and signed.
“It’s all very complicated,” said Maria, “because first you have to determine whether you’re really allowed to adopt a child.”
I didn’t know that. Most of the kids in the orphanage still had parents somewhere. But someone had decided that they weren’t good parents—maybe there was some kind of test that they hadn’t passed?—and that’s why their children were here.
I thought that in my case they could save themselves the trouble. My parents were just dead, plain and simple, and had been for an awfully long time.
But still, I was happy that there was paperwork. Because it meant that I got to stay a little longer with Karl and Maria and the yard with the apple trees.
Then it was Friday.
Karl and I were sitting in the doorway, looking out at the evening, and all of a sudden I let out a heavy sigh.
“Karl,” I said, “you know, you can have them instead of me, if you want. I don’t want them at all. I mean, they’re nice and everything, but I would rather stay here. They wouldn’t want to keep me for very long anyway. When they find out that I have asthma and stuff, they’ll definitely give me back... you go with them.”
Karl took my shoulders and shook me a little, and because he’s so strong, it really knocked me around.
“Yo
u’ve gone totally bonkers,” he replied, smiling. “They want you, don’t you get it? You’re gonna have your own room and a bunch of stuff and—man! You should be happy about it!”
“I’m trying,” I said quietly. “It just hasn’t been working too well.”
As I stood waiting in the parking lot with my suitcase on Saturday, it started to rain. That was okay with me, because I felt like rain.
The Ribbeks’ red car was in the driveway, stopped in the middle of a puddle.
“Write to me,” said Karl.
Paul smiled and clapped Karl’s shoulder as if he really were a sailor and stuffed my suitcase into the car. I think I said goodbye, somehow. And then I was looking out at the rain through the car window.
The car roared like a moose when it started up.
Behind the curtain of rain, Karl and Maria were standing and waving from under a large, ugly umbrella. Maria had her arm around Karl and had pulled him close. I thought, They look so sad.
And so did I, on the inside.
Eventually the orphanage disappeared behind a curve and a little later we turned onto the highway.
We drove all day. I sat in the back seat and pressed my nose flat against the window and got sadder and sadder the farther the car took me from Karl and Maria and their old umbrella.
My small, green suitcase was in the back of the car, with my toothbrush and my old, tattered toy dog Lucas (who I was actually already too old for), and my blue-and-white striped pajamas.
They were the same pajamas that all the boys in the orphanage had.
My whole life I had wanted pajamas that were my very own, a pair of pajamas that no one else had. Now I took some comfort in the thought that later that night, Karl and I would both get into our beds wearing blue-and-white stripes.
It was raining so hard outside that the trees were bending over, like they wanted to take shelter under themselves.
The radio was playing sad songs in a language I didn’t understand, so Paul turned it off and began to talk instead. He talked about his job as a teacher, a teacher for adults who couldn’t speak English. And Ines talked about flowers and grasses and the shop where she sold them. Even though I knew all of that already. After that, they talked about their house and how nice it was, and then they talked about their town ...