But Gran did not have these thoughts. His thoughts, instead, concerned getting the door open again, and helping Catalina Catalan. Because it seemed to him that a classmate who was descending a path inside a hollow hill would probably need his help.
So Gran went about trying to get the door open again. It didn’t seem difficult; he knew where the opening had been. But now, as he ran his fingers up and down the hillside, he saw nothing. No crack, no evidence of a door. It was as if there had never been any opening at all. The hill was seamless, just a regular mass of dirt and grass.
Gran ran his hands all over the side of the hill, getting dirt under his fingernails and mud all over his hands. He stirred up the pathways of ants and worms, but saw nothing like a door.
It was impossible. Seconds ago, Catalina had entered this hillside through some door that was no longer there. Gran stood, breathed deeply. He found his eyes welling. He wasn’t sure if it was the cold wind or his own frustration. Where was Catalina? Was she trapped inside?
No. She hadn’t looked trapped. The last he’d seen of her, she was descending a stairway with the same confidence and purpose she demonstrated wherever she went. She knew exactly what she was doing and where she was going.
At dinner that night, Gran was there but not there. The food tasted like paste and the words his mother and sister spoke were muted, seeming a thousand miles away. The phone rang, and Gran understood that his father was calling and wanted to talk to him and Maisie, but Gran was too distracted. His mother let Maisie meow into the phone for a few minutes, but when it was his turn, Gran didn’t feel like talking to his father. He brushed his teeth afterward and went to bed. Or maybe he didn’t brush his teeth. He couldn’t remember.
Gran couldn’t sleep. The events cycled through his mind. He’d followed Catalina across the valley, turned the corner, and she was gone. He found the opening in the hillside and saw her inside—inside the hill!—descending some earthen stairway in an amber light. Then the door closed and it was as if it had never been there.
But what if the door hadn’t been there? What if she hadn’t been there? The most logical explanation was that he hadn’t seen any of this. That he’d followed her, gotten hit on the head with a branch, and had a bunch of bizarre daydreams.
But that was even more ridiculous.
He hadn’t been hit by any branch.
He’d seen what he’d seen.
He knew Catalina had been there, and that the door had been real. It was as real as his bed, his house, his sister sleeping next to him.
He knew he would not sleep that night. He knew he would not be able to concentrate. Not until he figured this out.
So he sat up.
He put his feet on the floor.
And he made the most interesting decision of his life.
He got dressed.
He decided he would go back to the spot, that night, and prove that either he was crazy or that he’d actually seen what he thought he’d seen.
But he’d never left the house after bedtime before. His mother would worry. Then again, she was a sound sleeper. She never stirred when he or Maisie made noise in the night. She wouldn’t wake up tonight, either—not even if he left through the front door.
He looked at the time on his digital clock.
It read 11:11.
He crept downstairs.
Through the dark hallway.
Around the dark corner.
And into the dark kitchen.
He decided that the creaky front door might wake Maisie, and Maisie might wake their mother, so he went through the dog door in the kitchen—they didn’t have a dog, but the previous tenants had. He poked his head through, then one shoulder, then the other. It was good to be small.
He was out in the night. It was cold, and still blustery, the wind wild. The gusts went south, then north, then seemed to spin in place, making tiny tornadoes before giving up and moving in some new direction. The wind could not make up its mind.
Gran made his way to the side of the garage, where he’d left his bike, but found its back tire flat. It was almost a mile to the hill where he’d last seen Catalina. Could he really walk all the way there and back? He had no choice. This was a night where sleep was impossible.
So he set out, staying off the main streets; he didn’t want some concerned parent or police officer to see him and wonder what he was doing out so late. He cut through parks and two graveyards and across the parking lot next to the abandoned mill. He saw animals run into the woods, he heard the hoarse barking of dogs, the shrill yowls of cats fighting.
And finally he arrived at the valley. He took the same path he had earlier that day, but now, in the moonlight, all was stark, stage-lit. The shadows were black, the path the palest blue. He knew he should be afraid but some more powerful feeling within him—maybe purpose, maybe curiosity—was dulling his fear.
Before he rounded the corner of the final hill, he paused. The last time he’d been there he’d seen something impossible: a door where a door didn’t belong. His only friend—it was so odd to think of Catalina Catalan this way, given they’d only spoken once—had disappeared down golden steps inside a hill. Now what would happen? It seemed that anything was possible. Explosions, aliens, talking trees.
But no. That didn’t make sense, he told himself. This was a specific kind of strange. Asecret door, a path known by Catalina. He resolved to check the hill one more time and then, if there was still no sign of the door he’d seen earlier, he would wait. He would wait and see if it changed, if anything changed. He would wait for Catalina.
There was no door. Gran checked and checked, running his fingers over the hill like a lunatic.
So he sat. He sat in front of the hill, watching it. He felt silly, sitting there in the night watching a hill, but he knew he needed to stay—if only to think this through.
So he sat and stayed as the night swirled around him. He was cold and blew hot air into his hands. The wind continued to whistle. The musty smells of animals distant and near filled the air. The swoosh of air passing through a willow down the slope. The squeal of a car’s brakes somewhere on the other side of the valley. Then a siren.
He checked his watch and saw it was almost midnight. His father had given him this watch; it was one of the few things Gran could remember his father personally picking out. Usually shopping for birthdays and Christmas was done by Gran’s mom, who loved toys and parties, and always knew what to get and how to wrap it. But every so often Gran’s father would take an interest in a gift. Two years ago, when Gran had asked for a watch, his father had given him this one. It had a silver face and a blue cloth strap, and to Gran it was the perfect weight, the perfect size, and unerring in its accuracy. On the back, Gran’s father had engraved GRANITE, MY ROCK. LOVE, DAD.
An hour earlier, Gran had thought it impossible that he’d ever sleep again, but now he felt his eyes growing heavy. He closed his coat around his chest and brought his knees to his chin. He shivered and felt the wind shoot through his clothes and through his skin, chilling his bones. He knew he was miserable. He’d heard the word miserable before, but only now did he understand what it meant. To be outside, and cold, and have no way to get warm: this was misery. It was ridiculous. He didn’t have to be here. He had a home. It was warm and he could go to it. He didn’t have to be out here freezing.
By midnight, it seemed obvious. He had imagined it. Had he taken a nap after school, on the couch, and during that nap had he dreamed of this hill and its secret door?
Yes. It was the only answer.
But it was the wrong answer. Now your narrator is speaking, and I am here to tell you that Gran did indeed see what he thought he had seen. He saw it as clearly as you saw him seeing it.
But the human brain does a funny thing sometimes. When we see something that so conflicts with our everyday expectations of the world, sometimes our brains find a way to explain it away, or even to forget it. And this is what Gran did this night, as he shivered in front of t
he hill where Catalina Catalan had disappeared.
He forced himself to forget what had happened.
But this was wrong. Forgetting something like that is wrong. It’s never good to forget unforgettable things.
But in this case it was okay, because at that moment, one minute after twelve, the door opened again.
That is, where there had been no door, now there was a door. The grass and dirt and weeds of the hill moved outward, and the same golden light Gran had seen earlier that day was now, in the dark of night, shining out from the doorway.
Gran didn’t move. He didn’t breathe or blink.
The door opened a foot wide, and Gran saw a familiar boot emerge and land on the path. He knew this shoe, wet with fresh mud, was Catalina’s. Then a hand emerged, holding the hill-door open, and finally the full form of Catalina Catalan appeared in silhouette. She stood, and then turned to close the door behind her. She did it silently, and when the door was closed—just like before—there was no sign that a door had ever been there. Still, she carefully ran her hands along the edge, where the door had opened, as if to disguise the last signs of its recent existence.
Then she turned around, saw Gran, and screamed.
She backed away against the hillside. Even in the dark, Gran could see the whites of her eyes.
“It’s me,” Gran said. “Just me.”
Now Catalina had her hand on her heart and seemed to realize that it was just Gran. Just a boy.
“Why are you here?” she managed to say.
During his long walk, and during his hours of waiting, Gran had been rehearsing what to say to her. He was ready to tell her the truth.
“I’ve been following you,” he said. “And earlier today I saw you go in there.” He pointed to the hill, which now had no door. It seemed ludicrous that he would be claiming she’d emerged from it. “And so I came back tonight and waited.”
She stared hard at him for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Catalina started walking away, back into town. He ran after her.
“This is bad,” she said, striding purposefully through the moonlit dark. “So, so bad.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t tell. But what is it? Where’d you go? What’s the tunnel? Who put the lights up? Where does it lead? What about that room?”
“Please leave me alone,” she said.
“I promise not to tell.”
“Go away.”
Gran stopped. He never liked to be where he was not wanted.
“This is so bad,” she said again and again as she walked away. “This is so so so so so bad.”
But Gran thought it was good.
Even as Catalina walked quickly away from him, down the path and through a patch of woods that Gran didn’t know, he was happy. So many good new things had happened, and these things made him feel alive and very tall and very strong.
He’d seen her. She’d seen him.
There was actually a door to the hill.
There was a tunnel inside the door, steps leading from the tunnel down to a grand cavern below.
He wasn’t crazy.
He wasn’t invisible.
And most importantly, Catalina Catalan had spoken to him again.
So he walked home alone, snuck back inside, and dropped into his bed. He fell asleep sometime near daybreak. When his mother called him for breakfast, his head felt as heavy and full of mush as a prize pumpkin. He couldn’t lift it off the pillow.
Was it Saturday? He couldn’t remember.
It was Saturday. He yelled downstairs, begging to sleep more, and his mother allowed it.
But he didn’t sleep. He replayed everything from the night before in his mind. He was electrified. Nothing like this had ever happened to him. Had it ever happened to anyone? He thought there was a real possibility that Catalina was the first to discover a new world, inside our normal world, and that he was the second.
When Gran finally got out of bed, just before noon, he came down the stairs to find his mother and Maisie at the kitchen table, licking envelopes and applying stamps to them.
“Just in time to help,” his mother said. She was in a bright mood. Her hands were busy, her eyes alight.
The envelopes bore the words YES ON PROPOSITIONS P&S. Into the envelopes, his mother and Maisie were stuffing folded letters explaining the propositions and why they mattered. “Save Our Parks and Schools!” the letter said in bold letters. Gran was relieved. Over the past few years, he’d learned that his mother was happier when she was involved in the community.
Civic engagement, she called it. In their old town, she’d helped stop a power plant, located a mile down the shore, from polluting the ocean. During that campaign, she’d been a force of nature, working sixty hours a week, getting Gran and Maisie involved. They dropped off flyers all over town, and though not everyone agreed with them, there was something fun about all those doors opening, seeing his mother talking to all those strangers, making so many of them friends.
“I kept seeing the signs around town,” she said. “So I called up Phyllis Feeley and she signed me up. I’m already on the Steering Committee. And already have a phone tree. Anytime anything happens in town that has anything to do with Propositions P&S, we call each other.”
Gran was relieved to see his mother involved again, and relieved, too, to finally know what Propositions P&S were. But this was followed by confusion.
“Who doesn’t want to save the parks and schools?” he asked her.
“You’d be surprised,” she said.
The phone rang. Gran’s mother answered. She spoke for a moment, and the conversation ended gently. The phone rang again, but this time the brief conversation ended abruptly. Gran’s mother’s face looked alarmed by whatever words had come through the phone.
“See, that was an example,” she said, after composing herself. “The first call was from one of the supporters of P&S. She was very sweet. The second call was someone against P&S and for M&H. He knew I was helping P&S, so he said some mean things to me and hung up. People have lost their manners over all this.”
“What are Propositions M&H?” Maisie asked. She didn’t quite get the word Propositions right, though. Coming from her five-year-old mouth, it sounded more like Popozinis.
“Well, sweetie,” Gran’s mother explained, “remember how I said people who support P&S want to spend money on parks and schools?”
Maisie smiled and nodded.
“Well, there’s another side, led by Dr. Walter Woolford. He’s on the city council, and he says there’s no more funding available for parks and schools. He says that the money should go to other things that he considers more pressing.”
“Like what?” Gran asked.
“Moose attack prevention,” Gran’s mother said. “That’s what Propositions M&H are. He believes that the town is surrounded by moose, and that they are responsible for much of what ails the town. That’s Proposition M—the acknowledgment that moose are a big problem. Accordingly, he proposes that the town should buy a helicopter, and have it fly over the town at all times, so we can see the moose before they get into the town to attack it. That’s H, for helicopter.”
“Wait,” Gran said. “Do moose attack people and towns?”
“No,” Gran’s mother said. “Not that I know of. But Dr. Woolford has the town in an uproar about it. Some people are very scared.”
“But are there any moose around here at all?” Gran asked.
“There is no evidence of any moose anywhere around here in recorded history,” she said. “But Woolford says he’s a doctor, and that doctors well know that prevention is the best medicine. He says this goes especially for moose.”
As Gran’s mother had been explaining the threat of a moose attack, Maisie’s face had darkened.
“But what if they do attack?” she finally asked.
“They can’t,” Gran’s mother said. “There aren’t any moose within a thousand miles of here.”
/> Maisie’s eyes were now wet, and her face was red. “I want the helicopter!” she wailed, and ran up to the room she shared with Gran.
“Can you go up and see about her?” Gran’s mother asked.
Gran was on his way up the stairs when the phone rang again. He heard his mother gasp.
“You’ll never believe this,” his mother said. She hung up the phone. “That was the phone tree. A house up the block collapsed. Look.”
She pointed out the front window. Gran saw dozens of neighbors walking briskly up the hill.
“Can I go?” Gran asked.
“Yes, but stay safe,” his mother said.
Gran ran out the door and followed the crowd up the road and over, in the direction of the school. He saw a hundred people massed at the corner. It was a confusing scene, because Gran was sure he knew this block, and that on that very corner was the narrow burgundy wooden house where the pair of sisters lived. But now there was no house.
When Gran got closer and squeezed through the throng to see what everyone was seeing, he saw the narrow burgundy house, but a disassembled version of it, like a puzzle dumped on the floor. There was a window over here, and over there a door. There was a part of the roof, attached to a part of the chimney. And in the mess, there were the remains of the two lawn signs, YES ON PROPOSITIONS P&S and its opposite.
The destruction looked a bit like the work of a twister. But Gran knew this wasn’t tornado country—or earthquake country.
“Poor Therése and Theresa,” a woman in front of Gran said, blowing her nose into a pink tissue.