Januariad

David came across the knob while clearing old clothes out of the topmost shelf in his wardrobe. It was fixed, but with that slightly flexible quality that suggested a spring in tension. Feeling the wooden wardrobe wall behind it, he found a worn groove arching away from the protrusion and so pushed the knob in that direction. After a moment’s pressure it gave way, and the entire wardrobe swung away from the wall with with a heavy, silent smoothness.

In a small hole behind the wardrobe was a spiral stairway. It occupied almost the full space of a narrow, vertical shaft dropping away into the darkness. David grabbed a wind-up torch from beside his bed and climbed onto the metal stairs, which emitted not so much as a creak.

The space through which he descended was clean, dry and smelled slightly musty. The walls were simply plaster, although of an older, rougher texture than those in his apartment. He estimated from the number of steps that he’d dropped three floors, and this estimation was borne out by the fact that when he arrived at the tiny, light-emitting grille at the bottom of the steps, he found himself peering straight into the bedroom of his neighbour Jessica.

David had never been in Jessica’s bedroom before, but Jessica was there, relaxing in the manner that suggested that the room was hers. She looked to be preparing for bed, having just walked out of the en suite bathroom and removed her earrings, placing them in a dish at the side of her bed. Before David had fully assessed the situation, she began to remove her clothes, and almost involuntarily he yelped her name. ‘Jessica!’

She froze, startled, glancing around, and David was forced to continue. ‘Sorry, sorry. It’s me, David. I didn’t want to see anything I shouldn’t.’ She remained frozen, looking less than reassured, quavering ‘David?’

David shone his small torch around the inside of the wall and located, after a moment, a knob similar to the one in his wardrobe. He pushed it sideways and the grille and a good section of the wall swung outwards into Jessica’s room. He stepped out with his hands raised and she, somehow, appeared both more startled and more relaxed in that one moment.

‘I just found this door in my wardrobe upstairs! It led down here and… ’ he gestured back toward the hole from which he’d emerged. Looking behind him, a piece of the wooden panelling on Jessica’s wall had come away from the rest. The grille through which he’d been looking was a small, gold air vent in the middle of the hidden door.

Jessica sat down on the bed. ‘God! Look at that. My wall just opened up!’ Each paused for a moment regarding the portal. ‘It comes from your wardrobe?’ she said. ‘I think that makes sense. This old period house, chopped up into apartments in the twenties. It’s not unusual for a place of this age to have secret passages.’ Jessica was an architect by trade, and seemed to David to have come to terms with his appearance remarkably quickly.

‘I was thinking that on the way down,’ he said. The place could have been converted without anyone ever discovering these doors. Or bothering to check the hole in the plans. Assumed it was a disused chimney or something.’ She nodded. ‘Would you like to see it?’ he asked.

They tramped up the three stories to his room, and he showed her the knob in his wardrobe, and the huge, silent swinging mechanism. She dated the ironwork spiral staircase to the nineteenth century, and noted down the company imprint to research at work. They returned to her room, talking like excited children. The discovery had an element of play to it.

Jessica closed her door behind David. It clicked into place, returning the wall to seamless wood panelling. ‘So smooth!’ she said. ‘There’s no handle on my side. It’s one-way only. An escape hatch.’

‘I’ll have to go back up the public way,’ laughed David.

‘Not so fast, let’s have a nightcap.’ They walked out to the living room and she opened a bottle of wine. It seemed suddenly strange for him to be in her apartment, now that the passageway had been shut. Their spaces were once again separate and private, and he was a guest now. They drank for two hours, then kissed, then pulled one another back into her bedroom and tried to recapture the childlike excitement of earlier that night. In the morning he left after tea and an agreement to see her again that weekend.

Over the following week, Jessica could not forget the grille in her wall. She found herself glancing towards it, half expecting to see torchlight or to sense movement behind it. She considered speaking to David about how they might seal it, but it seemed ridiculous given what had happened the previous Monday. In the mornings she dried herself after showering, and it seemed almost harmless to imagine an observer. If he was watching her, she thought, it is nothing he hasn’t seen before. These thoughts were only half-comforting.

It was in the evenings that she felt most ill-at-ease. She lay on her bed, reading, and tried to banish images of David standing silently behind the grille, picturing instead the David who would be taking her to dinner that weekend. These anxieties grew most severe when she came to undress for bed. On two nights she even whispered his name at the wall, convinced that he was present, watching her. A second later convinced of her own paranoia.

David would have been hurt had he heard Jessica say his name into an empty room. He would have questioned her opinion of his character, and rightly so. But he wasn’t there either of those times. On the first occasion, he had crept upstairs to use the toilet. The second occurred on his tennis night, the first night that week he had not spent crouched behind the grille, peering into Jessica’s bedroom.