The Secret Room by Antonia Michaelis Page B

a corridor where there were pictures hanging on the walls. Or more precisely: framed photographs. Photographs of people.
    Black and white, of course. What else?
    I stopped in front of some of them to look.
    There was a little girl with long braids. She was sitting on a swing, and a man who must have been her father was pushing her from behind and laughing.
    There was an old man in an armchair with a young man sitting on the armrest and reading aloud to him.
    There were three triplet sisters in old-fashioned knee-highs and mini-skirts in front of a building that might have been a school. There were two men fishing and a huge family gathering in a garden.
    I noticed that there were no pictures that showed people all by themselves.
    The people in the pictures were always in groups, and they always seemed to have close relationships with one another.
    The feather pulled me on, as if it were impatient. The farther we went, the stronger its pull became.
    â€œWhere are we trying to get to?” I asked it, but my voice was so surprisingly loud in the empty corridors that I clapped my hand over my mouth, like I had said something I wasn’t supposed to say.
    â€œ... trying to get to ... get to ... to ...” my voice echoed from all directions.
    And then I gave in to the feather’s pull and went faster to escape the echo of my own words.
    Finally we came to a courtyard, but it was empty, and the feather dragged me on like a dog on a leash.
    It pulled so hard that I almost didn’t see the sheet of glass that was lying flat, embedded into the floor in the middle of the courtyard.
    Maybe the feather didn’t want me to see it. It was square and about the size of a table—and it had to be very thick, because before I had even really realized it was there I had already walked across it.
    Under the glass there was a rectangular room or chamber, tiled completely in white, without a single speck of black. In the chamber there was a small metal object. I knelt down next to the glass and pressed my nose against it.
    The object was made of the same carved silver as the palace gate. It had a handle on one end and the other end was stuck in an ornately decorated scabbard that looked like a horse’s head.
    A knife. But not one that could be used to threaten someone. A paper knife or a knife for cutting thread.
    Disappointed, I stood up and waited for the feather to lead me on.
    Why would someone bury a simple paper knife under a thick sheet of glass in a courtyard? In a courtyard that looked like it had been created for the sole purpose of housing this strange tomb?
    And why not bury a dagger or a sword?
    At the other end of the courtyard, I was swallowed up by another corridor, and again I wandered past an endless row of old photos.
    I only touched them in passing, with fleeting glances. Gradually the photographs began to infuriate me, and it took me a while to figure out why: They all showed the same things—families. Something that I’d never had.
    And then I stopped short, and my anger melted away like syrup into the ocean.
    I knew the faces in this photo!
    â€œWait!” I whispered to the feather. “Just a second!”
    â€œSecondddd!” hissed the echo mockingly in my ear. “Sec-ondddd ...conddd... onddd... nddd... ddd... dd... d...”
    The sound scratched through my ears like cat claws, and I doubled over and clamped my ears shut.
    But afterward I stayed where I was to take a look at the photograph.
    It showed three people gathered around a table. In the middle there was a game board with a bunch of little figures, and there was a low-hanging lamp that gave off a warm light even in black and white. One of the people was sticking his tongue out and crossing his eyes. It was Paul. The other two were laughing. They were Ines and Arnim.
    I swallowed once, twice, then I backed away from the photograph, and then I turned and began to run.
    I didn’t dare stop until there were many doors