The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

As I watch, Winston seems to fade, like a newspaper bleached and curling in the sun. He keeps lifting and chopping, lifting and chopping, but with each blow he gets less visible, until even the sound of his chopping drifts away. Presently Winston retreats to the barest outline of himself, as if drawn in watery ink, and then on a passing breeze he blows away.

I stand for a long time in the kitchen garden, staring at the spot where he used to be.

I’m alone.

The vegetables are all gone. The fat gourds and pumpkins that we usually have in October are gone, the garden bricked over and desolate, interrupted only by the rustle of dead leaves.

I wrap my arms around myself, hugging tightly. The wind picks up, blowing my skirts against my legs and my curls into my mouth.

Slowly I turn and walk back down the alley to the front of the house.

As I round the corner onto the street, I spy a dark figure at the front door. He’s young and slight, and I can’t see his face, but he’s holding a knife.

“Hey!” I shout. “What are you doing?”

The figure turns to stare at me with a start, stabs the knife into the wood of the door so hard it sticks, and flees down the stairs.

“Wait!” I yell, running after him. “Wait! Who are you? What do you want?”

Whoever he is vanishes into the dense wall of fog just beyond the circle made by the front stoop of my house. I’m on the point of following him, but I’m loath to step into the fogbank again. What if I get lost?

What if I can’t find my way out?

I stare at the carved wooden door of our house. The knife jutting out from the door pins in place a folded paper fastened closed with a red smear of sealing wax. I mount the stairs to rip the offending paper off the door and observe that the seal in the wax is shaped like an old-fashioned spindle.

It’s the note. The one we found on the door last week.

The same note.

Papa wouldn’t let anyone see it when it came.

He crumpled it in his hand and cried, “Eleanor!” in a way that I had never heard him address my mother before. And more importantly, she’d come. They’d spoken not more than five minutes and then Mother had emerged from the drawing room, handed a folded paper to Winston to carry to Hudson Square and said to me brightly, “Well! Better pack.”

This is the note that sent us running to my aunt’s house.

It’s not the day after the Aquatic Celebration.

It’s the week before.

My blood thuds in my ears. I slowly mount the steps of our town house and reach my hand forward to pluck the note from the knife.

But before my hand can touch the paper, something strange happens.

The door begins to melt.

It looks like the door is sculpted of mud, and a sudden hard rain has come up. The door dribbles down itself under my hand, the knocker and the handle and the carving sliding down the surface of it and pulling apart while I watch. In moments our heavy wooden front door is gone, and the note and knife vanished with it. The slurry runs into crevices in the brick, pouring down the steps and oozing around my feet. Speechless, I take a step backward and nearly topple off the top step. I catch myself by grabbing on to a cheap metal railing that wasn’t there before.

Behind our door is a glass one that I’ve never seen. It has a metal handle, and I can see through it into what had been our entryway, but I don’t recognize anything inside. Our wood floor has been replaced with some kind of odd-looking tile, and our curving stair is gone. Next to the glass door stands a row of little brass cubbies with names written on them. And to the right, jutting out where our front gated garden used to be, is a wall of glass, lit with that glaring white light I saw in our drawing room before, with the same little tables and stained mirror. Behind the tables I can see a long counter, with racks of pies covered in cheese. But all the people are gone.

“This isn’t happening,” I explain to myself, and I’m pleasantly surprised by how reasonable I sound.