But there was the sound again: a metallic scrape coming from the courtyard, as clear as if I were dragging the hatch open myself. I reached next to the thin mattress for my glasses. My hand was shaking, and they wouldn’t settle properly on my nose. There was no lamp on the sleeping platform, only a candle, but I didn’t have any matches, hadn’t noticed any in the room. But perhaps I didn’t need to turn on the light—after all, what I wanted to see was outside, not in the crypt. I was wearing only knickers and a singlet, and quickly pulled on a pair of jeans. My flip-flops were at the bottom of the ladder, and I climbed down slowly. Shuffling across the pebble floor, my foot caught on one of Elena’s knotted rugs, and I briefly pitched forward, taking fright. Over by the shrine, the old woman’s pink and white bedding heaved, but it wasn’t true about the snoring, she made no sound at all.
I reached the door, which was slightly ajar, and pushed on it with my hand. At my feet, through the door, was a short flagstone path and clipped grass, Notting Hill green. The door swung shut again, and I remained still, with my hand on the wood. Behind me was Elena’s room—the faded rugs and Jesus and Mary, their halos glowing faintly, neon lit. But in front of me, on the other side of the door, was what? Not the courtyard, not Elena’s villa. Not what ought to be there.
Once again, I pushed the door open, and held it open with my hand. I took a step forward so that one foot landed on soft grass. In front of me was a homemade brick barbecue, a small, square lawn littered with empty wine bottles, and the discarded red slip of a Wendy tent. Everything I’d seen that night at Peggy’s, but right here, within arm’s reach. I put my hand up in front of me and moved it forward, waited to meet resistance, but felt none, only a different kind of heat; the air through the door was swampier, like just before a downpour.
I lowered my hand and inched my right leg forward, leaving the other behind so that I straddled the doorway. The temperature on either side was subtly different, but both places were warm, summery, strangely inviting. Without thinking, I shifted my weight onto the front foot, and swung the other leg forward so that all of me was outside in the garden—my old garden from when I was six years old.
Not trusting what I was seeing, I stepped back through the door, into Elena’s room. But the garden was still there on the other side. I crossed the threshold another four or five times and then, satisfied that I wasn’t going to be shut out, I stepped resolutely into the garden. At first, being there felt like coming home, but as I walked a little farther my legs began to shake, and after a meter or so I stopped and looked behind me.
The door I’d come out of was an old servants’ entrance that I’d forgotten was there. It went nowhere, had been blocked off long before we’d lived in the basement flat. This was the same door, I now realized, that had confused me when I was staying at Peggy’s and had imagined a direct exit from the communal lobby to the garden.
Only then did I have the wherewithal to examine my surroundings more closely. The area immediately around where I stood was perfectly solid, tangible even. When I bent to feel the grass, it was springy to the touch, and slightly damp. I walked onto the patio and crouched down. The flagstones were smooth, and the grooves between them were gritty with soil fragments and dust that adhered to the ends of my fingers.
But looking across the communal garden, and beyond that into the distance, I noticed that the trees and masonry had soft edges, that they melted into one another, became indistinct. The waxiness of it unnerved me, and I had the sense that at any moment it might all collapse, taking me along with it if I was still there.
The thing I most wanted to see—but was also afraid to look at—was over to my right, on the other side of the flagstone patio. When I finally had the courage to glance over, I could just make out the edge of it—of the hole—and next to that, the hatch of pitted iron. The bunker was open, the same as it had been that night at Peggy’s, only this time I was at ground level, close enough to feel the vertigo that insisted I was going to fall in.
Pulled by that irresistible force, I moved a little closer, near enough to see moss growing around the edge of the iron plate. I moved closer still, until the top step that led down to the chamber of the air-raid shelter came into view. Seeing the step below that one sent a shiver through the hairs on my head, and I thought of the horrors that were down there. Not just the teeth and the T-bar shoe, but the lingering smell of decay, and the soup of hair and bones.
As if replying to my thought, a soft whimper sounded from the pit of the bunker—such a tiny sound that it was almost negligible, and I wondered at first if I had imagined it. To better hear, I dropped to my hands and knees, and lay down next to the hole with my fingers curled around its mossy edge. Cautiously, I put my ear to the cavity and listened. For half a minute, I remained stationary but heard nothing, and then a piece of soft moss crumbled off in my palm. Beneath it the soil churned with earwigs, squirming in all directions and wriggling blindly toward my hand.