100 Cupboards

Henrietta enters Grandfather’s room to find an old, bald man perusing the bookshelf. She says, “Excuse me,” and the man dives into the big cupboard. Henrietta grabs at his foot and pulls off a shoe, but the man disappears. She crawls in after him. Blake follows but ends up in Badon, a different place from Henrietta.

Henrietta emerges into a huge, beautiful ballroom packed with colorfully clothed, small dancers and a string orchestra. The bald man is walking away from her. As she emerges, the dancing disappears; in its place is a burned-out building at sunset.

She follows the man and asks where they are. He says she’s ruined everything with her meddling. He returns to the cupboard and finds the back of it is now closed. He warns her that she’ll have to wait until someone at the other end figures out the correct compass settings, and she better be ready to crawl through quickly, so she doesn’t lose an arm or leg. He says he once danced here, before everything was destroyed.

He climbs into a dumbwaiter and descends into the darkness. Henrietta grabs the ropes, stopping the tiny elevator, and asks his name. It’s Eli FitzFaeren, and he was a friend of Grandfather.

The dumbwaiter breaks, and Eli falls the rest of the way down. Groaning and angry, he denounces her, but he also tells her they’re in the remains of FitzFaeren Hall, and she should not eat anything and avoid getting eaten. She begins to explore the place.

Back at the Willis house, Henry sets the compasses to a different place, and he and Richard go downstairs. Henry climbs through the big cupboard, but Richard stays behind.

The next morning, Frank discovers Grandfather’s door partly open. Inside, he finds a boy asleep on the bed. He wakes the boy, who promptly explains that “Henry’s in the cupboard” (219).

Frank goes up to the attic and finds Anastasia sitting on Henry’s bed; on the wall are the dozens of cupboards, “just how Frank remembered it” (220). Anastasia asks her dad if he knows about them as she spins the compass dials. Frank orders her away from the wall. Richard appears; Frank sends Anastasia away and asks Richard what happened. Richard shares what he’s seen so far with Henry and adds that he’s from Queen Askew’s Britain of 1989. Frank remarks, “Wrong Britain.” He says Richard can sleep on Henry’s bed.

Downstairs, Frank tells a worried Dotty about Richard and what the boy told him. She asks which place the two kids are in, but Frank doesn’t know yet. He’ll need to work hard and fast to find them before anything bad happens. Frank calls for the girls, sits them down, and tells them that their mother will explain what’s going on.

Dotty tells her girls that, when she was young, a handsome boy who was very good at baseball had come to live in town. He arrived through the cupboard in Grandfather’s room, and, after a while, he asked Dotty to help him get back. They went to several places via the cupboard, searching for the boy’s home, until Grandfather stopped them and covered up the cupboards with plaster. The boy stayed, and Dotty married him; he’s their father, Frank. Henry found the cupboards, and now he and Henrietta have disappeared inside them.

Upstairs, Frank encounters a black-haired woman holding a mangy cat. She wants to know where Henry is, “The dream walker. The pauper-son. I have sampled his blood” (232). Frank pulls out his knife.

Henry crawls through to the grand ballroom. He hears a girl’s voice, sticks his head into the room, and sees dancers, who disappear into burnt darkness. He pulls back, and the dancing starts up again in the now-brilliant ballroom. He steps through and the place darkens again. He hears Henrietta’s laugh; she asks if he brought a flashlight. Henry tells Richard to come through, but Richard isn’t with him.

She crawls across the dark, dangerous ruins toward him. On the way, she explains about Eli and the destruction of the hall. Suddenly Henry can see everything by the blazing light of candelabras hanging in thin air. He goes to Henrietta and reaches her just as more dancers come to life around him. He leads her back through the dancers, who become more and more real, some bumping into him.

Suddenly the dancers stop as a cloaked figure enters the hall with a tall, spiked staff; he’s followed by large, dangerous-looking men leading chained wolves. They release the wolves into the crowd of dancers. Henrietta can hear screaming, and she holds her ears. Henry leads her toward the cupboard. A tall man with a face like Dotty’s runs past and dives into the cupboard. A snarling wolf chases after him, then turns and snarls at Henry.

Most of the dancers are herded into the middle of the dance floor. The cloaked man waves the staff, and all the windows shatter. He tells the crowd that the Witch-Queen Nimiane has breached the hall’s defenses.

Henry and Henrietta crawl into the cupboard, but the bad end is closed. They listen as the ballroom burns and the ceiling crashes down.

At the Willis house, Dotty hears a loud noise upstairs and rushes up. She finds Frank lying unconscious on the floor of Grandfather’s room, holding a blood-smeared knife. An old, blind hag addresses Dotty; she tries to resist the hag but can barely move or speak.

Penelope and Anastasia arrive outside the room, and a beautiful lady steps out. Something’s wrong with her eyes, but she talks smoothly and convinces them to show her the cupboards. They go to the attic. Richard lies on the bed, pale and nearly dead. The woman makes all the cupboards open at once. The girls run back downstairs, grab Blake, go into Grandfather’s room, and shut the door. It locks. From without, the door rattles.

Zeke, bat and glove in hand, knocks on the Willis’ front door. He wants to do some batting practice with Henry. He leans in, calling for Mrs. Willis, but receives no reply. He steps inside, sees a mangy black cat on the stairs, and, knowing it doesn’t belong, herds the hissing, clawing creature out the front door with his foot and bat.

Upstairs, Nimiane tries to open Grandfather’s door. Through the doorknob hole, she talks to the girls, taunting them and asking for Henry’s whereabouts. Anastasia peeps through the hole and sees that Nimiane has sores in place of eyes, scratches on her cheeks, and stubble for hair.

Zeke calls up the stairs; the girls tell him to stay away. The black cat tries to enter Grandfather’s room through the window; Anastasia pushes it back out, but it latches onto her arm, clawing and biting. Blake jumps on the black cat, and the two felines fall away. Blake darts back up through the window and Anastasia slams it shut.

Zeke walks upstairs and encounters Nimiane, who to him looks beautiful, with iridescent black hair and striking eyes that don’t quite follow him. She says she’s the girls’ godmother. She coughs, and for a moment Zeke can see her true hag form. From the room, the girls shout that she’s a witch. Nimiane pulls out a knife and moves toward him. He barely gets away.

Inside the cupboard at FitzFaeren Hall, Henry wakes to a cool breeze. The cupboard’s inside wall is open. He pushes his head through a small opening and looks down to see Richard asleep on his attic bed and all the nearby cupboard doors open. He wakes Richard and tells him how to set the compass combinations to open the big cupboard so Henry and Henrietta can return.

Nimiane realizes Grandfather’s door is protected by a weak Faeren spell, and she quickly unlocks it. She steps into the room just as Henry and Henrietta spill out of the big cupboard. They attack the witch, who backs out of the room and trips on the damaged carpet. Zeke swings his bat and hits Nimiane in the temple.

Richard trips and falls down the attic stairs. Outside, the mangy cat, suddenly released from Nimiane’s spell, “walked off into the grass to find a drink and a place to lie down” (268).

Nimiane is still breathing. Anastasia offers to kill her, and Henrietta agrees, but Penelope says no and to call an ambulance. Zeke sets the injured Richard down in Grandfather’s room. They decide to push the witch through the cupboard to somewhere else. Henrietta goes to the attic and shuts the cupboard doors, but she finds a limp, winged animal inside the compass door. She grabs the creature, resets the compasses, and dashes downstairs, where she and the others push the witch through the big cupboard.

At the regional hospital, Frank, Dotty, Henry, and Richard are treated for their various injuries. Their story is that their injuries are the result of a freak accident.

Back home, everyone gathers at the kitchen table, including Richard and Zeke. Frank tells them the adventure is over, and there’ll be no more using the cupboards. He says he and Dotty will move into Grandfather’s room, but Dotty reminds him that the door somehow locked again. Henrietta says she lost the key.

Anastasia claims Henrietta is keeping a tiny, winged rhino in the barn. Henrietta brings it inside. Frank says it’s a “raggant,” a creature that’s meant to find people. It had banged against the compass cupboard door, which caused the plaster to fall in Henry’s bedroom and “started the whole thing” (279). The raggant walks over to Henry and points its horn and a hoof at him.

Frank and Henry step out onto the porch, the raggant close behind. Frank explains that the raggant was sent to find Henry because someone lost him. Frank is pretty sure Grandfather found Henry in a cupboard. Frank and Dotty wanted to adopt Henry, but instead he went to Phil and Ursula.

That night in his bedroom—the raggant snoring at the end of his bed—Henry finds two letters in the cupboards. One is from the Witch-Dog leader, Darius, thanking him for freeing Nimiane from Endor and sending her to them. The other is from the Badon division of the Faeren “Central Committee of Faeren for the Prevention of Mishap” (284), declaring Henry an enemy for aiding Nimiane’s escape and asking all Faeren to capture or kill him.

Henry is miffed. He didn’t want all this trouble and never meant to cause it: “I did nothing. I’m just scenery” (286).

Nimiane stands in Carnassus’ throne room. Around her on the floor lie the bodies of the sorcerer’s magical attendants. A black cat leaps into Nimiane’s arms, and her consciousness takes over its body. Nimiane approaches a surviving attendant and gives him a message for his master: The sorcerer owes her a favor, and she has come to collect it and use it against a new victim.