The Secret Room
Authors: Antonia Michaelis
The Secret Room
Antonia Michaelis
Translated from the German
by Mollie Hosmer-Dillard
Copyright © 2012 by Antonia Michaelis
Translation © 2012 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Originally published in German as
Das Adoptivzimmer
© 2004.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Michaelis, Antonia.
[Adoptivzimmer. English]
The secret room / Antonia Michaelis; translated from the German by Mollie Hosmer-Dillard.
p. cm.
Summary: “Achim, an orphan, is adopted and brought to his new home, where he discovers a magical room leading to another worldâthe world of the dead and the Nameless One, who is keeping his adopted parents' dead son hostage. Only Achim can try to set him free”âProvided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-61608-960-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
[1. OrphansâFiction. 2. AdoptionâFiction. 3. DeadâFiction. 4. Supernaturalâ Fiction. 5. GriefâFiction.] I. Hosmer-Dillard, Mollie. II. Title.
PZ7.M5798274Ad 2012
[Fic]âdc23
2012015601
ISBN: 978-1-61608-960-3
Printed in the United States of America
Cover and interior illustrations: Birgit Brandt
For the adopted boy who took out the garbage
so that he couldn't be given back
.
In which a collision takes place
and a door is discovered
In which I create shards
and someone is standing at the window
In which I make a difficult
decision and learn to fly
In which the sea is capped in white
and a song gives me a warning
In which I wander through a tiled labyrinth
and have an asthma attack
In which I encounter the Nameless One,
climb a ladder, and start to fall
In which I stop falling
and see the inside of a nut
In which Ines and I go shopping,
and I come to an astounding conclusion
In which I sit in a cage
without a key
In which I go for a walk in a tree at night
and make a bouquet of flowers
In which I soak a sofa
and open lots of cages
In which a fight takes place in a storm
and the tower collapses
In which a kitchen utensil plays a key role
In which a collision takes place and
a door is discovered
I should have known.
My name is Achim, I'm eleven years old, and on that summer day when Karl was chasing me around with a piece of soggy bread, I should have known that my life would never be the same.
But I didn't know. I woke up and didn't know. I looked out the window onto the yard, where fog was rising from the field, and I didn't know.
I still didn't know when I pulled the blankets off Karl so that he wouldn't stay in bed till next Christmas.
If this was a story that I had made up, I would tell it differently. I would say that the night before, I had had a strange dream ...
But I hadn't.
I wasn't expecting anything. I didn't feel any differently than usual, not even for a split second. Instead, I rushed down the stairs just as quickly as ever so that I'd beat Karl to the breakfast room. The breakfast room was part of the orphanage where Karl and I lived.
It was a totally normal orphanage, or, well, I don't really know what an abnormal orphanage looks like. Anyway, ours was just fine.
There was a big yard with apple trees, a television room, a basement where we had parties sometimes, and lots of nice little rooms with two or four beds in them.
And of course there were a bunch of grown-ups who made sure that we didn't make campfires in the nice little rooms and that we brushed our teeth and got on the bus to school every morning.
Some of the grown-ups, like Maria for instance, were really nice. But they weren't parents.
That's what we all wanted: big, strong parents. A father who was a pilot, a train engineer, or a Nobel Prize winner, and a mother who baked hot rolls and who could eat any teacher alive. Siblings weren't so necessary.
That morning, Karl shaped a small piece of bread into a little boat, with jam portholes and everything, and set it into his cup to float in his hot cocoa.
“Achim,” he announced. “I've decided. I'm going to be a sailor.”
“A sailor?” I asked skeptically and watched as the bread boat soaked up cocoa and slowly began to sink.
“Yeah, that's right,” said Karl. “And then I'm going to discover the twelfth continent. All by myself. You don't need parents to do that.”
“What are the other eleven continents?” I asked suspiciously. “There aren't that many of them.”
“By then there will be.” He grinned. “By then someone will have definitely discovered another couple.”
“You're crazy,” I replied, smiling.
“Really? I am?” Karl was leisurely fishing the half-sunken boat out of his cup so he could throw it at meâbut I didn't wait around for him to do it.
I had already jumped up, dove under the table, come out on the other side, and started running.
“Just you wait!” I heard Karl call out from behind me. Some grown-up tried to stop us, but we slipped under his arms and, in a fit of giggling, dashed back and forth through the aisles.
At some point I zipped around a corner and was suddenly face to face with the front door and the green, sunlit yard behind it.
I was so caught up in running away and laughing and being scared of him catching me that I didn't even notice that someone was standing there.
In the doorway.
I didn't notice until I ran right into him.
He was a man, a pretty tall man, but I had been running so fast that I knocked him to the ground. A moment later we were both lying on the gravel path.
“IâI,” I stammered and sat up, gasping for breath. “I'm sorry, I...”
The man was looking at his hands and picking a few small, sharp pebbles out of his palms. He had curly black hair and looked at me with solemn gray eyes.
“And you are ... ?” he asked.
“A-Achim,” I stuttered. “Myâmy name is Achim.”
He nodded. “My name is Paul. This,” he pointed his outstretched arm toward the front door, “this is Ines.”
I looked over at the door. Maria was standing there with a woman I didn't know. Maria had grabbed hold of Karl and wrapped her arms around him so that he couldn't get away.
The other woman was small and thin and pale. She had lots of freckles and her red hair was coiled into an unruly bun behind her head.
And all three of them were staring at us. Maria and Karl and the new woman too.
“This is Mr. and Mrs. Ribbek,” said Maria, as if that explained anything.
“Ah,” I said, as if I understood.
“We were just about to go look for you,” continued Maria, “because Mr. and Mrs. Ribbek have come here to get to know you.”
Then I didn't say anything, not even “ah.”
Because no one had ever come to the orphanage to get to know me.
I had lived here for ages, since I was really little. But as a baby, I had been sick all the time. I was always coughing, and of course no one wants a baby that doesn't work right when you take it home.
Maria's always saying: “Achim, it's a miracle that you've grown so tall. I remember the period when we thought you might be leaving us for good.”
But I hadn't.
I got taller and paler and stayed sick. For a long time I thought that they weren't distributing the air fairly, and I complained to Maria that I got so little of it. She laughed and said, “That's your asthma.”
And I got an inhaler to help prevent asthma attacks and was really proud of it for a while. But not for long.
Sometimes people would come to the orphanage, choose one of the children, and take him out for ice cream, or to the movies, or to the park. Every weekend. The kids would laugh and wave as they drove away, and sometimes they went away with the people forever. I would stand at the fence with my inhaler and watch them go, feeling sad. Because no matter how often I pressed the inhaler, it couldn't conjure up any people who wanted to go with me to the park or take me away forever.
Karl stood with me at the fence. No one wanted him either, even though he was big and strong and not at all sick. It's like this: I think it's really hard for Karl to be in a family. People have tried. Three or four times. He came back every time.
I don't know why, exactly. Maybe he's too big and too strong. Maybe he spun the mother and father through the air till they were dizzy.
I looked at the man with the curly black hair, the one named Paul, and wondered if he was feeling a little dizzy.
He was opening and closing his mouth and saying something, but I didn't understand. I was tingling with excitement, my hands were damp, and my knees were trembling. These people wanted to get to know me.