Chapter Text
These are just flames
Burnin' in your fireplace
I hear your voice and it seems
As if it was all a dream
I wish it was all a dream
Can we go on like it once was?
Another Story by The Head & The Heart
25 September, 1940 | 5:47 pm | Professor Kirke's House, England/Western Woods, Narnia | Edmund
Edmund pounded through the manor’s dark halls, no clear destination in mind. He needed to get away. Away from Peter and Susan and Lucy, away from their accusing and disappointed looks, away from their judgment and hatred. His own words echoed through his head. You’re not Father! Stop pretending to be him. You’re not! I hate you! Every step carried him further from his siblings, the tears falling hot and fast on his cheeks. He was so sick of them all. Sick of this crumbling old house and the dreary professor that they all had to tiptoe around and especially sick of his brother and sisters.
Edmund wanted out. He wanted to be back in his own bed in Finchley. He wanted to crawl into a dark corner and hide until the war was gone and Father came home. He wanted to be anywhere else, anywhere at all.
Almost without realising it, Edmund found himself in a dusty room somewhere near the top of the house, empty but for an enormous wardrobe covered with a dust cloth. Suddenly, he wished he had thought to bring a book for something to do, but it hadn’t occurred to him in his earlier anger. It would be embarrassing to go back and face his siblings now, and even more so if he got lost on the way to the library and had to be dragged like a stray cat back to the clutches of his loving family by the housekeeper.
Resigning himself to a tedious afternoon until he worked up the courage to face the others, Edmund poked around the dust-choked garret in which he had found himself. As he had surmised upon first glance, it was empty but for a large wardrobe pushed against the far wall. The door was intricately carved with images of trees and flowers and dancing creatures from mythology. The inside, when Edmund looked, was full of old fur coats and the overpowering odor of mothballs. He couldn’t have found a more boring room in which to seclude himself.
For a while, Edmund amused himself by drawing shapes on the dusty floor, but that grew old quickly. The watery sunlight allowed through the windows grew dim until Edmund was certain it must be twilight. Long shadows stretched over the walls, darkening the corners and playing tricks on his eyes. Was that a rat in the corner or merely his imagination? The crescent moon rose steadily in the east-facing window, painting the floorboards silvery-white until it disappeared over the eaves and the room darkened even further. His aching stomach told him that he had missed supper. The room was growing colder, too, a product of the autumn season. As the sun-warmed wood floor cooled in the evening chill, Edmund shivered, pulling his jumper tight over his icy fingers, hiding his hands under his arms and curling his legs beneath him where he sat on the floor against the wall. He ached to return to the warm rooms of the house below but dreaded the prospect of seeing his siblings.
When he could see the foggy cloud of his breath in the air, it finally occurred to Edmund that there was an entire wardrobe full of coats just a meter away. Berating himself for his idiocy, Edmund climbed into the wardrobe—making sure to leave the door open—and went searching for a suitable coat, of which there seemed to be none. All the garments in the wardrobe were much too large for him and for women besides. At fifteen, Edmund was much shorter than Peter had been at his age, and even the other boys in his classes had stood at least a foot taller than him.
As Edmund contemplated the unfairness of his thirteen-year-old sister being only a few inches shorter than him, an icy wind blew through the wardrobe door and swirled around his ankles. There was a loud bang, and he was plunged into darkness.
The door had blown shut.
Employing a few choice words he’d learned from Peter, who wasn’t as good at censoring himself as he ought to be, Edmund fumbled for the doorframe. He prayed to any god that might listen that there was a handle on the inside and that he hadn’t just trapped himself in a wardrobe, in a room with copious amounts of dust that told him no one ever entered. Would anyone hear him if he were to yell? The rumbling of his stomach suddenly seemed so much more painful, as if it knew that he might not ever eat another meal. The hanging coats tangled and wrapped around him like jungle vines, rendering his searching hands useless. His mouth was full of fur and his nose stung with the nauseating aroma of mothballs. It was so dark that he couldn’t see his hand before his face.
Growing desperate, Edmund threw himself forward, hoping to hit a wall and use it to navigate to the door but succeeded only in tumbling to the floor. He hadn’t thought the wardrobe was this large from the outside. From where he lay, limbs akimbo and on his back, he should have touched at least one wall by now. Breathing heavily, Edmund lay still and tried to think of what to do, but his mind was too clogged with panic for rational thought.
It was at this moment that he began to feel a creeping damp chill beneath his back and struggled upright. His hand landed in the wet spot, and he startled back with a yell. It was icy cold and gritty, almost like . . . snow? He inhaled and the mothball scent cleared, only to be replaced with a sharp smell like pine and cold air. In fact, his whole body was suddenly freezing cold, as though he’d stepped into a London night without his coat, though the air was cleaner and fresher than in London. Just as he noticed this, he saw also that it was growing lighter. The smothering darkness was dwindling slowly to a soft gray-blue that allowed him to see at last his immediate surroundings.
Unbelievably, inexplicably, Edmund was no longer in the wardrobe at twilight, but in the middle of a wood at dawn.
Towering pines rose around him, piled so high with snow that they looked like hunched old men bowed under their own weight. The ground, too, was blanketed in a soft layer of new snow, smooth and unmarked but for the place where Edmund had flailed around in his confusion. All was quiet; not even the birds sang, and no breeze stirred the branches. The whole world seemed to be holding its breath, but for what, Edmund couldn’t tell.
Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Edmund stumbled through the trees, searching for a way back home. Was he even in England anymore?
As he pushed by, the trees bowed around him just like real trees would—but they couldn’t be real. It was impossible that he had walked into a wardrobe in autumn and walked out into a wood in winter. Every rule of science contradicted it. This had to be a dream. Perhaps, Edmund thought hopefully, he had hit his head in the wardrobe and was now suffering delusions. He had never expected to hope for an outcome like that, but what was the alternative? Magic? Edmund wasn’t a little kid. He knew that magic, like Father Christmas and haunted houses, didn’t really exist. Maybe Lucy would still believe this was real, Edmund supposed, but he was much too smart for that.
Just as he had this thought, Edmund rounded another tree and entered a clearing in the wood. The other end overlooked a long valley that stretched far into the distance, ending in a spike of tall, snow-capped mountains and beyond, a glimpse of the sea. From where Edmund stood to the horizon, there was nothing but quiet, snow covered trees. No buildings or people or smoke or even roads to be found anywhere.
The only fixture of civilization, bizarrely out of place, was a single iron lamppost—just like the ones lining every London street—in the center of the clearing, as though it had simply sprung out of the ground. The flame within the lamp burned merrily, casting a halo of yellow light onto the ground. The lamppost, like everything else in this strange world, wore a cap of snow.
Grasping the lamppost in both hands like a lifeline, Edmund tipped his head against the cold metal and tried to breathe. He was alone in a foreign land without a coat or food or means of getting back, and he had no idea what to do. This was seeming less and less like a dream each minute, and he wanted, desperately, to wake up.
Behind him, a twig cracked and the forest came alive.