“You have to come see this!” I shouted at my sister as I pulled a heavy pile of clothing away from the wall in my closet. Lizzie, my sister, climbed over even more piles similarly stacked with clothing to make her way across the large, walk-in closet and see what I was pointing at – the outline of a door in the wallpaper.

“Oh wow!” She said, “I wonder if it’s really a door.”

“Well, there’s only one way to find out!” I responded. I reached for a pair of scissors I had been using to cut the tags off some jeans a few minutes before. Then I used them to slice the wallpaper around the door.

Suddenly, a thought struck me. “Can you guard the door? I don’t want Mom or Dad to come in and find us destroying the wallpaper.” I asked Lizzie.

“No need.” She said calmly, “They left to go grocery shopping before I came in to help you.”

With that settled, I continued slicing the wallpaper, until the door underneath was visible, and I would be able to open it.

“So it is a real door!” Lizzie exclaimed as I pulled the door open. 

It took all of my strength to open the door. It must have been so old that the hinges didn’t work properly any more. Thinking back to the history of our house, I wondered what could be behind the door. When we first moved into the house, our neighbour told us that a previous owner had hidden something valuable in the attic. Maybe he meant closet instead, and we were about to get rich.

As soon as the door opened, a gust of cold, stale air blasted over us. Whatever was in front of us in the doorway was completely dark. 

“Go get a flashlight or two.” I commanded, and Lizzie scurried out to another room to find flashlights. I was excited for the possibility of discovering something amazing in this hidden room. It was a great distraction from the fact that I was meant to be going through my closet and getting rid of anything I wouldn’t wear anymore.

Before I could even come up with a plan, Lizzie came back with two flashlights. I turned mine on and pointed it into the void of the hidden room, and found a staircase, which turned a corner after a few steps. Nothing else was in the room, just the stairs.

“Wish me luck.” I said, turning to Lizzie before I stepped into the room and started ascending the stairs. The cold in that room seemed to grab me like icy fingers, and the stairs creaked like the stairs would in a creepy haunted house movie. I could hear Lizzie walking behind me up the stairs.

After a long few minutes of slowly and carefully walking up the old stairs, I reached the top of the staircase, where I found a huge room. It appeared to be bigger than the area of the ground level of the house, even though that couldn’t be possible. 

The entire room was cluttered with things. Shelves stacked high with books and scrolls lined most of the walls. Empty jars and bottles, and all kinds of artifacts, from goblets and necklaces to an old carpet and an ancient Greek warrior’s helmet covered many spots on the floor. There were also chests set in various places. Most of them looked to be locked, but one was unlatched. When Lizzie rounded the final stair, she almost immediately headed to that chest and excitedly opened it. “I can’t believe this!” She said.

“OMG!” She practically screeched with joy as she opened the chest.

“What is it?” I asked, running over to see what was so amazing. 

When I got over to her, I saw that the chest contained a mountain of jewels that shimmered in the light from the flashlights. I almost dropped my flashlight when I saw the size of the pile. Suddenly, something sticking out of the corner of the chest caught my eye, and I leaned forward to grab it and pull it out. It was a very old piece of paper. It was rough to the touch, and I could feel the dust and dirt on it as I grabbed it.

I began to look around for lights in the room so that I could read the paper without having to hold my flashlight up to it. I didn’t find a light, but I found an old lantern sitting next to some matches on a gargantuan metal table near us, so I used that. The light was dim, but enough that I could make out the fancy writing on the old paper.

After reading the paper, I was confused. It talked about ghosts and magic monsters and potions, and so many other things that I didn’t believe in. It seemed that the writer of the paper thought that he was an expert in all things paranormal and supernatural. The hidden room was where he kept all of the trophies and artifacts he had collected through years of adventuring and traveling the world.

When I first read the paper, I didn’t believe a word of it. I shrugged it off and went to go explore. I noticed many odd and unusual things in the room. One that I remember vividly was a simple but fancy looking black coffin. It was open and empty, and had a velvety red lining. 

Eventually, I found something that really caught my eye. A clear, bright blue light shining from the cracks in a tall pile of books on a shelf. I carefully removed the dust covered books to see what was behind them, and was amazed by the bottle I found.

It was a large bottle full of a shiny, glowing blue liquid that seemed to float around, suspended in the jar, rather than filling it like a normal liquid.

As I looked at the bottle, it drew me in, until eventually I reached out and touched it. Suddenly the light from the bottle began to grow brighter and brighter until it was nearly blinding, before it faded again to how it was before I touched it. When it faded, I noticed that my surroundings didn’t look the way it had only seconds before. There was no dust anywhere, and the entire room was very tidy.

Confused, I began to walk around, calling out for Lizzie, and I began to get worried when she didn’t answer me. I soon passed the coffin I had seen earlier, but it was closed now. I wondered if something was inside, and my curiosity got the better of me for a moment, causing me to reach for the coffin, but before I could open it, I got a terrible feeling about it, so I chose to leave it alone. 

After a few more minutes of wandering around, I saw a man enter the room. He was fairly tall with greying brown hair and deep blue eyes. “Hello!” I called out to him, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

I saw him put a bottle down on the huge metal table from earlier. The bottle looked like the one that had brought me to this  strange version of the hidden room, except the swirling liquid inside was a deep purple instead. I also saw the man put a piece of paper next to the bottle. 

I ran over to read the paper, which explained that the bottle contained a blue liquid, and when the glass part of the bottle was touched, it would transport whoever touched it to anywhere in the past, but they could only observe, and not change anything. The paper also explained that when the bottle was ready to take you back to your own time, it would turn purple, but only for you. 

That’s when I understood that this man must’ve been the man who wrote the paper I found in the chest (he was a previous owner of the house), and I was able to be there, in the past, because of the bottle. Maybe the same bottle that he had just set on the table, or maybe he had more than one of the magic bottles.

I wanted to explore more of the hidden room the way it was in the past, but I knew that some time had passed and I should get home soon, so I reached out and placed my hand on the bottle. Just like before, the light became blinding, before fading again, leaving me at the same table, but back in my own time. 

When I looked up, Lizzie was staring at me, pale as a ghost. “Where were you? Where did you just come from?” She choked out. 

“It’s a long story.” I started to explain.

I was cut off by the sound of the front door opening, and then the muffled voices of my parents in a heated conversation about something. Lizzie and I locked eyes, and knew we had to run back to the closet and hide the room from our parents, so that’s just what we did.

We glided down the stairs, pushed the door closed, and shoved a shelf in front of it so that no one could see it was there. By the time Mom and Dad came in to check on us, the door was completely hidden, but Lizzie and I will always know about that door, and next time Mom and Dad leave the house, rest assured we’re going back to find out  more.