A/N: Just something random that I came up with this morning! I might carry this on if I get enough reviews for it, but unless I do this will probably stay a oneshot. I hope anyone who reads this will take a look at some of my other stories as well, cos I not doing well with reviews at the moment. Oh well...
Disclaimer: I don't even own the plot to this story. Even the first paragraph was written by Clive Staples...
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air raids. They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office. He had no wife and he lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called Mrs Macready and three servants. (Their names were Ivy, Margaret and Betty, but they do not come into the story much.)…
…They had just finished their breakfast with the Professor and were upstairs in the room which he had set apart for them-a long, low room with two windows looking out in one direction and two in another… "I'm going to explore the house" said Peter; everyone agreed to this and that was how the adventures began. It was the sort of house that you never seemed to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places. The first few doors they tried only led into spare bedrooms, as everyone had expected that they would; but soon they came to a very long room full of pictures, and there they found a suit of armour; and after that was a room all hung with green, with a harp in one corner; and then came three steps down and five steps up, and then a kind of little upstairs hall and a door that led out on to a balcony, and then a whole series of rooms that led into each other and were lined with books-most of them very old books and some bigger than a Bible in a church. And shortly after that they looked into a room that was quite empty except for…
"A tiny door?" one of the siblings said. They had reason to be confused. The room itself was huge, almost big enough to house an old fashioned four poster bed, or at least a decent sized wardrobe, but instead it was completely bare; apart from a small door no bigger than a dumbwaiter, but the Pevensie children knew from their travels that there was no such dumbwaiter in this part of the house. It was indeed a queer sight, ornately carved but no bigger than a small dog. If Peter, Susan or even Edmund had tried to get through it they would've got themselves stuck, although as they got closer they realised they wouldn't be able to try anyway as it had been plastered over, and when Peter tried to turn the handle it was locked.
"Nothing in here, then" remarked Susan and they all trooped out again- all except for Lucy, who stopped and stared at the little door. The youngest of the four siblings had probably the most active imagination, and all she could think of now was the mystery of the little door. "Lucy, come on!" an annoyed Susan snapped from the entrance to the room.
"But Susan! Where does this door go?"
"Lucy, that's enough. We really better go before…" Peter began to moan at Lucy before suddenly seeing someone approaching and falling silent. Lucy looked and saw the Professor himself enter the room. "…we disturb the Professor?" he finished off Peter's sentence, gaining a stiff nod from the young boy. "Well, consider me disturbed. What is going on in here? It's like trying to work through a herd of elephants."
"Please Sir," Lucy said shakily, slightly afraid of the old man, "We decided to explore the house and we found this door, and I was wondering…"
"Where the door goes? I'll gladly show you. Anything for the kids, after all!" He pushed past the four children and knelt beside the door, and as he did so he removed a key from the inside of his coat. All of them thought it was a rather strange key: It was long and spindly, and the end of it was shaped like a large button. They watched as the Professor cut round the door using this key, and turning to look at the siblings as he did so, he twisted the key into the lock and pulled open the door. "It's bricked up" said Edmund blankly, and indeed it was. "Professor, I don't understand…" the youngest sibling began to mutter, but the old man put up a hand to stop her. "When this house belonged to the lords that door most likely led to the old scullery, and when they knocked it down a few years ago the door was bricked up. Simple as that. Now if you don't mind, I'd suggest that the four of you make your way to bed. Good Day." With that, he left.
It was in the middle of the night when Lucy woke up suddenly to the sound of obnoxious squeaking. She sat up and looked around the room trying to find the source of the noise, and saw a tiny white mouse sitting by the open door to the hallway. It squeaked again and disappeared down the corridor.
Lucy thought for a second, and then decided that she'd better go after it, for she knew that most adults hated that sort of creature and would kill it if they saw it. So she got out of bed and left her siblings resting peacefully in the room, venturing out into the house alone. The first thing she noticed was that the mouse had waited for her (why had it done that?) but as soon as it saw her it sprinted across the floor and into one of the rooms on the left. Lucy broke into a run and fell into the room after it, only realising then that of all the rooms in the house, the mouse had led her into the one containing the little door. She got up off the floor quickly enough to see the small rodent dart behind the door, which was still unlocked from when the Professor had opened it earlier. She opened the door wide, expecting to see the mouse trying to hide in the crack in front of the bricks, and gasped…
There were no bricks anymore; instead, a long tunnel spread out in front of her, glowing in all the colours of the rainbow. She stuck her head in and crawled forward, feeling a gust of wind hit her face and mess up her hair. "This must be magic!" she said to herself as she made her way deeper and deeper into the tunnel, until she finally saw a faint glow of lamplight coming from the end of it. She reached the opening and looked around, confused.
It was the same room that she had just left, except there was something different about it that she couldn't quite put her finger on. Perhaps because, although it had been almost midnight when she had entered the tunnel, the room was a lot darker than Lucy remembered it being on a hot summer's night and also because she could smell cooked food coming from the downstairs kitchen. For some reason the smell began to pull her in, and she found herself walking down the stair and into the kitchen itself, where she stopped in surprise. Her own mother, who had been left behind in London, was cooking a roast dinner with her back to her daughter, humming a strange tune that Lucy didn't recognise.
"Mother? What are you doing here?
The woman turned around and Lucy froze in shock. The woman looked exactly like her mother in every way, but instead of her mother's light blue eyes staring back at her, she found herself looking into… Buttons.