ANOTHER DOOR


[1]

The old man died, and left the house to Bob.  Bob hadn't seen the
old man, who he would always think of as the old man even though
he knew his name was Abel Cantor, for nearly two years when the
letter came from the lawyers.

Standing in front of the house, which sat on the flat and mostly
treeless plain, a former swamp, between and among various other
similar houses with similar mostly empty yards, along similar and
mostly straight streets with generic names, Bob looked over at
the house next door, which he'd rented for awhile and therefore
come to know the old man and apparently become his best or only
friend in the world.  The same white fence still separated the
yards, the same slightly spotty mostly green grass grew the same
way on both of them.

It was odd, standing there facing the house, which was for
awhile the house next door and then a house in another state
that he gave no thought to, but now his house, a house owned
by him, and in his mind the planes of his attitudes shifted
beneath the surface, memories of the old man's house (drinking
beer in the kitchen in an evening, standing across the fence
from the old man talking sports or women) being turned over
and looked at, the "old man's house" smell of them being
tested for a new "my house" sort of scent.

A small and simple rectangular house: front door leading to
a living room (sofas, a side table, an armchair, a rug), door
through to the eat-in kitchen in back with a door to the back yard,
single bedroom and bath to one side and a short hallway to closets
or a utility room or something on the other.  No clutter, very
little actually reflecting the old man, who had apparently been
selling of or otherwise ridding himself of the small clingings
of life starting from sometime before Bob knew him, ending with
his uncomplicated death and just this house and basic furniture,
which now belonged to Bob, who walked up to the door slowly,
the planes of his mind still slipping over each other, and
unlocked the door with the bigger key on the keyring from
the lawyer's packet, and went inside.


[2]

Bob's life is as simple as the house.  Only child, ordinary
parents, casually beloved.  The high school sweetheart, the
years at college, casual girlfriends, a few jobs, a few moves,
renting a house on this flat plain and being casual friends
with an old man.  Moving off to the next job, doing it competently,
not without interest but entirely without fascination.  Looking
at other people's children with amusement but without envy,
treading lightly and passing not unnoticed or unremembered,
but without controversy or particular difficulty.

He could have just asked the lawyers to sell it off, there was
just a box he could have checked on the business reply mail
form to make that happen.  But he'd had nothing else to do
right then, in fact he'd found out the night before that the
new job wasn't going to have need of his services just then,
or apparently for the foreseeable future, and he'd gone
to bed somewhat drunk and woken up late to a hangover and a
soul at loose ends, and in the mailbox the letter.  So he
called the phone number, and they mailed him the thick packet
of forms and deeds and the key, and he walked to the bus
station carrying essentially all of his belongings, feeling
whatever small carapace he had accumulated peeling off once
again and flying off into the wind behind the bus and out
of sight, and arrived here at the house more or less bare,
and empty, and ready to open the door.

He sat down on the sofa, turned on the television for company,
watched it without seeing, thinking of the old man in an idle
way, because it seemed appropriate to think of him here, now.
The house smelled clean, from the cleaners sweeping through
some time after the old man died, his will registered with
the lawyers and the lawyers' card one of the few things in
his wallet, the will specifying no funeral, just cremation,
the ashes disposed of, tidily.  And the house and land and its
contents, which it seemed the old man had owned free and
clean, passed on to Bob, for no poetically described purpose,
but just as simple and clear as a will could be, saying that
they should be his.

Leaving the television on for company, Bob goes back into the
kitchen.  There is nothing in the refrigerator, perhaps the
cleaners have taken whatever the old man might have left
there.  A few boxes on the shelves, noodles, tea, a jar
of microwave popcorn, salt.  Suddenly hungry and especially
empty, Bob goes back into the living room, turns off the
television, goes out, locks the door behind him, and
walks out to the convenience store half a mile away for
some groceries, some lunch, coffee, some conversation
with the black-haired girl behind the counter.

[3]

The plan for the next day is to survey the house, his house,
thoroughly, see if anything needs doing, see what it is he
actually owns.  He makes himself dinner, noodles and hotdogs,
a can of beer, a glass of water.  The sheets on the bed are
clean and the bed is tautly made.  The old man died somewhere
in the living room, called 911 on himself, and when they came
he was lying on the floor in the center of the room, according
to the lawyers, a massive but probably mostly painless heart
failure that the EMTs' efforts had done nothing to undo.  Bob
thought idly of finding the EMTs, asking them how the place
had smelled, what expression had been on the old man's face.

Why, he wondered, if the old man knew it was happening, if he
had time to call 911, why wasn't he in bed, comfortable, when
the end came; why in the center of the living room, not even
on the couch.  Although he had no real reason to think it,
Bob imagined gratefully the old man thinking of Bob, and how
he might be sleeping, if only for awhile, in this bed, and
sitting on this sofa and watching television.

When you leave a house to someone, Bob thought, do you think
about whether they will keep it or sell it once you're gone?
About where they will sit and where they will sleep and what
they will do?

Tired and full, drained for no particular reason, Bob gets into
the bed in his undershorts, stretches out under the sheet (it
is a warm August this year, less rain than usual but not a
drought, the sky a slate blue during the day and a clear but
warm black at night), and thinks about what he will do tomorrow,
and whether it will even occupy the entire day, looking through
the rooms, tapping the walls, opening and closing all the
doors.

And thinking of the walls and the doors that are his, he
falls asleep, surprisingly or unsurprisingly quickly, the
darkness enfolding him, his mind wandering off into mazy dreams
that in the morning he will have no memory of.  Around him,
the house is very still.

[4]

He wakes late in the morning to the sound of trucks going by
on the highway a mile away.  He is wide awake immediately, and
the air in the bedroom feels light and hollow.  He makes himself
scrambled eggs for breakfast, and takes his coffee to start his
survey of the house.

The bedroom is as expected, the bed a middleaged boxspring and
a newer mattress, the bathroom and shower relatively modern
and ship-shape.  He would have liked a bathtub, for lying and
soaking in, but there is no bathtub.  Across the bedroom from
the bath is a large closet, empty except for the bags that he
tossed in there yesterday.

Livingroom, sofa, television, side table with coasters, oval
rug in nondescript earthtones, windows onto the front yard,
three chairs, door to the kitchen, side hallway opposite the
bedroom.

Kitchen, sink, refrigerator, electric stove and oven, table,
only two chairs, shelves and counters, door to the back yard
with a lock and painted-over deadbolt.  Still smelling of eggs
and coffee (not too strong, no cream, a little sugar).

The side hallway is wide and short.  There's a table at the end
with a few wooden bowls and a mug filled with pencils, a cork
noticeboard hung on the end-wall above it, with a handful of
tacks it in holding up nothing.  Bob remembers that the old man
used to keep bags of potato and corn chips under that table,
and when they sat sometimes watching television he or Bob would
come and open a new one, and pour some into one of those bowls,
and they would eat and watch the news.

Each side wall of the hallway had a door set in it, doors that
had always been locked when Bob was here.  He'd asked the old
man once what was behind them, a bathroom or a utility room
or spare room or what, but he didn't remember what the answer
had been, if there had been one, or if it had been just a vague
waving of hands.  The old man had sometimes talked with his
hands, not in the Mediterranean way, not in chops or splittings
apart, but with softer and round motions, patting his words
into place or sending them off scattering into the air.

[5]

He opens the bottom door first, the one that opens toward the front
of the house, and finds that it is in fact a utility room, with a
small clothes washer and dryer, the water heater, the electric
furnace, a window looking out toward the street, and a padlocked
closet to one side.  Bob frowns when none of the four keys on
the keyring from the lawyers fits the padlock.  Maybe he'll find
the key somewhere else in the house, or maybe the lawyers will
have forgotten to send it.  Or maybe, he thinks, since this is his
house, he will just cut the lock off, or have the door removed
completely.

The appliances all seem to work, to be slightly aged but basically
healthy, with their own utilitarian scents when he turns them on
and off again.  Tonight he will, he thinks, do a small load of
laundry, and if it's chilly he'll try turning up the thermostat
and switching on the furnace.  He's not completely clear about why
he's concerned with the details of the appliances, why he is tapping
the walls and floor to verify their soundness, looking behind the
washer and dryer for dropped items or missing keys or hints of
rot in the boards.  He can see himself living here, where the old
man lived, buying a car, driving to a job.  But it's not a very
attractive prospect, really; better to be in a small city somewhere,
as he was when the latter came, living above a deli, knowing where
the good jazz clubs are, having the numbers of girls within an
easy walk.

He thinks he remembers trying the the other door out of the hallway,
the one that opens toward the back of the house, at least once when
visiting the old man, just out of curiosity, and finding it locked
or perhaps stuck.  Now, though, it opens easily on silent hinges,
and Bob is surprised to find himself in what seems a large and
airy room, for some reason windowless, with a better quality of
furniture than the rest of the house, dark wood that might be oak,
carved or turned in lush curving patterns, a thick wool rug in
the center of the floor, an old-fashioned lamp at either end
of a long couch, turned on and throwing bright circles upward
and downward.

Bob frowns, shaking his head at the incongruity.  The old man maybe
a furniture collector, or the holder of some legacy, some family
leaving that had come down to him but been something he had no use
for, was not comfortable with?

The walls of the room also seem to be a richer texture, a warmer
offwhite with wooden wainscots and a thin strip of rail halfway up
the wall, decorative in a way that doesn't really fit the house at all,
doesn't fit the folding chairs in the livingroom and the fiberboard
stand that supports the television.  Bob runs his fingers along
the rail, which shows no hint of dust, and frowns again.

[6]

Not only is the room too well-appointed, it is also too large.  He
frowns at the walls, at the far corner, then turns and goes outside,
and surveys that side of the house from the yard.  The only window
is a small frosted-glass thing that must open on the padlocked
closet, and the only other opening is a vent-slit that must open
into a crawlspace above the hallway.  The wall is, he is certain, not
wide enough, not nearly wide enough, to hold the room he was just
standing in.

He has no measuring tape, but the store half a mile away does, and
he returns to measure.  On the outside, the wall is twenty-eight
feet long.  On the inside, the hallway is six feet across, the
utility room ten feet deep, and the too-large room is fully fifteen
feet.  At least three feet too large, and really more like five
given the thickness of the walls that he hasn't measured.

He goes outside and measures again, comes inside and measures again,
and nothing has changed.

He goes again to the convenience store, to get lunch, and to get
a hand drill.

Lunch at the tiny counter in the store, not saying anything to the
black-haired girl who is behind the counter again, feels entirely
normal, and he laughs at himself.  There will be some explanation
for it all, and at the moment it feels good to be sitting with a
mystery, eating a tuna sandwich and tomato soup with a sheer
impossibility fluttering in his chest.

Back at the house just as a heavy rainstorm comes through, the
first of a set that the television says will bring much-needed
water to the area and cooler temperatures, he feels a pang as
he sets the head of the drillbit to the wall, over in the far
corner in the feet-too-wide zone.  The paint is so rich, almost
glowing, cared-for.  But, he tells himself, it is his paint and
his wall, and he can fix the hole afterwards, after he's figured
out just what's going on, what he's failed to take into account
in his measuring and adding.

The drill turns easily, through the paint and a layer of sheetrock,
and then becomes harder to turn, as though caught in something, and
then hits some sort of bottom, some hard substance that the head of
the bit grinds against with a tooth-aching whining sound.  Pushing
harder just makes the whine worse, and he backs the bit out and
stands there, looking at the wall with pursed lips, the drill at
his side, for a long time, with the rain pounding on the roof.

[7]

Bob watched television for awhile, on the couch, frowning at the
screen, until the rain stopped.  He walked around the house, frowning
at it, and then off along the straight street, away from the corner
with the convenience store, down the long row of flattish houses on
flattish pieces of land, orthogonally arranged, thinking of ways to
force the impossibility of the room to reconcile itself to reality,
ways preferably not involving irreparable destruction, because if he
simply knocked out a wall and discovered that the room was suddenly
small enough to fit in the house after all, what a waste that would be.

Something over a mile from the house, in that direction, Bob found the
subdivision's public library, a set of overlapping cream-colored (or
perhaps creme-colored) cubes sitting on a slight rise (an artificial
one, he suspected), cozied up to a small parking lot and tended to by
wide stairs in dark brown wood.

The library was also cream inside, and quiet, and air-conditioned, and
full of chairs and modest bookcases and light.  The card catalog was
embodied in three clusters of computer screens, the screens in each
cluster sitting with their backs politely turned to each other, with
thin particleboard privacy shields between them, to deter the idly
curious from enjoying the search terms of the neighbors.

Bob sat down and idly read the titles of books about houses, and about
rooms, and even about doors and televisions and wills, but none of them
stuck in his mind.  He stood up and went to the window, looked out over
the flat miles of houses, wondering how it was that the library's rooms
all fit within its outside, wondering what idiotic mistake he had made
in measuring the walls, what the hard layer under the extra room's paint
really was, whether he had just hit a metal plate or an electrical box
of some sort and should just try again somewhere else.

Of course he should.  He frowned at himself, at the ghost of a reflection
just visible in the window, and wondered why that had not been the first
thing he had tried.  Back to the house, he said to himself, back to make
another hole, this time one that will go through the wall and clear this
all up.

Back at the house, unlocking the door, picking up the drill from the
ground where he'd apparently left it, he walked boldly into the too
large room, to find that the hole he'd drilled earlier had been neatly
and expertly spackled and filled, the white filler still barely tacky
under his lightly shaking fingers, ready to be painted.

And then found himself sitting in front of the television, staring
at the talking heads, sleepy enough to tell himself that it would make
sense in the morning.

[8]

He stood up, shaking himself out like a dog or a mop, looking toward
the bedroom but with the drill in his hand.  Then in the bedroom,
stuffing a pillow and a blanket under his arm and across his shoulder,
then in the too-large room, the pillow and blanket tossed onto one
of the too-lush sofas, and the drill pressed to the wall again.  Then
sitting on the sofa, head on the pillow and blanket draped across
himself, facing the wall that now needs both painting and another
round of spackling, prepared to doze, to rest, to be disturbed by
the slightest sound in the too-quiet and too-lush room.

Trucks on the highway.  Crickets in the grass and frogs in some
local wetland.  A gust of wind.  The comfortable disoriented feeling
of dipping in and out of sleep, with the attendant colors and sounds,
tastes and smells, illusiary touches running across the scalp, the
edges of dreams.

Sometime during the night, someone is standing at the damaged wall,
working efficiently with a small brush, a putty knife, round cans,
a metal toolcase that barely rattles, a yellow light shining onto the
wall from somewhere. Bob is sitting upright on the sofa and the blanket
is slipping off to the ground.  The figure at the wall is turning,
slowly, the light revealed to be coming from a lens at the neck
of the dark uniform; above the neck a shadowed face whose eyes are
far too large and round, whose nose is far too small and flat, whose
mouth is a wide line; and Bob is falling back onto the sofa, in
horror, in fascination, in the deepness of dream.

[9]

In the morning, of course, the paint on Bob's first hole is drying,
and the spackle on the second is nearly dry.  Bob is entirely
mystified by the figure, the round cans, the huge eyes, the memory
that is certainly the memory of a dream, fleeting as the figure
turned, as he fell back onto the sofa, as he remembers opening his
eyes again for an instant (in the dream) and seeing the figure in
its uniform opening the far door and going out.

There is a far door.  On the other side of the room.  Opposite the
door that leads in from the short hallway, from the rest of the house.
Bob frowns seriously at the door, grateful to be baffled by it rather
than by dreams of odd-eyed figures with brushes (Bob reminds himself
of just how distorted a face can appear when it is lit from below).

The door can open only into the back yard of the house.  Bob has not
noticed any doors into the back yard aside from the door to the kitchen,
but then he hadn't noticed the second door out of this very room until
now somehow, so this is not terribly surprising.  Without looking at
the now twice-repaired bit of wall, he reaches out and grasps the
doorknob.  It is cool under his fingers, polished, richly metallic,
and it turns easily, a well-oiled and competent thing.

On the other side of the door, as Bob feels he has known all along,
as if the surprise has already been felt and absorbed at some distant
past time, is not the back yard at all, neither a set of steps leading
down from an overlooked door, or a straight drop from a secret door
invisible from the outside, or anything else involving the back yard.
Instead there is another room, an even more impossible room, larger
than the livingroom and far more elegant, what must be oak tables, a
cabinet full of glassware, a small marble bust on an endtable, and
other things, more than Bob's eyes can possibly take in before he
finds himself back in the livingroom, on the sofa, staring at the
television mindlessly.

[10]

Having two impossible rooms in one's house, Bob thinks, sitting at the
tiny table in the convenience store with a warm a coffe and an enormous
sticky Danish, is really a wonderful thing, the best thing ever, the
sort of thing that completely recreates one, that opens up the world
to entirely new possibilities of life.  There are, he recalls now, in
a calmer mood, a mood to accept whatever come at him, windows in that
second impossible room, and those windows must be looking out on something,
and that something will be either some view of the back yard of the house,
and he can try to reconcile the angles and the distances, or it will
be a view of something different, and that will be a reward in itself,
a novelty until recently unimaginable.

It occurs to him also that the windows might open, or might at the
very least be breakable.  But at the thought of breaking a window the
image of the flat-eyed spackler comes to him strongly, as does a
certain protectiveness toward the house itself; the house is his,
so the two impossible rooms are his, although in a way he cannot
understand, and the flat-eyed spackler is not something he is ready
to think about being his, in any sense.

In the early afternoon, standing in the door to the first of his
(his?) impossible rooms, Bob feels a benign warmth extending from
him, a sort of generosity replacing the bafflement, the feeling
of wrongness (although he is still not thinking too much about
he uniform, the flat eyes and tiny nose, the metal tool bucket).
He has a pad of graph paper, four lines to the inch, and a fine
marker, and his measuring tape, and he is drawing for himself the
shape of the house, the dimensions as seen from the outside on one
sheet, the dimensions of the livingroom and kitchen and bed and
bath and the short hallway on another sheet, and the first of the
impossible rooms, with each of its pieces of furniture placed and
sized, two circles for the lamps, rectangles for the sofas and the
chairs, a dotted line for the thick rug.  And for each of the doors,
the one leading in from the hallway and the one leading onward to
the second of the rooms, a line at the edge, canted away from the
lines of the graph paper, showing which way the door swings.  Where
he drilled the two holes in the walls (something that seesm, already
or at least now, to have been the action of an entirely different,
and rather pitiable, person), he draws a light wavy line.  The repair
has been so expert that even knowing where the holes were he's not
sure that he can put his fingers on the exact spot.

Walking now into the second impossible room, he goes to one of the
two windows in the lefthand wall, the two windows that let light
into the room and color the cream walls with a touch of outdoor
blue, and looks out.

[11]

The view out the window could be of the back yard of the house and
the flatness beyond, except that there are no houses, no buildings or
utility poles, no constructs of any kind as far as the eye can see,
except for one curve of road at the left edge of the scene.  Pressing
his face against the glass, which is cool but not to cool as to give
any information about the likely temperature on the other side, and
peering left, he sees nothing new, flatness and grass, or reeds, with
the road coming from and returning to the beginning of what might
be gently rolling hills off in that direction, and perhaps a hint of
trees in the distance.  He thinks that the view goes off into mist
rather quickly, that it must in fact be somewhat foggy out there,
although he realizes that he has never spent much time studying the
views out of windows.

Although double-hung in style, the window offers no purchase for the
fingers anywhere, or any suggestion that it might be opened.  Bob has
no desire to press the issue with it, but stands looking out for some
time, pad in his hand and tape in his pocket.  Eventually he goes to
the other window, with some tension in his chest, but the view there is
the same, entirely consistent with the first window, and he smiles.

The measuring tape confirms that this room is solidly rectangular as
the first.  Bob takes and methodically notes down all of the relevant
measurements and then, setting his back to the wall between the windows
beside a small watercolor still-life of book and a vase of flowers on a
table, he brings up his pad and adds this room to his map, with its
doors and its windows and furniture.

This room is more complex, semantically richer, than the first.  The
glass-fronted cabinet shows off goblets and plates, kitchen things
Bob thinks.  The marble bust is heavy in his hand, and he pauses in
surprise to find himself holding it.  But why not?  Isn't it his, in
his house, even if an impossible room in a part of the house he does
not understand.  The bust is the head of an unremarkable man with
thinning hair, and the letters on the base say "Isaac Burgher".

In the corner of the room opposite the bust is a small waist-high bookcase
with a drawer in the base.  Bob kneels down and looks at the spines of the
books, draws one out with a finger and opens it.  To his disappointment
they seem to be in Italian, or in some other language that he doesn't know
that looks like Italian.  The frontispiece of the one that he has pulled
out is a map of some coastline, dense with the names of foreign cities,
and rivers, and mountain ranges.

Bob puts the book back, to a hint of sweet acidic scent from its pages.
He reaches down for the round pull of the drawer and opens it.  It is
not full, only a pair of unmarked pencils, a pad of paper, another small
book with words in that same Italian language on its cover, and three
sheets of paper folded in half.  The paper is crisp and smooth in his
fingers, elegantly watermarked.  The words, in a neat hand writing in
dark brown ink, are in a language that he understands.

[12]

My most dear Maria, [the letter says]

It was, as always, a joy to hear from you.  I took your note out into
the fields, and read it under the open sky.  Your words filled me with
delight as they always do, and my heart ached with yearning to see you,
to touch you, again.  I know you will not think less of me when I tell
you that I cried, and that every tear was both the deepest sorrow and
the sweetest happiness.

What is it that time does to lovers, my cherished one?  Every second
without you is an emptiness, but every second is also full of you,
because our hearts are so intertwined that I am never without you,
and you are never without me.  You are in every smallest atom of the
world to me, so wherever I am you are here as well, surrounding and
interpenetrating with me, and because of you all is joy and sweetness.

How high and cold the stars are here at night!  They seem infinitely
distant, parts of another universe entirely, and still they are Maria,
and they carry in them Maria's love, and her serenity, and her beauty.
All hymns are hymns to Maria, and all laughter is the sun on Maria's
hair, dancing in the field.

Love makes us irrational, it may be, but there is a higher reason in
love, for reason must always start with axioms and premises that reason
itself cannot provide

[13]

Here the writing ends, in mid-sentence, halfway down the second page.
The third page is blank.  Bob lets the sheets fold themselves again,
and puts them softly back into the drawer, and closes it.  How had
this letter from some unknown lover to some unknown Maria come into
the old man's house, into his house, an unlooked-for human voice
breaking out in the silence of the two impossible rooms.

Two or more.  Bob stands up and stretches, looking around.  Besides the
door he came in through, the room has two other doors, one on each of the
windowless walls.  He tries the door on the far wall, but finds it
locked.  He tries all of the keys from the keyring that came from the
lawyers, but none fit.  Perhaps, he thinks, he will find that key
under the cushions of one of these chairs or sofas, or in a drawer in
yet another room.  (Or, he does not let himself think, perhaps the
uniformed wall-repairer with the rounded eyes has locked it from the
other side, and keeps the key with him.)

The other door, the one opposite the windows, opens easily.  The room
beyond is again opulent, again scentless, again entirely impossible.
Bob feels himself buoyed up, happy, and also dizzy and somehow at the
edge of unconsciousness.  Too many impossibilities at once, he decides,
too much of something that must be taken in small doses, savored like a
fine strong brandy, or perhaps accustomed to over time like the venom
of a snake.

He sits again in front of the television, shaking and hollow, feeling
the world stretching out unheeding in all directions around him, and
feeling over his shoulder the pressure of the door, and the room, and
all the other doors and rooms, and in that state he somehow dozes off,
to the voice of the announcer describing wars, and rumors of wars.

[14]

The third impossible room is a complex thing, with a semicircular
step down to a semicircular sunken area taking up most of the space,
two doors in the opposite wall, tall bookcases on the side walls,
and at the center of the sunken area, against the far wall between
the doors, a long table under a large blank wooden panel.  The
room is lit by subtle recessed ceiling lights, and carpeted with
a rich grey carpet.

Bob can imagine a small upscale cult sitting here, on the step,
with their feet down in the sunken area, and the cult leader in his
robes standing at the long table, with whatever cultish objects
he's devised for the occasion spread out to be worshipped, or
reviled, or both, and perhaps with some shimmering symbolic banner
hung on the wooden panel for backdrop.

It seems that sort of room somehow.

He walks to one of the side walls and runs his fingers across the
spines of the books.  They sit upright on the shelves, orthodox,
closely but not tightly packed.  There are, Bob thinks, lots of
them.  A very large number of books.  Not that he's unaccustomed
to books, even books like these with cloth or leather bindings,
a few gold-inlaid titles on the sides.  But this many in one place,
in a room that's at least nominally in a house that is his, is
something new.

This is, of course, all something new.

The books in the case on this wall all seems to be in that same
possibly Italian language, or at least all the ones that he picks
out at random, and all the ones whose spines he looks at, are,
except for a few at one end of a shelf that use a different
alphabet, Russian, Cyrillic he thinks.  The books seem rather old
on average, judging from the feels and smells, and the numbers that
are probably years in the front of some.  But some are newer and some
are older; it doesn't strike him as a collection gathered for its
age.

Bob frowns here in his woolgathering.  A collection implies a collector,
and suggests some use.  This is, presumably, someone's collection,
someone's room.  Can it have been the old man's, and therefore now his,
the impossibility of its fitting into the house aside?  Bob would not
claim to have known the old man intimately, but this does not seem
like the kind of room he would have, the kind of collection he would
have.  Bob cannot picture the old man as cult leader, standing in his
robes at the front of the room presiding against the backdrop of some
rich red silk bearing a golden eagle, or a silver chalice.

[15]

The books on the other wall of the room are, to Bob's surprise, mostly
in English.  He even recognizes some of them: that "Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire", Dante's "Inferno" in at least two different
translations, a King James Bible or two, a "Golden Bough".  Most of
them are obscure, of course, unknown, because most books are obscure
and unknown, especially those with cloth or leather bindings and gilt
lettered spines, that smell slightly of age and comfort and steadier
times.

Bob takes two of the books from the shelf (being careful that the gap
they leave is visible, so he can put them back in the same place), and
sits in the chair in one corner, in the part of the room not sunken down
into the cultish amphitheater.  A well-placed light from the ceiling
glows down onto his hands.  One of the books is smaller and redder,
the other larger and greener.  Both are bound in good practical cloth,
both show some signs of wear, or at least use.

Sitting with the books, it occurs to Bob that it's somewhat odd,
faced with this impossibility and these two not-yet-tried doors,
that he's sitting here relatively passive.  It occurs to him also
that it is exactly because of those two doors that he is sitting
here.

He puts the smaller redder book down on the small table beside the
chair, and opens the other one at random.  The paragraphs that his
eyes light on describe a night spent in an inn in a village with a
Spanish name, sometime before the outbreak of the First World War.
The diction is slightly dusty, slightly wordy, slightly slow.  Bob
reads to the bottom of the page, turns the page, reads down that
page to where it ends halfway down.  The next page begins chapter
16, whose title is "Over the Hill".  Bob begins to read it, and
before he reaches the bottom of the page he has lowered the book
to his lap, and is asleep.

[16]

He jerks awake not long after, having dreamed a sound or a sudden emotion
or a change in the world.  He shakes himself, looks with amusement at the
book in his lap, snaps it shut (not noticing the half-sheet of paper that
flutters out of if and ends up on the carpet under the table), takes both
books in his hand and stands and slides them back into their place on the
shelf.

He looks around for his pad and pencil, and remembers having left them back
in the living room, in the possible part of the house.  Back through the
first two impossible rooms, which seem almost familiar and normal now, but
with a pleasant shiver of their impossibility, into the side hallway, takes
his pad and pencil, and is annoyed to find he is very hungry.

Over his food and drink, he looks at the diagrams he's drawn of the
house and the first two impossible rooms, and is pleased with them.
After eating and carefully cleaning up the crumbs and putting the
dish and silverware by the sink, he goes back through the living room
and hallway, the first impossible room with now indiscernable place
where he drilled his holes, the second impossible room with its
pair of windows and its three doors (he tries the locked door and
finds it still locked), into the third impossible room (which is
unchanged), and quickly diagrams that on the squared-off paper,
working quickly enough that he again doesn't notice the half sheet
of paper lying on the carpet under the little table.

The two doors on the far wall are unlocked, and lead into a corridor.
He's been almost fearing a corridor, because corridors lead at once
to a number of different rooms, and how many rooms, he thinks, how
many impossible rooms can he handle at once?

The corridor ends, in another door, not very far to the right, and
stretches off a longer distance to the left.  He quickly measures its
width and fills it into his diagram, which he is coming to think of as
a map, a navigator's guide, a record which, is the impossible rooms
continue to ramify, may be the thing that prevents him from becoming
lost in their maze, and allows him to get back to the house itself,
and its possible parts.  Then he goes to the door at the leftward end
of the corridor, noticing but not bothering to mark down that it is a
narrower and a plainer door than the others so far, and turns the knob,
and opens it.

The door opens onto a flight of wooden stairs, leading down into
darkness.

[17]

Should have brought a flashlight, he thinks, but even as he thinks it is
fingers are going to the place where anyone building a house in this culture
would put a lightswitch, and there one is, and pushing it upwards turns
on a bare bulb at the base of the steps, and perhaps some other bulbs
further along, and with only a moment's hesitation Bob ventures down.

At the bottom of the stairs, under the bare bulb, there is a basement.
Not a surprising thing to find at the bottom of a set of wooden stairs,
but also an additional impossibility here, because on this flat plain,
where the old man's house (now Bob's house) stands in its straight row
with all the others, houses do not have basements; the ground is too
wet, too infirm, too seeping.  So furnaces and washers and dryers are
in a utility room on the ground floor, and decades' worth of boxes and
bags and old papers are in the garage, or in the crawlspace above
the ceiling, or in a trunk in the corner of the bedroom.

But here is Bob, standing in an undeniable basement.  The white glare
of the bulb illuminates dusty cinder-block walls, pipes and wires
running from here to there, on the ceiling the undersides of floor
joists supporting what must be the rooms above (although if Bob's
map is accurate, the rooms above are yet more impossible rooms that
he has not seen yet, because he is not, or should not be, under any
of the known and mapped impossibilities).

The floor is cement, the air smells of dust.  There is another lit bare
bulb on the ceiling several yards away, lighting just more of the ashy
walls and grey floor, and beyond that the darkness closes in again.
There is a small narrow door behind him, in the wall that the steps
came down.  Looking back over his shoulder, he turns the knob.

It is a tiny room, a bathroom, with a minimal toilet, old-fashioned
with the tank set up on the wall behind it and a chain leading down,
tired-looking white porcelain and dingy silver metal.  A small sink
basin, in the same tired white, with a single spigot, protrudes from
the adjacent wall, the whole being barely large enough to suffice.

The contrast between the rich appointements above and this tiny
utilitarian room strikes him, and he smiles to imagine the cultists
from the Cultist Room, or men in smoking jackets from the soft
seating of the other impossible rooms, making their ways at intervals
down into this cramped and minimal place to answer their calls.
Bob closes the bathroom door without testing whether or not the
water runs, and turns again out into the basement proper.

He goes into the second pool of light, reaches out for the wall and
feels his way forward into the dark, wondering if he'll find another
lightswitch, or an end wall, or just what.

Instead he nearly shouts aloud as a door opens in the darkness ahead
of him, and a voice says, quietly but menacingly, "Don't move."

[18]

"Yeah, he's human all right."

"What else would I be?"

The three men seated around the rickety wooden table with him look
in a way hard-bitten, in another way warn out, or thin, or attenuated.
Two of them have just given him a very thorough and really rather
embarassing patting down and palpation, while the third stood a little
ways off, overseeing, with an air of being armed and dangerous that
might or might not match reality.

"What else would you be?  Where are you from?  You haven't seen them?"

"Well...  Once I thought I saw this, person, or something, in the night,
in a uniform, repairing the wall.  His eyes were, well, round and very
large...  But it could have been just the light."

The third man, the biggest and most hirsute of the three, shook his
head.

"Nope, not just the light.  That was one of them, exactly.  We had to
be sure."

"Why?"

Not a sensible question at all, or at least not a sensible first question.
But it was the one that had come out.  Bob felt himself to be running
mostly on automatic here, himself sitting at some distance and just
observing the fresh quantities of impossibility.

"We don't want the Others knowing that we're here."

"So if I hadn't been human...?"

The third man shook his head.  "Don't even ask."

"Look, I really don't understand.  This is my house --"

"Your house?"

"Well, that is, the doors that I came here through --"

"Tell us about it."

"Look, I can show you.  Just come with me upstairs, and --"

"We aren't going upstairs right now.  It's safer here."

The thought that he had been in danger up there, in the impossible
rooms, standing naively and sketching their sizes and running his
finger over their books, in danger the whole time, sends a chill and
a shiver up his spine.

"Is it dangerous, up there?"  Still asking the surface questions,
shying away from the more basic "what the hell is going on?" ones,
the "isn't this all impossible?" ones.

"They aren't human.  You don't want to get in their way."

"They take care of the rooms?"

The third man shrugs.  "Sometimes.  We think they built it all,
they and their allies.  Aliens, from somewhere else.  Who knows what
they're about.  We stay out of their way.  Right now, we don't think
it's safe to be upstairs.  We thought you might be one of them,
although we haven't seen them down here."

"Look, wait, okay.  I mean, I don't understand any of this.  I
came through a door in my house, in the house that the old man
left to me in his will --"

"He's dead, this old man?"

"Well, yes, he died."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I --"

"Did you see the body yourself?"

"Well, no, his will called for cremation without any ceremony --"

"Uh-huh.  So he might be dead."

"Look, this doesn't matter.  He left me the house, and I've moved in.
I opened a door that had always been locked the other times --"

"Other times?"  The third man seemed intent on letting Bob finish as
few sentences as possible, on questioning everything, even or especially
the things that it made no sense to question.  The other two were silent,
alert, looking around constantly.

"Yeah, other times, I'd visited his house before he died, and that
door had been locked --"

"Locked?"

"Yes!  Look, I'm just trying to tell you --"

"Was this old man a normal sort of person?  No odd habits?  Wearing
sunglasses in the daytime, anything like that?"

"No!  Would you let me finish a sentence, please?"

The third man just waved a hand, saying forget it, okay, fine, go on
then.

"So yes the old man died, and he left me his house in his will,
I guess because we'd been pretty good friends and he didn't really
have anyone else --"

Here the third man shook his head, made a motion as if to say something,
but then stopped with a sour expression and looked expectantly at Bob,
waiting for him to continue.

"So I came out and moved into the house, and I looked around, and there
was this door that had been locked before but it was open now, and when
I went through it there was this room that was too big for the house."

Here the third man nodded, and Bob thought he heard a sort of grunt from
one of the others.

[19]

"What, has this happened before?  Is this a thing that happens?"

But the third man just shook his head.  "Go on."

"Well, so, when I couldn't figure out how the room could fit inside the
house, I got a drill and made a couple of holes --"

"Holes, in the walls?"

"Well, yes, but not very deep because there was something hard, like
metallic, not very far in --"

Head-nods all around.

"That stopped the drill.  And then when I came back later something,
I mean someone, had spackled over --"

"Spackled over?"

"Yeah, spackled over the hole --"

"What does that mean, 'spackle'?"

"Well, you know, spackled over --"

"If I knew, I wouldn't be asking.  What does that mean?"

"Well, come on," Bob completely baffled here, "You know you put this,
I guess, spackling putty on a putty knife, and you --"

"Filler, you mean, like wall filler."

"Yeah, sure, just it's called spackle."

Odd enigmatic looks passing between the men here, as if this confirmed
something that they had suspected, that was now more certain.

"Okay, go on.  The hole was filled..."

"Yes, it was filled but not painted, so I drilled another one for good
measure, and I slept on the sofa there is the room, hoping to catch
whoever it was that had spack -- fixed the first hole."

"And you saw one of the Others?"

"Well, I guess so, I mean.  I woke up and there was this, I don't know,
this person in like a workman's uniform, with a metal carrying box of
tools --"

"Did you see the tools?"

"Did I see them?  I saw, I mean, I saw, well, I guess I didn't really
see any of the actual tools, it was dark, and he had just this low
night like hanging around his neck."

More nods.

"And then I must have made a noise or something, because he turned, and
I think it may have been just because his neck-light was lighting his
face from  underneath, but it looked like his eyes, I mean, his eyes
were awy too big, and rounded, and he had hardly any nose at all, and
then I guess he went out..."

"You saw him go?"

"Yeah, well, I was sleepy, and it was you know like a dream sort of --"

"A dream?"

"Yes!  You know.  And I sort of fell back into the couch and back to sleep,
but I did see him, or I thought I saw him, or it, open a door in the far
wall that hadn't been there before --"

"Wait.  A door that hadn't been there before?"

"Well, okay so it must have been there before, maybe I just didn't notice it,
but --"

"Wait, this is important.  Had the door been there before, or not?  The door
that it went out through."

[20]

"Well," Bob spreads his hands apart, helplessly, "how can I say for sure?  I
didn't notice it before he went out through it, or really actually not until I
woke up in the morning, but it might have been there before, a door is an
ordinary kind of thing to find in a room --"

"Even a room that's too large for the house?"

"I hadn't really convinced myself of that yet."

"But a door there would have been impossible.  You would have seen it, been
struck by it, tried it to see where it went."

"I might," Bob said, feeling now somewhat truculent at the third man, his
flow of words having exhausted itself for now, letting in the strange unreality
of meeting these three strangers in a baeement that can't be there, under some
rooms that can't be there, in the house that it now his.

"You would have.  Don't you think that you would have?"

Bob just nods.

"So the door wasn't there until the Other needed it to be.  And then it stayed
around after."  Here the third man looks over at the others, and there is a
long exchange of looks.  Bob wonders if they're speaking to each other
telepathically; it wouldn't be any odder than the rest of this.

It's very quiet in the basement.  One of the light bulbs is humming almost
inaudibly, all four of them are breathing.  There are, reassuringly, no
footsteps from above, no sound of doors opening or closing.  Or, for that
matter, new doors being formed or (and Bob's hair prickles at the though)
old doors vanishing.

[21]

"Have you been mapping?" the third man asks, frowning at the pad in Bob's
hand as though he's just noticed it.  Bob nods wordlessly and turns the
pad to face him in the dim light.

The man grunts and takes the pad out of Bob's hand so fast that he has no
time to react, and hands it to one of the other men (there is nothing in
particular to distinguish them; one might be slightly younger than the
other, slightly darker, but thinking of them as "the younger man" or
"the lighter man" would be a waste of energy Bob feels), who stands and
goes off to one side, into deeper darkness.

"You don't mind if we take a copy of this, do you?  Our maps are important."

A small focused light comes on there, and Bob hears the sound of paper,
and quick efficient writing.  No photocopiers in this basement, just the
smooth scratching of a pen.  Bob has the indistinct impression of a large
book open on a table, and imagines these three hiking through long
corridors, with enormous books strapped to their backs instead of
tents and sleeping bags.

"Can I see yours, too?  Have you mapped very much?  How far do the
rooms go on?"

The third man shakes his head, perhaps in answer to the first part of
the question.  "We've mapped miles of the Anomaly, and we have no reason
to think it has any end; we've found no sign of one."

"The Anomaly?  Is that what you call the rooms."

"Yes.  Seems as good a name as any."

"And how did you find it, how did you get in?  Is there --"

But here the man cuts him off with the most commandingly negative hand
gesture Bob has ever seen.  The light in the farther darkness snaps off,
and the pen-scratcher returns with Bob's pad, giving it not to Bob,
but to his interlocutor, who looks it over in more detai this time,
turning it from side to side.  Bob wonders if it's a good thing that
these men can now find his house, the possible rooms.  If, that is,
they couldn't already.

"Not much here.  You haven't been inside long, I guess?"

"No, just, well, just recently.  I've just, well, look!  Why are we
making small talk here?  Isn't this Anomaly, these impossible rooms,
aren't they --"

The man is looking away from him; the other man, not the one who'd
taken the map, is leaning over and speaking softly.  The third man
asks some unheard question, gets a low reply.

"All right," the third man says, rising, "we have to go.  Can you meet us
here again, twenty-four hours from now?"

Bob looks at his watch, does no particular mental calculation, but nods.
The man isn't looking, doesn't seem to be interested in his answer, but
moves back into the darkness, with the other two before him.

He looks back as they disappear.  "Don't follow," he says.

[22]

Bob doesn't follow.  When there is no sound or light from in front, he
feels through the darkness to the table where they copied his map.
It is a desk, really, an old fashioned metal and wood thing, and there
is no light on it, certainly no books or ledgers or maps, wearable or
otherwise.  They must have gathered them up, utterly efficient, in the
few seconds before they left.

He goes back to the stairs, and up.

At the top of the stairs, Bob begins opening the door carefully, thinking
to peek out into the corridor before going out, but then shakes his head
in irritation and opens the door wide and walks out.

The man in the basement, the men in the basement (none of whose names he
knows, it strikes him) are clearly lunatics, paranoid, or playing some
kind of game that he doesn't understand.  The corridor lies ahead of
him who knows how many doors ("miles", the man had said, although there
is really no reason to believe him).

Forced to choose a friend and an enemy from a harmless-seeming (if not
harmless-feeling, he admits) figure in a uniform patching a wall, and
three paranoids crouching in the dark in a basement, he knows where his
tendencies lie.

Absurd to think of an alient conspiracy that would, that could, create
an Anomaly of miles of impossible interconnected rooms in some kind
of space-warp, and then have to go out with a putty knife and spackle
to fix some holes in the walls.

The man, Bob remembers, hadn't known, or had pretended not to know,
the word "spackle".  What could that possibly mean?  He is not
prepared, not now, to accept the idea of the rooms flowing off
into parallel universes, where the word "spackle" is unknown, and
perhaps where hiding grimly in basements is considered normal, the
obvious thing to do.

He wonders if he will be back there, going down the basement stairs,
in twenty-four hours.

[23]

On the corridor wall opposite the doors back into the cultist room
(Bob begins to give the rooms names in his mind: the First Impossible
Room, the Second Impossible Room, the Cultist Room), a rather used-looking
corkboard hangs on the wall.  There are thumbtack in it, but sadly
(or Bob thinks at the moment that it is sadly) they hold up nothing,
affix no notices to the board, nothing but a small triangle torn from
the corner of a piece of slightly green paper under one of them.  Bob
carefully removes that tack, looks at the sliver of paper, and finds
it blank.  He puts it back onto the tack, and puts the tack back into
the board.

There are two facing doors a bit further along the corridor, and Bob
adds them to his map.  The lefthand one (the one in the wall opposite
the door from the Cultist room) opens into a small but well-appointed
bedroom, with a sapphire blue quilt on the bed, a sky-blue rug on the
floor (which is itself blue-grey slate; an odd choice for a bedroom,
Bob thinks), and matching blue-upholstered chairs beside a tall wooden
armoire and a small writing desk.  (The Blue Bedroom, Bob thinks to himself,
and adds it to the map.)

The armoire is locked.  Bob hestitates for a moment, feeling like a
burglar or at any rate a ransacker, but then pulls one of the chairs
up to the writing desk, and begins going through its drawers.  (He
can no longer tell himself sincerely that this is after all his own
house; on the other hand it does not seem to be clearly anyone else's
either, for who could own an impossible house?)

The writing desk has four drawers, two on either side.  The upper left
drawer (where Bob himself would keep most things, he thinks) is empty.
The lower left drawer has again a few unmarked pencils, a few loose
thumbtacks, and what seems to be a postcard.

Taking the postcard out carefully, he is disappointed to see that it is
unused, not written on, with no stamp.  The face shows an utterly
conventional sunset over a beach, the back declares the beach to be
somewhere in the South Pacific, and the date is twenty years ago.
Meaning, he thinks, that the photo was taken twenty years ago, not
that the card was made then, although the printing is ambiguous
on the subject.

Bob puts the postcard back into the drawer and closes it.  Would it
be radical, he wonders, an act of rebellion, to, say, put the postcard
into the empty top drawer instead?  Would a workman be sent out, with
(or, in this case, perhaps without) his metal box of tools, to open
the drawers and transfer the postcard back to its appointed place?

Feeling only a bit surreptitious, Bob opens the drawers again and moves
the postcard to the top drawer.  Closing them both, he feels an odd
sense of satisfaction, as though he had delivered an answer rather than
merely posing a question.

[24]

The upper right drawer of the small writing desk in the Blue Bedroom
contains a set of nine curved wooden slats, each nested within the
next, like a brace of spoons.  They are held together at one end
with a pink lace ribbon, tied in a bow.  Bob frowns, having no
notion what they could be for, no connection from them to anything
that he knows of.

It strikes him to wonder if the three men in the basement have been
in this room, if they have opened this drawer and left undisturbed
the lace ribbon and the slats.  It seems uncharacteristic of them
somehow, of their grim faces and basement lurking; but perhaps they
are afraid of alerting the aliens (Bob's lip curls as he thinks
the word "aliens").

They must not spend all of their time cowering in basements, though,
if they have miles of maps.  Has alien activity increased lately?
Have they had a scare?  Are there indications that this is not a
good time for mere humans to be abroad, and that other times would
be better?  These are all things that Bob cannot picture the three
men in the basement discussing; they are not information sources,
not agents of clarification.

In the bottom righthand drawer are a number of small glass bottles
of colored liquids or powders that Bob things must be makeup of some
kind, cosmetics, an odd thing to keep in the drawer of a writing
desk.  And there is also a folded piece of paper, and a brown
pen.

[25]

The paper is the same kind of paper that bears the partial love
note to Maria, and the brown pen is the same brown as the ink in
that note.  He takes the paper from the drawer, thinking of dry
leaves and Autumn, and unfolds it, and smiles.

"Maria," the paper says, "Maria Maria Maria Maria", over and over
again, in different sizes and with different degrees of curl on the
initial letter.  The ink is brown, brown as the pen, and the hand is,
he thinks, the same as the hand in the love note.  (Was that a draft,
he wonders, of a note that was later rewritten more perfectly and
completed and delivered on other pieces of paper, or was it begun
and never finished at all?)

He imagines a young man, maybe in a hose and doublet, writing the
beloved name over and over at the little writing desk (although the
Blue Bedroom is a bit female even for a lovesick young man in hose),
scribbling with the brown pen and its brown ink, and daydreaming.

When he slips the paper, folded again, back under the bottles, it
sticks at the back, and moving the bottles with his fingers he finds
that there is a small key there, in the paper's way.  He looks at
the key, and the armoire, speculatively, takes the key in his fingers,
closes the drawer, and goes to the armoire.  The key fits easily,
and the lock opens with only the smallest hint of a squeak.

The armoire is nearly empty.  There are only two hangers on the
round wooden bar that crosses the inside, and one of them is empty.
Looped over the other one is a long dark scarf, or wrap, or some
other sort of long band of thick fabric.  Bob reaches out and
touches it, and it feels clean and well cared-for and expensive.
He considers taking it out and wrapping it around his neck (for,
again, whose house is this, anyway?), but he doesn't.

The only other thing in the armoire is yet another piece of paper,
in the dimness at the bottom.  This one is not folded, and is
entirely blank.  Bob leaves that there also.

[26]

The door across the hallway leads into a similar bedroom, except
the bedspread and upholstery are red (the Red Bedroom), and the
rug is larger and offwhite.  There is no armoire, and instead of
the writing desk only a small table in the corner holding an empty
green marble vase.

Bob, suddenly tired, stretches out on the bed, which is enticingly
soft, and closes his eyes.  It is very quiet, not a distinct sound
from anywhere, except for the infinitely familiar rushing of blood
through his veins, the sound that comes up with there are no other
sounds.

He thinks of the men in the basement again, wonders if they've
done this, lying on the beds and listening to the quiet, maybe
listening for the footsteps of aliens or other enemies, or the
general march of their fears.  He thinks of that first night, seeing
the face of the wall repairman, and it no longer seems nearly as
terrifying, only strange, as all of this is strange, as all of this
is impossible.

Not intending to, he falls asleep, and dreams of cake and ice-cream,
and of thick sugary pastries, and when he wakes up again, startled
upright by some dreamed sound (because the room itself is still
utterly quiet), he is very hungry.

[27]

Back in the possible part of the house, back in more or less ordinary
reality (but how ordinary can even this reality be, when there are
impossible rooms attached to it?), he sits at the kitchen table and
eats a sandwich, looking over his drawings again, adding the Blue and
the Red Bedrooms to his map.  Except for being far too big for the
house, the rooms seem to have committed no further impossibilities,
fitting between each other with room to spare.  Too much room, if
anything; and Bob wonders about crawlspaces and secret tunnels and
narrow stairs leading down into further basements and subbasements
and sub-subbasements, or for that matter leading up into impossible
second stories, and towers.

He intends to go back through the impossible rooms and continue his
explorations, investigations, but finds himself instead outside,
walking up the street along the even sidewalk, toward the convenience
store at the corner, his mind having invented a need for some small
ingredient or foodstuff that he'd forgotten or used up the day before,
or a cup of coffee, or maybe a donut.

The black-haired girl is behind the counter again.  He gets a cup
of coffee at the coffee island, puts in a packet of sugar, takes
a glazed donut from the donut display, and pays for them at the
counter.  The girl is polite enough, smiling absently, nodding at
he fact that he's just inherited a house in the neighborhood, shaking
her head at the suggestion that maybe she rememberd the old man?
Not taking up any offered conversational thread.

When he's done with his coffee and donut at the plastic table, he
asks if they have a rest room.  They do, in the back, behind a door
as small and narrow as the one in Bob's basement (out here, in the
more possible, or apparently more possible,  parts of the world, he
thinks of the house and everything that it leads to as his, in some
loose but palpable sense).  It is nearly as cramped as that one, but
the fixtures are more modern, slightly pink, and the sink has both
hot and cold water.

[28]

It's black night when Bob comes out of the store, black night at
any rate up above the layer of streetlamp light that blankets the
flatness of the houses.  He's slightly surprised by this, and the
fact that he's not sure exactly how many days have passed since he
first opened the first door into the first impossible room bothers
him slightly.  He has not been paying much attention to his watch,
has been sleeping oddly in odd places, and has been eating when he
is hungry.  He does know, though, that it is sixteen hours until
the three men (or at least the third man) will be expecting him in
the basement.  He think it's likely that he will be there.

Back in the house, he decides on sleep, sleep in an entirely possible
bed in an entirely normal room.  He has another sandwich from the
kitchen, eats it on the sofa watching things moving on the television
and listening to the sounds that it makes, and then gets in under
the sheets and falls asleep quickly.

He dreams of armies and pincers, of hard-faced men looking down at him,
and lighted doorways in dark rooms.  But none of the dreams wake him,
only the sun coming in through the windows, and five minutes after that
he's forgotten the dreams entirely.

The First and Second Impossible Rooms are undisturbed and unchanged.
The Cultist Room is also, and again Bob doesn't notice the half sheet
of paper that still lies under the table.  Feeling overcome by riches,
he takes a book at random from the English shelves and opens it.  It
is a collection of nineteenth-century philosophical essays by authors
that he has never heard of, and the few paragraphs that he reads are in
a prosy and indirect style that quickly glazes over his eye.  He smiles
to himself and replaces it.

The corridor behind the Cultist Room is just the same, and the door to
the basement is closed.  It is six hours or so until he will be expected
down there.  The doors to the Red and Blue Bedrooms are closed also.
In the Blue Bedroom, the postcard that he moved is still in the drawer
that he moved it to; so either the aliens (or the caretakers, or the
repairmen) do not concern themselves with that sort of alteration, or
they don't do it as quickly.  He opens the door to the Red Bedroom just
wide enough and just long enough to look in, and see that it appears
unchanged.

The next door in the corridor is set back slightly into the wall, into
a slight niche in the wall opposite the doors to the Cultist Room, the
same side of the corridor as the Blue Bedroom.  It is somehow an unassuming
door, a door that lowers the expectations of what might be beyond it.

The room beyond it is in fact nearly empty, a rectangular room with
plain walls and no furniture, a couple of cardboard boxes stacked
carelessly in one corner, another door in the far wall, and close
to Bob on the nearer side wall, a wooden ladder fastened to the wall,
leading up into a square well in the ceiling.

[29]

What to address first?  Where to begin?  Bob goes over to the boxes,
which are brown and unmarked.  The one on top is taped close and although
he has a pocketknife he is not comfortable cutting the tape.  He puts
the box to one side (it is not heavy, not light), and finds that the
one under it, the bottom one, is open, not taped.

Inside the box are a large number of smaller boxes, made of stiff
cardboard and bearing not names but what looks like serial numbers,
part codes, strings of letters and numbers and hyphens that say
nothing to him, but presumably speak fully and exactly to anyone
armed with the proper catalog.

He takes out one of the boxes and opens the lid.  Inside, wrapped in
crumpled paper, is some kind of electronic component or perhaps a
piece of a small motor.  It is, at any rate, nothing that Bob
immediately recognizes; he replaces it carefully.  The second box
he tries holds what seems to be an identical part.  This is amusing
in some abstract sense, but it does not hold his attention.  He
closes up the bottom cardboard box again, and puts the top taped one
back on top of it.  The weight of the top box is consistent with it
being full of layer after layer of that same boxed component again,
all waiting, perhaps forgotten, for some use somewhere.

Now, he thinks, the door, or the ladder?  He puts off the decision for
another few minutes, measuring the room and adding it to his map,
including the far door, and the ladder and the well (for which he invents
a new symbol), and even a small note about the boxes and their boxed
contents ("electric components?").  Then, looking from the one to the
other one final time, he tucks his pad under his arm, and pulls himself
up the ladder, the wood smooth and warm under his fingers.

Looking up as he climbs, he sees at first only dimness, but then as
his eyes grow used to it a circular something set at the top of the
ladder, perhaps another room's height above the ceiling of the room
that he started in (the Storeroom, perhaps, despite how little there
actually is stored in it).

When he is high enough to see that the circular something is a waffled
metal cover, like a manhole cover, he also notices a small wooden
shelf on the wall of the well at the level he's climbed to.  On it
is a pair of steel pliers, and a dozen or so screws lying loose on
the wood.  He leaves them where they are.

At the top of the ladder he pushes upward, and without too much
resistance the metal cover grates aside and Bob clambers up.  He
finds himself standing in a very large, cavernously echoing, space,
and from somewhere on the nearest wall comes an odd distrubing sound.

[30]

It is something like music, and something like the roaring of lions,
and something like thunder, and in the large space (light pouring down
from somewhere above, steps going up to a catwalk on a far wall, hints
in the distance of barn-sized doors, windows too high to see through,
large machinery) it echoes in an entirely too ambient way.  It makes him
think of disorder, of things coming unglued, of things forgotten.

Bob frowns and walks in the direction of the sound.  It is, as he
suspected, coming from a small audio unit sitting on an empty
wooden crate against the wall.  He squints at it for a moment, at
familiar yet somehow unfamiliar controls, the usual design but a
different flavor, perhaps made in a foreign country, but not so
foreign as to be unrecognizable, and after a moment he presses what
must be "stop".

The music, or noise, or whatever it was, abates.  Another sound, from
farther away in the space, that he hadn't realized was separate from
the sound of the music, also stops.  He turns, hearing footsteps, and
at the same time a figure comes into view in the vastness, and a small
but forceful female voice very distinctly says "hey!".

[31]

Methilde is a small slim woman, probably about Bob's age, with dirty
fingernails and a welder's mask tilted upward above her face.  They
are sitting now at opposite ends of a long battered couch with at
least one broken spring, pushed up against the one of the walls of the
big echoey space, looking up at the thing that she has been making,
and drinking coffee, and talking.

"You came up through that manhole?  That's funny; I did poke at it
when I first saw it, but I didn't have a crowbar to get it open
from above."

"Why did you have that music, or whatever it is, playing over there?"

"I don't know.  Adds to the space, I think.  Hope you don't mind I
turned it back on."

"Not at all."

"Is this all completely impossible for you, too?"

She laughs at this, and says that yes it's definitely impossible.  She
also opened a door to find a room too large for its outside, with doors
leading to more impossible rooms, although she won't say exactly where,
either in terms of the outside less impossible world or in terms of the
path that might lead from this big echoey space back to there.

"Not that I don't trust you or anything, but I just like to be safe."

"Safe against what?"

"I don't know."

She hasn't seen any of the uniformed workers, or anything like the
three men in the basement that Bob describes.

"If they repair damage, I guess I should be flattered that they don't
consider my work to be damage."

Methilde has taken a dozen long steel rods from a storeroom that she
found in one corner of the large space, and welded them together to
make a twelve-foot-high framework that she is now embellishing with
other rods and bits of metal in a pattern that Bob can see, but does
not understand.

"It was marvelous, finding this space.  I'd been looking for somewhere
just like it.  I hauled my welding gear in here right off."

"Have you told anyone else about it, about the impossible rooms?"

"No.  No one to tell, really.  Have you?"

Bob shakes his head.

[32]

She laughs at the basement theory about the aliens and their enigmatic
extra-dimensional constructs, when Bob tells her about it.

"No," she says, "I've decided that it's a metaphor."

"A what?  What is?"

"A metaphor.  This whole place, all these what you call impossible rooms,
this gorgeous space, the manhole cover, the things I haven't told you about
yet, it's all a metaphor, a concept."

"How can be be sitting drinking coffee in a metaphor?"

"Well yeah, that's the thing, isn't it?"  Her eyes are bright, and she
moves on the couch to face him more directly, clearly full of the
thought.  "If this can be here, and it's obviously a metaphor, and we
can be in it, can be having parts of our lives in it, that says something
about everything, about what life really is.  It puts everything in
an entirely new context.  Life can't be anything like that we thought
it was."

This is further than Bob has gone along that line of thought, and it
makes him uncomfortable.

"So we're sharing a metaphor?  Like a dream?  What about those men in the
basement, the person or whatever it was that fixed my wall?  Are they also
in the dream with us?  Are their lives working in the same metaphor?"

"I don't know," she says, leaning back, "It sounds to me that they're just
metaphors, too, sort of bits of the story, or of the stage.  Not parts of
the cast, if you know what I mean."  Her eyes narrow, and she smiles at
him.  "I think you're part of the cast, though, like me.  Cool that you
found me like this."

Bob shakes his head, not to say no but just to clear it.

"This is good coffee.  Do you go back often for food?"

She is amused.  "Oh, no.  You haven't seen?"

"What do you mean?"

"Come on."

And she gets up and goes around a corner of one of the high cement walls,
around a thicket of thick pipes that come from somewhere far above and
vanish into the floor here, and through a door into a more human-sized
room beyond.

[33]

The room is a kitchen, not entirely unlike the one in Bob's house, in the
possible part of Bob's house (and he notices that he's completely stopped
thinking of the rooms, at least the rooms beyond the Cultist Room, as
part of the house in any sense, although compared to say the convenience
store he still feels as though they are his).

Methilde (and she has been coy about her last name, and Bob hasn't told
her his either, and he knows his confidence that Methilde is really her
first name isn't based on anything in particular) opens the door of the
small white refridgerator with a flourish.  Inside there is food.

There is, in particular, fruit and cheese, bread and lunchmeat, milk
and sparkling water, cut carrots and what looks like a ham shank,
butter, and eggs.

"So you brought all this in here...", Bob isn't sure exactly how the
refridgerator is an answer to his question.

"No!", she says, sparkling, "No, I just eat it.  And if I leave it
slightly bare in the morning, then in the evening it's full again!
Just like your wall, where the holes that you drill heal up in the
night."

Bob frowns.  Because of course he's told her that the holes heal up
through the offices of the person, or creature, with the neck-light,
and the spackle, and the putty-knife.  He doesn't want to think about
that same uniform bringing food here, sometime in the night.

But Methilde isn't done showing off.  "And the cabinet, too!  Just
this one, beside the stove."  Inside this door there are cans of
prepared soup, and dry cereal, and coffee, and salt and sugar and
dry pasta and some canned fish.

"And they just replace whatever you use?"

"Well, more or less.  There's always the same amount; exactly what it
is changes sometimes.  Variety is good."

Bob takes one of the cans from the cabinet, a can of tuna, and
turns it over in his hand.  It has a familiar paper label, a brand
that he's seen before if not one that he buys himself.  He takes
out a less familiar one, garishly-colored, and finds that it has
the same vaguely Italianate writing on it, and a drawing of a
smiling pig.

"Oh, yeah, about half the things are in that language.  I don't
know what it is, do you?  Something Balkan, I thought; is there
a Serbian language?"

[34]

Back on the sprung couch at the base of Methidle's artwork, drinking
sparkling water from slender glasses.  ("The place doesn't wash the
dishes for me; that I have to do myself", she's laughed.)

"You're pretty self-sufficient here then."

She just smiles.

"Where do you sleep?  This couch wouldn't be too comfortable I'd
think."

She laughs.  "I know you've seen bedrooms in the metaphor.  And
no I'm not going to tell you where mine is.  But if you need a
bathroom, there's a nice little one next to the kitchen, with a
shower and everything."

"You hardly have to go back to the rest of the world at all."

"Well -- I don't, really."

"You don't?"

"There's no reason to!  I have my bed here, my books, my work."

"But don't you want to, like, keep up with the world?"

"I know what you mean.  But..."

"But?"

"Well, hasn't it occurred to you, sometime if you go out, back to
where you started, the next time you open that door it might not
lead back in again?"

"Hm, wow.  I'll have to think about that."

[35]

"So what do you think it's a metaphor for?"

"For?"

"Yes.  If this is all a metaphor, it was to be a metaphor *for*
something.  It can't just be a metaphor for nothing in particular."

"Right, of course.  But there are so many things, can't you see?
A metaphor for space, for desire, for privacy and quiet.  When I
came through that door from the crampedness and noise of the city,
and -- well after I went through a few rooms -- coming into this
space, it was perfection."

"I guess the metaphors would be different for me."

"We all have our own."

"But ours have crossed here, maybe."

"Maybe!", she seems pleased by the idea.

"I don't know what mine would be, though.  I've never dreamed of a
quiet place to weld.  And I came in from a suburb, flat, lined up,
like a lot of similar rooms along alot of straight corridors --"

"Well, there you go!"

"But... I mean it can't be that simple.  Everything's a metaphor for
everything else if you slide your mind around right."

"Well, so?  What do you think?"

Bob considered, as if the idea made any sense.  "Exploration?  Openness?
Possibility?  Something to dig into, something where the world is deep
and goes on back into the darkness."

"And down into that basement, with those awful men; they're yours also."

"Hm, yeah I suppose they are."  Bob stopped and looked back toward the
kitchen, struck by a thought and speaking without thinking.  "Hey, you
know..."

"What what?"

"I'll bet they'd be fascinated by your kitchen, if they don't have their
own.  They could feed themselves from it, they could wait in the night
for their aliens to come and restock the shelves.  They'd probably want
to garrison the place --"

He stopped at a gasp from Methilde, and turned to see her eyes wide, face
frightened, her hand at her mouth.

"I'm sorry, I --"

"You'd better go."

[36]

He hadn't wanted to go, but Methilde had been both very upset and very
convincing.  If his metaphors included that sort of thing, she said,
she didn't want hers to be at risk.  There might be, here in the
impossible rooms, places where metaphors overlap, and clash, and even
do battle.  And she didn't want his setting up any sort of beachhead
near hers.

As he went reluctantly back down the manhole (and she quickly began
to slide the cover over, the opening into the vast echoing space a
dwindling cresent), he'd gotten her to agree that he could come back,
now and then, and say hello, as long as he didn't stay too long, and
she felt right about it.

That would have to do.

It was now an hour until Bob was to meet the men in the basement, and
he felt oppressed and disoriented.  He went to the Blue Bedroom (still
untouched, still as it had been) and sat at the writing table and drew
what he could recall of Methilde's space on his pad.  It was a vague
and indefinite shape, on a page by itself, the only definite features
the manhole through which he'd come up, the door into the kitchen, and
a drawing as accurate as he could recall of the woman's work, standing
on its braced feet of steel rods.

Then he went back into the possible parts of the house, and sat watching
television and eating bread and cheese for forty-five minutes.

When his watch told him the three men would be expecting him in the
basement soon, he got up and turned off the television and went into
the side hallway, through the first two impossible rooms, the Cultist
Room, into the corridor, and opened the door to the basement.  Everything
was just where it ought to be, and he felt sure that the postcard would
still be in the drawer in the Blue Bedroom that he had left it in.

The basement was quiet and dim, the lights still on, had been on as
far as he knew since he had turned the switch.  He went down the stairs
and stood there at the bottom, looking around and listening.  There was
no sound.

He felt his way forward through the darkness past the second pool of
light, to where the door ought to be.  It was, closed and solid under
his fingers.  He knocked, but there was no answer.  He called softly,
then a bit louder, his voice sounding like the only thing for miles.
He opened the door and stared into the darkness beyond.

Yesterday one of the men had turned the switch, after saying "don't
move" and before the thorough patting-down.  Now his own fingers found
the switch easily, again in just the place that one's fingers would expect
to find a switch, and turned on the inadequate light.  The table and
chairs were just as they had been, and he sat down to wait.

[37]

Bob waited, sitting in the chair by the wobbly table in a poorly-lit
room off of an impossible basement at the end of an impossible corner,
for fifteen minutes.  Then he got up and went out through the door
and through the narrow door and confirmed that the bathroom's water
supply and facilities were entirely functional, although the water
was painfully cold and there was no soap.

Back in the inner room he paced around, finding but not passing
through a doorless archway that the three men had almost certainly
left through the day before, tripping over a small empty wooden
crate and carrying it back to the light to examine it.  It was
unmarked and rather rickety.  He put it on the ground and propped
his feet up on it.

How long, Bob asked himself, does courtesy require waiting for an
appointment when the other does not show up?  When, in particular,
the other is a stranger, and not necessarily a friendly stranger,
and the making of the appointment was entirely one-sided?  And when,
for that matter, one is feeling oppressed by the atmosphere of an
impossible basement?

Next time he comes down here, Bob tells himself, he will definitely
bring along a good strong flashlight.

[38]

In the Storeroom, half an hour later, Bob finds that the door in the
far wall is locked.  He looks upward into the ceiling well, imagining
that he can hear the grating and sparking of Methilde's audio player,
and her welding arc.  He turns to go back out into the hallway and
continue on his way, but his foot feels some irregularity in the
floor (regular but unpolished wooden slats), and he looks down.

In the floor, directly under the ladder and the well that lead up
to Methilde's space, is a recessed metal ring, and a line of breaks
in the floorboards that means a trapdoor.  Bob crouches down, puts
his finger into the ring, and lifts.

The ladder leading down is a series of metal rungs set into the
wall.  The well it leads down into a round, with cement walls.
It goes down farther than the wooden ladder goes up, and the air
is cold and slightly dank, wetter and chillier than that basement
where the men had not appeared.  (Perhaps, he thinks as he descends,
his metaphor has changed.  He will mention this to Methilde.)

Just as the light from above, from the undistinguished ceiling lamp
in the Storeroom, is giving out, Bob sees a floor beneath him, the
well opens out into a room, or at least a room, and shortly he is
standing on the ground, rubbing his hands together, in a tight cold
space that leads off into darkness in two directions.

He is suddenly tired, and he has no flashlight, and his metaphor
feels unstable.  He does not have Methilde's self-contained renewing
kitchen, Methilde's claimed bed to retire to.  He turns back to the
ladder reluctantly, but it is the way home.

[39]

That night, in his bed that used to be the old man's bed, in the house
that used to be the old man's house, he sleeps deeply and without
dreams, despite the surrounding metaphors and the memory of the
places above and below the Storeroom.

In the morning he turns on the television, and watches the news over
his breakfast, bacon and toast with butter and orange juice.  The world
is still out there, still doing the same things.  There are no reports
of houses with impossible extra rooms, or aliens with space-warps, or
even putty knives.

There is no flashlight in the house, at least none that he can find in the
possible part of the house.  He walks the familiar route to the convenience
store, buys the ten-dollar flashlight (thinking the four-dollar one might
not be trustworthy enough for penetrating the metaphor), nods to the
sandy-haired boy behind the counter, and walks back.

The first and second impossible rooms, the Cultist Room, the corridor
and the Storeroom are all as before, undisturbed.  He considers going
down into the Basement, looking into the tiny bathroom and shouting for
the three men and their maps, but he does not.  He looks up the well
toward Methilde's space, and down at his feet at the ring in the floor,
and bites his lip.

[40]

The flashlight penetrates the darkness of the tunnel easily.  The walls
are close together, six or seven feet, and the ceiling low.  But in 
either direction it goes, apparently straight, as far as the beam can
reach.  There are thing along the walls at intervals, and Bob wonders
if each one is a ladder, leading down from yet another room above.

He flips a mental coin and starts out, in the direction away from 
the possible parts of the house.  The tunnel runs perpendicular to
the corridor, and there are attractions both to walking in under
the places he has already been, and walking out away, into farther
and newer places.  His mental coin toss chooses the latter.

The first irregularities in the tunnel walls are a pair of small
metal doors, set opposite each other in the walls, that are either
locked or rusted shut or simply unopenable from this side.  The
next is a more normal-looking door, standing at which Bob can see
another, on the other side of the tunnel, a few yards further along.
He notes then down on his pad, which has a fresh sheet for the tunnel
and anything it might lead to.

Another mental coin to flip here, or at least a decision to make.
Try every door, climb every ladder that might appear, pass through
into every offshoot room and turning, or continue straight down
the straight tunnel, extending the distance he has gone into
the impossibility?

Again the coin toss or some buried preference decides in favor
of outboundness and extension, and Bob continues down the tunnel,
the sound of his footsteps echoing, pausing to note passing features
on his map (another pair of small facing doors, a larger door by
itself, a cluster of pipes, a ladder like the one that he came
down leading upward to somewhere else, a grating in the floor
that he imagines is a drain for water, another and even narrower
tunnel leading off to the left), walking at a good pace for a long 
time, until the beam of his flashlight shows the straightness
coming to an end.

[41]

The ladder at the end of the tunnel is more a set of stairs,
a metal scaffolding set against the endn wall that lets him
walk up from rung to rung, turning at a landing, and then
from rung to rung up into the ceiling.  After three landings
he is at the top, at a wooden door in a narrow space with
sheet metal walls.

The door opens with a squeak, and he is nearly overwhelmed with the
smell of the sea.  The impossible rooms have been nearly scentless
so far, subtle fragrances perhaps in the bedrooms, the hot metal of
the welder in Methidle's space (and food smells in her kitchen, and
a clean smell from her hair as they sat on the sofa), a certain
dankness in the tunnel.  But here the air is so strongly sea-tanged
that he thinks he hears waves, and then closing the door behind
him and going the only way there is to go down a short hallway
he does hear waves, and he is standing in the main room of a
beach-house, looking out across a pebbly shingle at the ocean.

His hand, reaching outward for support, finds the back of a
worn wicker chair, and he sits down blindly, his eyes fixed
on the waves.  They come in regularly, swelling and rolling and
breaking, rattling and hissing against the shoreline.  They are
grey as slate, grey and striped with lighter spume, undulating
like the backs of whales or the undersides of stormclouds.
The sky over them is just as grey, and grey gulls wheel high
overhead.

[42]

So is this more of the metaphor, Bob asks himself?  Is this just
one very large impossible room, with an ocean and a sky and those
gulls?  Or is this someone else's entrypoint, someone who inherited
this house from an acquaintance, and went into the short hallways
leading off the living room, and opened a door and found metal
stairs leading down into an impossible tunnel?

He puts his pad on his lap to add the hallway and living room to
the map, but pauses and frowns and chuckles.  Should the map 
include the shingle, the sea, the gulls?  Instead he draws, at
the end of the tunnel, stairs leading up, his symbol for a door,
and then a cloud, and the words "beach house, ocean".

And what now?  Back into the tunnel, to explore some of the other
doors, side-tunnels, ladders?  Out into this world, to see if the
house has neighbors along the beach, if the world is the familiar
one, if the neighbors are human?  Or to unscrew the knob from the
door, and sleep beside it, to see if anyone comes to repair it?

Outside the window, a pair of gulls lands at the edge of the water,
their wings cracking noisily.

[43]

The obvious door from the living room, once Bob has turned the
deadbolt from the inside and stepped through, leads out and down 
two grey wooden steps, to a concrete slab set among the pebbles.
Bob kneels and takes a handful of them, rattling in his palm,
smooth and only slightly damp from the spray.

Behind the house the ground climbs steeply, up a hillside thick
with brush and evergreens.  A path, car-wide, skirts the steepness
and leads up and around, and after a hundred yards or so levels
out at the top, and joins a road.

Bob stands at the side of the road, which goes straight in both
directions, parallel to the beach and vanishing both ways into
thick evergreen forest.  It's a dusty needly two-lane road, with
a middle-aged broken yellow line running down the middle, and
minimal shoulders on the sides.  He bends to pick up a round
piece of dark corroded metal with a hole in the center, and
a car comes from the left, passes him without slowing, and
disappears into the trees to the right.  

It was a familiar-enough car, the license plates convincing,
although he has not caught the name of the state, or province,
or country.  Looking down the road after it, he thinks of
Methidle and her dislike of leaving the metaphor, the impossible
rooms, and her fear of the door not being there next time she
went to open it.

[44]

Back in the house overlooking the pebbled shore, Bob finds the short
hallway off the living room just the same, the door just the same,
the narrow space with its descending stairs, and the tunnel at the
base of the stairs, all just the same.  His flashlight beam shows
the same penetrable darkness, his nose smells the same dank smell.
He goes back up the stairs to the living room.

One door from the living room leads outside.  A doorway with a
hanging curtain leads to a corner dayroom, which also has a view
of the beach and the sky.  Behind the dayroom is a small kitchen
with a refrigerator-freezer and pantry shelves, all of which are well
stocked, with an emphasis on portable prepared food.  All of the
packages seem to be in English, with a couple of exceptions that are,
Bob thinks, certainly French, and not the Italian-like language of
the impossible rooms.  He wonders who lives here, where they are now,
and whether they have (and how could they not have?) opened that door
from the hallway and gone down those stairs, into the tunnel.

The other door from the small hallway opens into a bathroom.  The
other door from the livingroom leads up three steps to a neat little
bedroom, with a matress on a riser set into the wall, a desk, a chair,
and a telephone.  Bob picks up the telephone and listens to the dialtone,
sees the number written on the bit of paper under the bit of clear
plastic (the structure suggesting that this is in fact North America),
and copies it onto his pad, near the words "beach house, ocean".
The telephone has a built-in answering machine (zero new messages).
He will call this number from his own house, he thinks with a
smile, leave a message, and then come back here from the impossible
rooms and listen to it.  Proving there some sort of connection
between the possible and impossible worlds, or at least posing a
kind of test that he feels certain things will pass.

[45]

On his way back through the living room with pad and flashlight,
headed for the metal stairs, Bob pauses, frowning.  There is a
small stack of magazines on the table beside the chair here, the
chair he had been sitting in watching the gulls, and (he walks over
and picks one up and confirms this) some of the magazines have
address labels.  He shakes his head at himself and notes down
the address on his pad as well.  This particular possible house
is, it seems likely, Anderson, 13302 Long Point Road, Creigmore,
Nova Scotia.  Which sounds like a perfectly ordinary place in
the very same universe as his own house, sitting in its row of
houses on its straight road among other flats roads on the plain,
half a mile from the convenience store.

The tunnel is still just as it was at the bottom of the stairs,
darkness and silence.  He will, he tells himself, go back up to
the Storeroom, climb to Methilde's space and tell her about the
beach house andn Nova Scotia if she is there, and then go back to
his own house and call the Anderson answering machine.  

He sets off down the tunnel at a good pace, pad under his arm and
flashlight extended, passing pipes and doors that match those on
his map as far as he bothers to recall.  He feels complexity and
possibility spreading out from him, from the tunnel, on all sides.
On a whim, he pushes the bar set into one of the doors, and when
it opens he steps inside.  His flashlight shows a lightless bedroom,
panelled in light wood, with a small round window and a narrow
door.

Behind him, the door he came in through swings closed, and there
is the very distinct sound of a latch catching.

Bob turns, heart in his throat but sure there is no real problem,
to find that there is no door, only another light wood panel of
wall.  He brings the light close, his face close, and finds the
outline of the door, fit closely into the wall, a pair of subtle
hinges, and no obvious way to open it.  He pushes on the wall,
the door, hard, hoping it will respond but remembering the cool
and substantial bar that he pushed to open the door from the other
side.  It seems to require at least a solid metal handle on this
side, but there is none.

There is a lightswitch beside the other door, the visible door,
but the warm light from the recessed ceiling lights is no help.
He finds, by luck and by feel, a circle of wall veneer that swings
aside under his fingers, but behind it there is a keyhole, and he
knows (even before he tries) that none of the keys in his pocket
fit it.

[46]

It may be, Bob thinks, that just a few rooms from here there is a
kitchen like Methilde's that is always replenished.  And even a
bathroom.  It may be, for that matter, that this round-topped
door right here, beside the odd round window that seems to look
out onto a hallway, opens into a hallway in a perfectly possible
building, on some ordinary street, and he can walk out and find
a bus station and be back at his own very possible house in an
hour.

Or it may be that he can go out, turn right, walk down a hallway
for a few dozen steps, turn right again into another room, open
a door in the opposite wall of that room, and be in the tunnel
again, and back on his map, back on an unobstructed path to the
possible world.

He does not throw himself against the panelled wall, does not
pound on it with his fists and scream, and he is proud of himself
for that.  He does bite his lips, but not hard enough to draw
blood.

The corridor beyond the door (and he tests the other side of
the door as he goes out, like he will test every door he goes
through for a very long time, at first consciously and then as
an invariably habit, a nervous tic) is short and dim, smelling
softly of wood.  Four doors open from it, each leading into a room
essentially indistinguishable from the one with the locked door
to the tunnel, although none of the others has a door, at least
not that he can find, concealed in any wall.

There is a narrow door at each end of the corridor.  Behind one
is another bathroom; Bob hopes that the other will lead back to
the tunnel, or to the outside, or failing those perhaps to a
self-renewing kitchen.  In fact the door opens on the bottom of
a staircase.  At the top of the staircase is a large low room,
with furniture pushed up against the walls as though for a dance
or an exhibition, and four more doors (two in the wall opposite
the stairs, and one in each of the adjacent walls).

Standing at the head of the stairs, his arms at his sides, Bob
thinks that wherever he stands in a new and unknown room with
one or more untried doors, he may be just one more opening
away from freedom, from a clear path back out of impossibility.
And that that possibility might lead him on until he starves,
or goes mad.

[47]

He searches each of the four bedrooms, and the bathroom, with
care and restraint.  They are all unoccupied, unlittered, clean,
apparently ready for occupancy as soon as the front desk assigns
someone.  He starts in the room with the locked door, as the most
likely to contain a fortuitous key, and here is the only thing he
finds that is in any way remarkable.  In the bottom of the small
closet, in one dim corner, is a leatherbound book.  Bob takes it
out and shakes it, riffles through the pages for a key, and
finding none tosses it onto the bed for later.

When all four rooms and the bathroom, and the stairway, have
proven unfruitful, the concealed door still locked and immobile,
he throws himself onto the bed on his stomach, mind whirling, and
opens it at random.

"What shall I build for Maria?", the book says, in that same brown
ink and that same hand, and Bob's mind whirls a bit faster, "What
can I create for her that will do anything but dim the luminance
that she already is?  A diamond would dim her light, the sun would
be a shadow across her face.  Whatever excellent thing I might make
and give to her would so pale in comparison to her own self as to be
an insult.  And because it was from me, she would smile, and take it
in her hand, and transform it into another piece of her light, into
something ethereal and perfect."

He closes the book again with a snap and presses his face against the
bedspread.  He does not want to think about Maria and her lover if he
is to be trapped in here, to be cut off.  He does not want to think
about the brown ink, about why the only two writings he should find in
these impossible rooms should be from (and to) the same person, if he
is not first to have a key, an open door.  These are things he will
think about when he is not lost, not going mad, when he has found at
least a restocked ktchen, where the uniformed aliens bring food at
night when they are not repairing walls.

And at this thought Bob raises his head from the matress, and looks
about in wild surmise.

[48]

It is harder than he expected to tear off a piece of the wooden strip
that edges the bottom of the wall.  It is well attached, both glued and
nailed with small stubborn nails, and he cuts the tips of two fingers and
ruins the decorative letter-opener from  the drawer of the room across
the hall.  He wonders idly if the letter-opener will be replaced, but he
hopes desparately that the torn bit of strip will be repaired, and that
the repairman, the alien, the agent of metaphor, will come in to do it
through the door from the tunnel, or leave through that door, or all
else having failed will listen to pleas or threats to open that door,
or show Bob a way back to the tunnel, or to the outside.

He is worried that he will not be able to stay awake long enough.

His watch says that it is late evening, although his mind would have
guessed early afternoon.  He sits down on the bed, piling the pillows
behind himself for comfort, noticing and immediately trying to stop
noticing that he is quite hungry.  He stands again, goes out to the
short corridor, into the bathroom, and drinks handfuls of chilly water
from the tap.  It is biting, slightly acidic, bracing.

Back on the bed, he picks up the book from the closet, to read more
in praise of Maria, but then it occurs to him that the repairman,
like Santa, might be more likely to come if the light is out.  Counting
on the sound of the door to wake him if he falls asleep, he reaches
out to turn the switch, and sits in the darkness, listening to the
silence, and the movement of his blood.

He is awakened by what he is sure is the sound of the door from the
tunnel closing and latching into place.  He curses himself silently
for not springing into action at the first sound of the door opening;
having missed one of his two main chances, he lies still in anger, and
only slowly calms down enough to feel fear.

In the darkness, someone or something man-sized is moving around.  It
has or has not noticed him.  At first it is moving without light,
guided perhaps by some visceral knowledge of the hurt that has been
done to the metaphor, Bob's scar inflicted on the impossible room.
Then a light snaps on (he imagines it dangling on that neck, below
that distorted fact), there is a muted rattle as something is set
on the floor, and the efficient sounds of repair begin.

[49]

Slowly the sounds go from menacing to soothing, and he struggles
with sleep rather than panic.  Muffled thuds of a mallet, a sudden
high-pitched whine (an electric cutter?), a crack, small liquid
slidings that he imagines as glue, sharp and wakening taps of a
hammer, and through it all many unidentifiable clicks and snips
and crumples, as things are opened and closed and taken out and
put away.  The only breathing he hears is his own, held as quietly
as he can hold it.

The snapping out of the light brings Bob fully and acutely awake,
as he had hoped it would.  He is aware of the body straightening in
the darkness, and he swings up right in the bed, smoothly, letting
his feet touch the ground.  Sounds move to the concealed door, there
is a click, a slide, the sound of a key in a lock.  Bob holds himself
motionless, poised.

It is as dark in the tunnel as it is here in the room, but his ears
hear an opening, his eyes seem to see a different quality in that
darkness, partially blocked by the figure passing through.  He stands
and reaches out, his hand reaching for the edge of the door and
finding it, and then the small light snaps on again.

As close as he is to it, the face is so distorted by the underlight
that again he is not certain what he is looking at, whether the eyes
are huge and rounded and the nose barely there, or whether the shadows
are only redrawing the face.  But he is aware, or feels intensely
aware, of scrutiny, or consideration, of a sizing up that freezes
him in his tracks.  If the repairman had pushed him back into the
room and pulled the door closed from the tunnel side, he would not
have had the strength to resist.

Instead the light snaps off again, the presence before him turns and
moves off down the tunnel, and Bob is left there, in the dark, his
hand holding open the door, his ears telling him that the tunnel is
open in two directions, and he is free.

[50]

"So then what did you do?"

"Well, you've seen how badly I'd planned it all, all but the first
basic idea.  I was standing there, pitch dark, holding the door open,
with my flashlight somewhere, and the lightswitch somewhere, both
out of reach."

"Idiot."

"Yeah, clearly.  I ended up taking off my shoe and wedging it in the
opening of the door, and then dashing over and turning the light on,
grabbing my flashlight and my pad and diving out into the tunnel,
before something could I don't know come and knock the shoe away and
lock me back in again."

Sitting again on Methilde's couch, under the slowly growing and
ramifying sculpture, her with her welder's mask tilted back on
top of her head again, him with a cup of coffee.

After the encounter and the escape, he'd come up here to Methilde's
space rather than going back to the empty house, and although his
watch maintained that it was the earliest hours of the morning she
was there, here, working away.

"What kind of impression did you get of him, it, the repairman?"

"I don't know.  Like he was sizing me, up, like I said.  I don't
know if he was human or what.  It's amazing the tricks your mind
can play with the light."

"Could he have been wearing a mask, some kind of face mask or
safety glasses or something?"  She touched the mask on top of
her own head.

"Could be, but I don't think so; I don't know."

"Did he seem friendly, hostile?  Did he smell funny?"

Bob laughs.  "I don't remember any smell at all.  He certainly didn't
seem friendly.  But he also didn't shove me back into the room, or
bite my hand.  So --"  And he shakes his head.

"Well, tell me more about this beach house you found then."

[51]

He feels like he should be hitting on Methilde, at least a bit; it seems
only polite, or at least called for.  But she feels like a friend, or a
big sister even, up there in her huge echoey space with her impossible
kitchen and her bedroom and her welding.

(And where does the electricity come from, he wonders, the power that
this impossible place must consume?  Where does the running water come
from, how many miles upon miles of pipe, and who pays the water bill?)

He says goodbye to her when she starts eyeing her welding tools while
they talk, and lowers himself down into the well and down the ladder.
She's never shown any desire to see his part of the possible world, or
even the Cultist Room or the basement, but she asks him to tell her
about them, and he enjoys it.

Now he is going back to his house, that used to be the old man's, with
the phone number on his pad, to call the answering machine and leave a
message for himself.  The Storeroom and the corridor and the Blue and
Red Bedrooms all seem undisturbed.  He looks down the corridor, away
from the door to the basement, and realizing that there are doors in
that direction, off into the dimness, that he has never touched, the
immensity of the possible and impossible worlds strikes him for a moment,
and he is dizzy.

[52]

He dials the number, and hears one ring, another ring, and then a
voice, saying "Hello?".

He hangs up the phone.

That is not what he'd expected.  That someone would answer the phone
when he called it was not at all in his plan, although the house was
clearly lived in and maintained, and not being within the impossible
rooms, not within the Anomaly or the Metaphor, it would not have any
odd-eyed servants to take care of it, and there is no reason at all
for the phone not to be answered.

Bob's telephone rings.

"Hello?"

"Did you come up the metal stairs from the tunnel, into the house?"

"I -- what do you mean?"

"I suspect you know what I mean."

"All right, yes, I came through the tunnel.  I -- I'm sorry if I was
trespassing."

"Not at all, don't worry about it.  If I cared I would have put a
locked door at the end of the corridor."  He hears a chuckle in the
voice, which is low and smooth and masculine.

"So, uh --"

"Look, I'd like to do this in person if you're willing.  You already
know where my exit is; can we meet here?"

Bob's not sure.  Is that a bad idea?  Is there some reason the man on
the phone might want him to come to the beach house, to be trapped, or
taken advantage of in some way that Bob can't even conceive of?

"I don't know, I =="

"I'm harmless, I promise."

Which is what anyone would say, of course, harmless or not, but the
idea of meeting someone else, a third person, who has been in the
impossible rooms, and who might want to talk about them, is very
attractive.

"Sure, okay, of course."  And he realizes how exhausted he's feeling.
"But not right now.  Tomorrow?  In, um, twelve hours, say?" 

"Hm.  Make it fourteen?"

"Okay."

"Okay."

And they both hang up.

[53]

Bob eats, and sleeps, and eats again, walks to the convenience store
and back, watches television.  On the way back, pad and flashlight in
hand, through the first and second impossible rooms, the Cultist Room,
the corridor, Bob detours into the basement and shines his light around.
Nothing remarkable or new appears.  The darkness where the third man
had gone off, saying "Don't follow", leads to a series of narrow and
empty rooms connected by arched doorways; somewhere far off he thinks
he hears the sound of water.  

He fills suggestive curves into his map, but further penetration is
for another day.

Down into the round well, not stopping at Methilde's this time, into
the tunnel and along it, counting doors and stopping and opening the one
that led to his imprisonment, looking in to see it unchanged, the book
still lying on the bed, but the bed neatly made and the pillows tucked
in.  (So there are maids as well as repairmen?  What about plumbers,
electricians?  Which of them changes a burnt-out lightbulb?)

His light penetrates the tunnel darkness easily, and at the end of the
tunnel he almost swings himself up the metal stairs and landings, such
is the energy he is feeling.  He knocks at the upper door, but then
opens it and lets himself in.  In the house, standing in the living room
by the big window overlooking the misty pebbly beach and the breaking
waves, stands a tall wide man in a beige hunting jacket and cargo
pants, who looks as though he ought to be smoking a pipe, but is
merely drinking a glass of water.

[54]

"Have a seat."  They exchange names, pleasantries.  Bob notices that
the man, Peter Anderson, carefully avoids asking about the location of
Bob's possible-world  house, or how long it took him to get here from
there.  Is this just his host's quirk, he wonders, or is there an
unwritten (or even written) etiquette of the metaphor, such that one
does not ask for that information unless the other party brings it up
first, to allow for anonymity, to avoid stalkers carrying Anomaly
feuds into the outside world.

Bob describes roughly how he got into the impossible rooms, and after
a bit of thought (it's only fair, I know how to get to his place, why
shouldn't he know how to get to mine), lets Anderson look over his
maps.

"Mm," he nods, "I haven't gotten that far down the tunnel yet, to
have reached your ladder.  There's too much to explore."

"I just sort of walked by things to the end of the tunnel," Bob says,
wondering if that is the wrong thing to have done.

Anderson shrugs, a lithe but somehow heavy gesture.  "I like to be
thorough.  Don't like things sneaking around behind me."  His chuckle
is deep and inward.  He reaches down into a backpack that Bob hasn't
noticed before, and pulls out a big ledger.  He opens it, and Bob
sees that it is, of course, full of handwritten pages of maps.

"Here", Anderson says, pointing at a place on a page, where lines that
are clearly the Tunnel end, "that's as far as I've gotten.  Well short
of you."

They compare notes, and it turns out that Anderson is even well short
of the room where Bob got himself trapped, the room where he broke the
wallboard.

"Good thinking," Anderson says when Bob describes it, nodding approval,
"Good use of available resources.  And face to face with a Caretaker,
at that."

[55]

Anderson calls them Caretakers.  He seems to have no particular opinion
about their origin or species, their humanness, and he doesn't quite
say whether or not he has ever seen one up close, at least not in any
more detail than Bob has.  But he is convinced that they are not the
builders of the rooms, and that they are probably not very intelligent.

"Well-trained animals, I'd say they are, with animal intelligence.  Enough
to spackle up a hole" (like Methilde and unlike the men in the basement,
Anderson knows the word "spackle") "or fix a broken bit of wainscot,
but just instinctive, nowhere near what it would take to create all
this, no spark of creativity.  You can see it in their eyes.  Here,
look --"

And he spreads the ledger open to a page, where the lines are curved
and jagged and far apart.  "You haven't been here, have you?  To the
Natural Area?  Or to the Martian Zone."

"Martian?"

"You'll see; it's easier experienced than described.  And -- ah!
Here is where we should go now.  You must see the Temple; it's
like nothing else."

And Bob trails after him, pad and flashlight in hand, as he walks
to the back hallway and the door and the metal stairs, closing the
book and returning it to his pack, fastening the back and sliding
his arms into the straps, as he goes.

[56]

To get to the Temple, Anderson and Bob go a short way down the
Tunnel, and then turn into a narrow side passage that is just a
pair of close-together lines on Bob's map.  It slopes sharply
downward after a few yards, and then widens out into a dome-shaped
metal-walled space that Bob for some reason pictures full of small
pieces of mobile construction equipment, compact gasoline-powered
hoes and ditch-diggers and bulldozers.

There are three doors out of the dome, not counting the ramp that
they came down, and Anderson strides without pausing to the lefthand
one.  It is a metal door, with a small window of metal-reinforced
glass.  They pass through into another tunnel, or something between
a corridor and a tunnel, lit by fluorescent strips on the ceiling.
From there they duck under a low archway in the righthand wall,
into a small room, up a short flight of stairs and through a
wooden door with a porcelain handle.

Now they are in what seems to be the lower reaches of some elegant
country house, with deep red carpeting on the floor (slightly
threadbare in spots, Bob thinks, and wonders if the Caretakers will
eventually get around to servicing it, or if alternately this is
what this part of the Metaphor is supposed to look like).

A few turns in that space, up a longer flight of stairs into what
seems to be a modest foyer at the base of a wide staircase leading up,
with tall double doors opening in the other direction.  They turn
their backs on the staircase and Anderson throws the doors open,
and it takes Bob nearly a minute to realize that he is not looking out
at the outside world.

[57]

The Temple is set in a wide courtyard, under a high vaulting dome that
Bob thinks may be natural, a cavern, perhaps an improved cavern, rather
than a building.  There are stone walls, high ones, at a distance, and
beyond those, almost blurring with distance, are the curving walls that
enclose the space that they are in.  The courtyard is suffused with a
dim light whose source is not at all apparent.

In the center of the courtyard stands the Temple, square but also
graceful, with something of ancient Rome about it but also something
more primitive, simpler.  Looking back over his shoulder as they cross,
Bob sees that they have emerged from a tall housefront that sits under
the arching outer walls of the cavern, with the stone walls leading up
to either side of it.  He wonders what there is in the upper storeys,
with a familiar and routine wonder that he is growing rapidly used to.

The Temple itself is of some translucent white stone, some kind of
Marble Bob thinks, interlarded with irridescent grey veins.  The
light seems to be coming from the stone itself, although Bob imagines
that this is a trick of reflection, and whatever is in fact lighting
the cavern is simply obsorbed and diffusely reflected by the stone.
He touches a white pillar, and finds it smooth to the touch but also
soapy, almost soft.

The Temple proper is filled with the sound of water, and in the
outer circle, the place that they enter first, there are fountains
set at every corner, small fountains of the same white stone, water
driven by no apparent source cascading down rounded abstract shapes
into graceful fluted bowls, plashing softly as it falls.

"All gravity-fed, I think," Anderson says as they pass through,
"no sign of pumps that I can find.  Streams in back."

Within the circle, or the square, of the fountains is a stretch 
of quiet emptiness, and then in the center of the Temple, in an
inner square approached by archways from every direction, stands
a figure, again in white stone, but a pure white without any veining,
with her arms at her sides and her face turned slightly upward,
and Bob stops and stares.

"Maria," Anderson says.

[58]

"Maria?"

"Yes, look at the base."

The square of white stone that the woman is standing on, on her
delicate feet brushed by the hem of her gown that looks at once
light and airy and solid and stone, is deeply incised on the front
face, and the letters spell "MARIA" in solid majuscule strokes.

"Maria," Bob repeats.

"Does that mean something to you?"

Bob tells Anderson about the love-note to Maria in the drawer, and
the journal in the closet where he was trapped, in which a random
praise was full of love for Maria.

"Have you not found anything similar."

Anderson makes a dismissive motion.  "I haven't gotten nearly as far
as cataloging the books or the paper.  There are whole libraries out
there, bound sheafs of paper that probably has writing on it.  I've
concentrated on the mapping.  One thing at a time."

Bob finds this degree of organization unaccountable, but says nothing,
only pondering.  "Could it be the same Maria?"

"Certainly it could."

They walk slowly around the figure.  The smooth marble floor of the
temple is oddly dented in one spot, or one set of spots, roughly in
a line behind it, behind her.

[59]

"Odd the, uh, Caretakers haven't fixed that."

"Yes.  Who knows what instincts drive them?  Maybe this is supposed to
be here, part of the design that they've internalized.  Or maybe it's
not a kind of damage they can repair."

Bob looks around at the rest of the temple, the pillars and floor and
archways, the rails and fountains, all apparently undamaged, unworn,
untouched by time.

"I wonder how old this place is."

Anderson nods.  "As old as time, perhaps."

"Maybe he made it for Maria; maybe this is the gift he decided to give
her."

"The Temple here?"

"Or the whole thing, all the impossible rooms, the metaphor, the Anomaly."

Anderson laughs.  "A world made for a woman named -- oh, come now."

"And why not?  That the Creator loves Mary is a well established story."

Anderson just shakes his head.

[60]

The entire Temple precinct is lovely, if cold, Bob thinks as Anderson
shows him around.  "The fifty-cent tour," he calls it.  A circuit of
marble paths extend from the back of the Temple, through groves of
sculpted stone trees, more fountains (these shaped more sinuously,
more chaotically, mimicking to a degree the natural forms of woodland
or river), benches, and two streams, one flowing from somewhere at the
base of the overarching walls into the temple, and another flowing the
other way, back out.

There are no other words carven into the stone, nothing in either
English or the Italian-like language, or in any other set of
symbols.  Some of the faces and surfaces are carven in abstract
patterns, smooth shapes or intricate square overlapping knots,
but Bob sees no language, and Anderson says that he has never found
any here either.

"Nothing else in all this marble but that one MARIA.  And no other
figures, either, no other statues of anyone, just the trees and the
fountains, and her standing there in the center, looking up."

Bob stands and stares for a long time, there behind the Temple,
listening to the silence and the water, and feeling the presence
of the standing figure in the building behind them.

"You should come and see the journal, and read the letter."

"I should?"

"Yes."

Anderson is quiet for a moment, considering, and then he nods.

[61]

"You should get yourself a pack, a supply of food, some decent mapping
paper, spare lights, if you're going to explore properly."

They're walking briskly through the dark tunnel, almost too fast for
Bob to keep count of the doors and intersections that they're passing,
to keep up with his map by the flashlight in his hand, so as to find
the door to the room where the journal may still be sitting on the bed,
or may be back in the corner of the closet where he found it, or may
be gone entirely.

"You can make up a packing list for me."

Anderson laughs, almost derisively.  Bob is only a little intimidated
by the man's carefully-packed supplies, his pair of bright flashlights
(extra batteries, no doubt, stowed in there somewhere), his spare pens
and well-kept ledger full of maps, his brisk and unhesitating pace.
Bob can't imagine Anderson uncertain, but he can easily imagine him
entirely certain about an entirely mistaken thing.

Bob pushes the bar and opens the door into the compact little room,
and Anderson chocks it open with a wooden form he's made specially
for the purpose.  ("It's definitely something to look out for.
Most of these doors are solider than you'd want to have to break
down to get back.")

When the light is on, they see that the journal is still sitting just
where Bob left it, although the bed has been neatly made.

[62]

"Maria is mine, I am hers.  We belong collectively to each other.  We
are, in the deepest sense, each other."

Anderson has flipped through the book, gently but firmly flexed the covers,
scrutinized the binding, done everything but count the pages.  The first
few pages are blank, the last third of the book is blank, and the rest is
covered with that same neat brown writing in that same hand.  There are no
numbers or dates, but there are breaks, blank spaces left between what
seem to be logical clusters of text.

Now Anderson is reading aloud, in a voice that surprises Bob with the
richness of its emotion

"But we are not symmetrical, not matched and equal.  Maria is the perfection
of us, and I am the imperfection.   I am nascent, she is mature.  I am the
admirer, she the admired.  Paired and utterly different halves of the 
same completed whole, we mirror each other, together we mirror the world,
together we are the world.  And we are always together."

"And so on."

That last from Anderson directly, of course, in a flatter and tireder
voice, as he fans the pages again, closes the book, and drops it into
the bed.

"Quite lyrical."

Bob shrugs, finding nothing expressible to say about the words that have
reached his mind through such obscure channels.

"No reason to think that it's the same Maria, or not the same.  Either
way is a ridiculous coincidence, the only two names we find down here
naming two unrelated women, or else the only two references we find being
to the same woman."

"It's the metaphor," Bob says, if only to have something to say.

"Hm, yes.  Let's go see your Methilde.  Perhaps she should see the 
Temple also."

[63]

"Ahh, it's amazing."  Anderson is standing under Methilde's work,
paying it far more attention than Bob ever has, apparently enthralled.
Bob doesn't understand exactly what he's staring at, and strongly
suspects that Anderson doesn't either, but Methilde is clearly
flattered.

"Well, thank you!  I'm not sure exactly what I'm aiming for here --"

"Oh, it's obvious!  Clear and obvious, and also inexpressible.  Don't
try to put it into words, you don't want to pollute it."  He looks
from the metal pile to Methilde, and his eyes are as bright as hers
are.  Bob sits heavily on the sofa.

They talk about the Temple, and Methilde's work, the grey of the ocean
shore, the mystery of the Caretakers, of Bob's three men in the basement.
Anderson nods, and says that he has seen, twice now, the backs of some
number of men moving away from him down a corridor or a tunnel, but has
not tried to follow them or catch them up (quite the opposite, Bob's
impression is).  Methilde shudders at all this, and looks around her
space possessively, protectively.

When Methilde coos appreciatively at their description of the Temple
and its fountains and standing figure, the grace of is marble, Anderson
hints subtlty, without really hinting even, only nodding in the direction
of the thought, that Methilde might come and see it herself, it isn't
far.

Methilde, perched on the arm of the sofa, bites her lower lip and
doesn't answer directly, but nods to herself and stands up.

"Come," she says, "you will want to see this.  It is not really my
kind of thing at all, but it is in the metaphor for some reason, and
this might be it.  If I can find it again."

[64]

Given Methilde's worries about being cut off from her space being what
they are, Bob is surprised that she has no map.  The knows where her
working space is, her kitchen and bed and shower, and how to get to the
storerooms where she scavanges the metal for her slowly-growing work.
She knows, she says, how to get back out of the metaphor, but she has
only a general memory of the other turnings on the path that eventually
got her to where she is.

"Through these rooms, I think, and then up to a balcony..."

The are walking single-file, Methilde leading and Bob at the rear, through
a dim series of long rooms, connected by archways, and half-filled by a
long stone conduit through which water runs sluggishly.  There is a dank,
almost a foetid, smell in the air.  Light filters down from what seem to be
dirty windows high above; Bob wonders if it is sunlight, sunlight from the
possible world making its way in, or from some part of the Anomaly itself
that blazes whitely in some other impossible space above.

Anderson looks around himself silently, his hands moving unconsciously;
Bob wonders if he wishes he were mapping, if this wide diversion from
his gradually and systematic recording is making him nervous, or exciting
him.  He catches Bob's eye once, and grins, sheepishly Bob thinks, as
though caught in some inadequacy.

The line of rooms ends in a large circular room, even dimmer, with a
pool or puddle in the center, a stone stairway leading to a balcony
above, and another archway on the other side.

"Up the stairs," Methilde says, softly, "I've never been through that
arch."  

And Bob wonders if anyone ever has, and how long ago.

[65]

Heavy double doors open inward from the balcony, and Bob pushes them shut
after they pass through, thinking vaguely to keep the smell out.  The room
is empty, but another door leads to what seems to be a kitchen, with counters
and places to hang pots, two large bright metal stoves with hoods.  Another
door leads to another room, nearly identical, and another door leads to yet
another one.

Anderson frowns and laughs at the same time.  "Now this is interesting,"
he says, slowing his pace to touch the controls of the stove, the sixth
one they've passed by now.  "Three kitchens, with no apparent source of
materials to cook, and no apparent place to deliver the results."

Bob and Methilde stop, one on either side of him, and listen.  He is looking
off into space, into the metal of the sixth hood.

"The rooms, the spaces, usually make more sense than this, at least
considered in the small.  Outside of the Martian Zone, anyway, and that
probably makes its own sort of sense."

"The Martian --?" Methilde asks, but Anderson waves a hand dismissively
and smiles.

"We'll get there," he says, and Methilde smiles back.

The door from the third kitchen leads to a short hallway, and the door
at the end of that (the smell of the murky water left behind them now)
opens into a large deeply carpeted room, niches in the walls where
windows might be expected holding sculpted vases filled with sculpted
flowers, well-stuffed chairs and a sofa on one wall, a large and 
gleamingly-black piano (a baby grand, Bob thinks) sitting at the
focus of their attention.

And on the wall behind the piano, where anyone sitting and listening
to a performance will be looking directly at it, a large oil portrait
of a woman, standing against an abstract red and black background,
wearing a long white gown and looking at something over the viewer's
left shoulder, her eyes very present, very visible, but not quite
meeting the gaze of anyone looking at her.

"Maria," Methilde says.

[66]

Bob is not surprised that Anderson plays.  He sits on the double
bench and his fingers move confidently over the keys, filling the room
with some complex music that Bob doesn't recognize.  

Not only is the woman in the picture recognizeably the MARIA of the
figure in the Temple, but on a small brass plaque set into the bottom
of the frame is the same name, again all majuscule, again alone in the
space, with no other text, no last name, no artist or date.

MARIA.

Bob and Methilde had begun talking about, or talking around, the notion
that the two men had approached earlier, of a creator in love with a
Maria, and the impossible rooms, or the metaphor, or the Anomaly, or the
world his gift to her, out of his otherwise inexpressible love.  But
Anderson had seated himself before the piano, lifted the lid off of
the keys, and started to play, and Methilde had stopped talking to 
listen, and Bob had stopped talking because she had.

The instrument was apparently in perfect tune.  Bob imagined, sitting in
one of the plush and very comfortable chairs, a pair of the round-eyed
scant-nosed Caretakers in their uniforms, rustling about the piano for
hours in the otherwise endless silence, the sounds of the tuning
filling the rooms (the redundant kitchens, balcony, long rooms of sluggish
water) and rebounding off the walls and into the distance.

[67]

Back on Methilde's sofa they drink coffee and eat cheese and crackers
from her kitchen.  ("They have mostly very good taste," she says, of
the resuppliers of her stocks, "although they are sometimes very into
fish, if you see what I mean.")  Bob and Anderson sit at opposite ends
of the couch, and Methilde sits on the floor between them, her back
against the couch and her legs straight out in front of her.  As they
talk she stands up now and again, walks to her artwork, pulls herself
up onto it, or onto the work scaffolding that she has rigged around it,
and looks at bits of it intently, her voice if she is talking becoming
softer, abstracted.

"It's not surprising that the metaphor would have a representation of
the creative power of love," she says, measuring a rusty bit of welded
dark metal