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 with her thumb, "or that it would even be the organizing
metaphor for the whole.  It is where we all come from."

"And it may be where we all return," says Anderson, finishing her
sentence for her.  

Bob think it's unlikely that this actually means anything.  "Does calling
it a metaphor buy us anything, really?" he asks.  "I mean, sure there are
things in it that remind us of things, and that might be about things,
but it still has to come from somewhere, to be maintained by someone, to
get, I don't know, to get the electricity and power from somewhere.  You
can't light a room with metaphor."

Methilde just smiles, and Anderson smiles in an annoyingly conspiratorial
way.  "Can't you?" he asks.

[68]

"Hey, for that matter," says Bob, feeling suddenly practical and clear
minded, "we should bring in a GPS device, see where the satellites say
that we are.  That should put something interesting behind the metaphor!"

Anderson laughs.  "Been there done that, my boy; what do you think
happens when you bring a GPS unit, or a cellular telephone, into the
rooms?"

"I don't know.  Tell me."

"They just don't work.  The telephone can't reach a tower, the GPS unit
can't contact its satellites.  It happens gradually, as you get further
from what you call the possible rooms, but by the time you're well in
they're just useless."

"I tried drilling a hole in the wall, but I couldn't get through.  We
should try harder, make some connection between the possible and the
impossible worlds, force it to show us how the trick is done."

Methilde just frowns at this, and looks at her sculpture.

"Come to think of it," Bob continues, "one of my rooms has two windows
in it.  We should --"

"Windows?" says Anderson, softly but in a tone that cuts Bob off quite
effectively, "Really?  Let's go look."

And he is on his feet before he even finishes the word.

[69]

"There aren't many windows in the rooms," he says, striding along back
along Bob's corridor toward the doors to the Cultist Room, "at least
not in the parts that I've mapped.  The ones I've seen mostly open
into other rooms."  He stops before the doors, looking back at Bob
for confirmation, then stepping through at a nod.  "There are a pair
of them, rather high up, that seem to look out at sky, but I haven't
gotten enough height to see what else might be out there."

Then he stops, halfway across the room, and frowns.

"What's that?"

He has noticed, as Bob never has, the half-sheet of paper under the
table, looking (now that Bob sees it) entirely out of place here, as
it might not in Methilde's larger and messier space, the one thing
in this carpeted formal booklined room not exactly where it's supposed
to be.

He crosses to it in two steps, picks it up, turns it over.  Bob and
Methilde some up close to him, on either side, looking at it around
his arms.  It is a half sheet, one long side slightly ragged with
being carefully torn, one narrow edge bent and discolored, and Bob
thinks it must have been between the pages of one of the books he
looked at earlier, sitting in that same chair, with that edge sticking
out above the pages, marking someone's place perhaps.

Anderson grunts.  On the paper, in that same brown ink and that same
hand, is a single sentence, more or less in the center of the space,
at a slight angle.

"I shall throw down the old statue of Bast," it says, "and raise in its
place an image of Maria, still a million miles from her perfection, but
likewise a million miles closer to it."

Anderson looks up from the paper, looks at Bob, looks at Methilde,
and shrugs, lets it fall (and it floats down to perhaps exactly
that same spot under the table, and Bob wonders what book, which
book, it came out of), and goes onward to the door.

And then they are in the Second Impossible Room, which is just the same,
and there are the windows, and they go to them, and they look out.

[70]

"I don't think they open," Bob says.

Anderson nods, still running his fingers around the edges of the pane,
around and under the sill, reaching up and over, efficiently feeling for
a catch, perhaps, a button, a release.

Methilde is standing at the other window, motionless, just staring out
into a view that is also the same, green and dim and misty, with one
snippet of road just visible to the left.

Anderson's hand stops moving, and he and Bob look over at her, because
she is speaking.  Her voice is low and private, self-absorbed, and she
may have been speaking for some time, unnoticed.

"Out there is bleak and cold, out there is no roof, only sky, no floor,
only ground, no warmth, only night and the stars.  Out there are no
kitchens, no shelves, no beds.  Out there are no welders, no rooms
full of parts with the marks of usage and will.  Out there are only
what grows, by itself and mindlessly, only what comes of itself, only
the unthinking."

She looks over at them, for a moment as if she does not recognize them,
then her eyes awaken or focus, her mouth quirks up, and she is laughing.

"Poetry," she says, "poetry.  It comes on me sometimes."

And she presses her face to the glass to look far left and right, but
says that she can't see anything new.

[71]

"It feels like glass.  It wouldn't be hard to cut."

Bob doesn't like the idea of a window breaking, of the violent sound,
the sharpness of the shards.

"They would come and repair it."  This from Methilde, still standing
at the window looking out.

"Yes, they would.  And we could cut our way in again, from the outside."

"Not necessarily.  What if, from the other side, these windows are an
unbroken stone hillside?"

"If it's any comfort, I can say that I haven't seen that.  Every door has
also been a door from the other side, even if some of them are concealed."

"These are windows."

"Yes, these are windows."

Bob feels a chill, and it occurs to him that the rooms, or at least
the rooms that he's seen and noticed, have no obvious sources of heating,
no radiators, no steam pipes in the baseboads, no gratings in the floors.

"Have you seen any fireplaces?" he asks.

"Yes," Anderson says, and at the same time Methilde also says "Yes."

"Hm.  Where do the chimneys go, I wonder."

"Now you're thinking," says Anderson, smiling and again looking as though
he ought to be smoking a pipe.

Methilde turns from the window, looking uncomfortable.  "I go back to my
work," she says.

Bob stands up, but Anderson also stands up, and extends his arm.  "I should
get back to my ocean for now as well, I'll walk with you.  Bob," he says,
turning his head, "tomorrow?".  But it isn't a question.

Bob nods, and sits down again.

[72]

Later, having gone back into the possible rooms, eaten dinner while sitting
in front of the television, thought about walking out to the store but
not done it, and finally slipped into bed heavy with fatigue, Bob
wonders again about the heat, and also about the water, the electricity.
A metaphor can do anything, he thinks, but the water has to flow, and
be real.

He dreams that night, a deep and suffocating dream, in which ordinary
things are freighted with emotion, all the important things are carved
from white marble, and all the words are Maria, or Methilde, and the
portrait over the piano is of both of them, standing face to face, and
the Temple has fallen.

"You don't like him," Methilde says, around the spool of flux she holds
between her teeth.  Bob is up in her space again, sitting on the couch
and drinking her coffee again.

"What do you mean, I don't like him?"

"You know," she says very definitely, and she grins at him over her
shoulder for an instant before turning back to her hands and her work.

"Who I like and don't like doesn't seem very important, somehow.  I
mean, we have all this, all this impossibility.  It changes the, you
know, the deepest nature of the world --"

"It's all metaphor," she says under her breath.

"-- it calls everything into question and disarray.  Compared to that,
what does it matter that Anderson's pipe annoys me?"

Methilde laughs.  "His pipe?  But he has no pipe!"

Bob shakes his head, "He might as well."

The laughs louder.  "I know exactly what you mean, even if I shouldn't.
He plays very well also, don't you think?"

Bob nods, and looks through his maps.

"I guess he wanted me to come back to his beach house, although he
didn't say.  I think I'll stop back in the basement again on the way,
see if anything's changed."

Methilde makes a sour face.  "If you run into anyone down there, don't
come back here for awhile.  I don't want you contaminated with those bits
of your metaphor."

Bob slips into the wooden well and climbs down the ladder, wondering why
he is planning to go again to the basement, and again to Anderson's house
at the end of the tunnel, rather than trying new doors, taking more books
from more shelves, and finding his own bedroom and daily refilled kitchen
somewhere deep in the Anomaly, where he can curl up and be himself.

[73]

The basement is empty, as before, but this time Bob, with his flashlight
(and now a spare flashlight in his pocket), goes forward into the darkness
in the direction that the three men left him all that time ago, before
Methilde and before Anderson and before the Temple.

The doorless archway that he felt but did not see the last time down here
leads to another dusty and mostly empty room, with a few more scraps of
broken crate on the ground.  Bob wonders again how the Caretakers, the repair
men, the aliens, know what to fix and what to leave alone; is there one
moment in time, somewhere in the past, where all was by decree correct,
including these broken dusty bits of wood, and they work to keep things
that way?

Another archway leads onward from that room, into another, similar, room
that has a closed door in each side wall, and a cluster of sorry-looking
chairs and another beaten sofa, arranged around a mostly intact crate
that seems to be serving as a table.  There is a bare bulb suspended from
the ceiling, with a bit of string hanging from it, and when Bob reaches
up and pulls the string the bulb lights weakly, providing a sort of 
half-hearted light.  He considers unscrewing the bulb and taking it
with him, to see if it has been replaced after a few hours; but it
occurs to him that someone might need, or want, that light between now
and then, and he doesn't take the bulb.

Both doors out of the room prove to be locked, so this is the end of
Bob's basement explorations for now.  The doors seem old and dirty,
but also sturdy.  The basement men must have keys, he thinks, and again
resolves to look behind and under all of the sofa and chair cushions
in his impossible rooms for possibly useful keys.  (And for a moment he
thinks of that locked closet in the utility room off of the side hallway
in his house, but the image fades.)

Feeling the passing of time, Bob goes back up the stairs, along the
corridor, opens the trapdoor in the floor of the Storeroom and climbs
down to the Tunnel, toward the pebbly beach and the grey gulls.

[74]

"Bast," Anderson says, and this time he is smoking a pipe, sitting in
the chair beside Bob's chair in the livingroom, by the window that
overlooks the sea, "also Bastet, or Pasht, was an Egyptian goddess of
various things; the sun, or the moon, or perfumes, depending on who
you ask.  She is sometimes shown as a lioness, sometimes as a cat.
They had great trouble with mice in the grain, the Egyptians did;
they valued their cats."

"Not much in the way or grain or mice down there around the Temple,"
Bob said.

Anderson pursed his lips, considering, as if giving the remark more
weight than Bob had intended it to carry.

"No, quite true," he said.  "If the rooms are a metaphor --"

Here Bob made a sound, but Anderson ignored it.

"If the rooms are a metaphor, then replacing a cat-goddess with a standing
woman, perhaps a virgin, in a white marble Temple might have various kinds
of significance.  On the other hand, it would be alot of work, and one
might expect it to anger the displaced Goddess."

"Have you seen any cats, or lionesses, in your explorations?"

Anderson nods his head, "I recall a cat-figure or two in the statuary
rooms in Zone Three."

"Statuary rooms?"

"Yes.  Remarkably uninteresting really, considering.  Very pedestrian
work for the most part.  And arranged haphazard, whatnot.  A lifesize
male nude standing in a crowd of garden-gnomes and foot-tall metal
hippos.  Not much sense to it, as far as I was able to determine."

Bob just shakes his head, suddenly tired.

"Of course," Anderson continues, "I wasn't really looking for a pattern,
or a message.  Who knows what we might find, if we set our minds to it?"
And his smile seems more inward-turned, less intended for Bob.

[75]

"The Martian Zone," Anderson says, after they have had a long walk on th e
beach, and some lunch from the prepared food-packs that Anderson hoards from
a grocery store forty-five minutes away.  "I think you and Methilde would
appreciate that.  It's also different from anything else you've seen so
far."

"I think she was nervous yesterday," Bob says.

Anderson nods.  "She was.  She is disturbed by various things, and she
also enjoys various things.  Like most of us, she enjoys some of the same
things that disturb her.  I think she will appreciate the Martian Zone;
perhaps it will inspire some new directions in her metalwork."

Bob frowns.  "Are you being sarcastic?"

"I am not," the other says, "by no means."  He is quiet, they are both
quiet, for a long moment, looking out at the sky, which is still grey
and gull-ridden.  "If you're ready, shall we be off?  We can fetch the
lady, and then off to see new sights."

"What's the point of all this?  Are you the Tour Guide?"

Anderson smiles again.  "We are the Brainstorming Society, Bob.  If we
look at enough, and have enough penetrating conversations, and argue
enough, we may figure something out.  And it would be good to know."

"It would be good to know.  Yes."

"Then come."

And they go back, back toward Bob's part of the posible world, and find
Methilde, who is with only a little urging willing to come with them,
and then back into the tunnel, and through a door that Bob has never
been through before, checking entirely instinctively that it is not
going to close and lock behind them, and inward toward the Martian Zone.

[76]

The Martian Zone is at the end of a series of electically operated round
iris doors.  Passing through the first of these is not a pleasant thing
for Bob.

"Yeah, I felt the same way," says Anderson, "but I saw the controls on
the other side, and sometimes you just have to take a risk."

The first door hisses open when they approach, shiny metal blades retracting
in a spiral into the walls.  Bob won't go through, even goaded by words about
risk, until Anderson has gone back and forth three times, the door opening
when he approaches it from either side, and closing after he goes through.

Methilde hangs back, silent, until they've finished their negotiations and
continue on.

The last of the scything round doors opens into a space that is not quite
a room and not quite a plaza.  The floor and walls are uneven and their
colors are blotchy in a way that almost make sense.  Bob and Methilde
frown and look around uneasily; Anderson smiles at them.

They move further into the Zone, Anderson in the lead playing guide,
nodding in the direction of things, gesturing with his hands, not
saying much beyond an occasional warning or word of encouragement.

In the Martian Zone, the rooms, if they are rooms, blend into each other in
baffling ways.  Angles that should be square are not quite square, or are
entirely square but are so obscured by oddly-canted walls that they might as
well not be.  There is clutter, but at least some of the clutter is part of
a wall, or an extension of the floor.  There are doors, but mostly there are
obstructions to progress that Anderson, presumably after considerable study,
knows how to cause to move out of the way, or to reshape themselves to
permit progress.

Bob is very glad he is not trying to keep a map here.

[77]

"An insane designer?" Bob says, the first whole phrase anyone has spoken
since they entered the Zone.  They are sitting, perched or lying awkwardly,
on a set of outthrustings from the walls and upjuttings from the floor that
are at least somewhat soft, in many places, and that may be intended for
something like chairs, or beds.

Bob is starting to see patterns in the places that they are passing by or
passing through, and he is not entirely happy with the fact.  He suspects
he may have nightmares.

"Not necessarily," Anderson replies, "It may be an entirely sane response
to a set of needs that we're not familiar with."  And he smiles again, and
Bob thinks of ice.

"The needs of Martians, do you think?"  Methilde has been silent until now,
looking around her with eyes alternately disturbed and fascinated, fearful
or as delighted as a child's.

Anderson laughs.  "And why not?  What's to keep these rooms from opening out
somewhere on Mars, or Jupiter, or some planet in another galaxy altogether?
It may be that those iris doors are an airlock, or a way of keeping something
out."

"No locks," says Bob, worried as always about locks.

"No locks," Anderson nods, "although I've never experimented with the control
pads beside the doors.  Didn't seem wise."

Bob shakes his head.  "Have you found anything in here that's functional,
like a kitchen, or --"

"This might be a bedroom," Methilde says, curling up sideways onto a mostly
soft and nearly horizontal surface, curved and cupped like the bowl of a
spoon, the edged ringed with irregular bumps.

"If it's a room at all, and not just a wide place in a hallway or
something."  Bob gets up and worms between two smooth protrusions, into a
tight space that continues on, but is far to narrow to move through.  It
looks as though it widens out again after a few yards, but there is no
visible way through, or around.

"The light is oppressive," Methilde says, holding out her hand.  Bob has
not noticed the light.  It is diffuse and sourceless, and casts no shadows.
It must, he thinks, be coming uniformly out of the walls and floor and
ceiling, or out of what passes for those things here.  And it is, he
realizes with a frown, somewhat the wrong color; his skin is not that
orange.

"No," Anderson says, as though he's just heard Bob's question, "I've found
no kitchens here, or bathrooms, or at least anything I've identified.  No
running water of any kind."

[78]

The sky is thickly overcast, and dripping a slow cold rain.  Bob is under an
old black umbrella that he found in the tiny closet by the living room door,
bypassing puddles on his way to the convenience store for another bag full
of groceries, a cup of coffee, a few minutes sitting by the window looking
out at the rain.

When they tired of the Martian Zone, Anderson led them back to the iris doors
and back into the sane part of the impossible rooms.  Aside from one more
round metal door, somewhere deeper in the Zone, which hadn't opened when
they approached, or when (with Anderson's nodded permission) Methilde had
pressed various of the unmarked buttons on the metal panel beside it, they
had come to (and Anderson said he had never in his more extensive surveys
come to) another connection between the Martian and non-Martian parts of
the Anomaly.

Back in Methilde's space, they had talked and eaten her bread and cheese,
wondering about the notional Martians, the nature of the Zone, whether the
Caretakers would come and apply some malformed repair tools to undo any
changes they might make with hammer or drill to the non-walls and the
not-quite-floors.

"Or perhaps," Methilde had said, shrugging her shoulders comically, "the
Martian Zone has its own very twisted Martian Caretakers, with the long
tentacles and the many eyes."  The others had laughed at this, but here
walking in the chilly rain Bob did not find it a very pleasant thought.

The black-haired girl is behind the counter again, and she and Bob nod at
each other with the marginally softer nod of non-strangers.  Bob goes
between the shelves, looking absently for the things that he's used up in
his kitchen, looking for the kind of packaged foods that Anderson stocks
his pack and his shelves with, fills a red plastic shopping basket with
things.  He pays for them, and also a coffee and a buttered roll, and
sits at the tiny table, and watches the rain.

He goes back to the rest room, leaving his sack of groceries on the table,
not to answer any urgent call of nature, but more to open and close the
door, to be in the small space, to see what it feels like to be in one
room of a smal finite series of rooms, surrounded by the outside, with no
mysteries beyond the ordinary mystery of a house he's never been in, a
person he's never met.

[79]

As they were parting, there in the wide tall echoey space around Methilde's
art, Anderson said that he would be away for a week or so, off in the
possible world attending to his affairs.  Bob thought he saw some flavor
of relief in Methilde's face as she nodded her head.

"Stay safe," Anderson said to them as he started down the ladder.

Now Bob has his day-pack out on the kitchen table, and the contents of his
grocery bag, and is packing for an expedition, for tomorrow, off into the
impossible rooms by himself.  He has duct-tape for fastening down door
latches, doorstops and even a crowbar (for no clearly-imagined purpose, but
it was there for sale in the convenience store, and it makes him feel
prepared), as well as food and water and a blanket and his flashlights.

For now, though, he will make himself some dinner (he's stopped looking at
his watch, there in the impossible rooms, because time seems to make little
sense there, or at any rate less sense than the tiredness of his legs and
the closingness of his eyes), and sit in front of the television and watch
the moving images, listen to the words, and then get into the bed, under
the covers, and sleep.

He wonders, sitting on the sofa that is his now, in the room in the house
that is his now, about the old man and the impossible rooms.  He tries to
imagine the old man first discovering the First Impossible Room (if he
did discover it, rather than building it, or conjuring it, or arranging
somehow for it to appear), going on into the Second, looking out those
windows, touching the glass.  Going, for how could anyone resist going,
deeper inside, on expeditions of his own, sitting at a table in the
Cultist Room and looking around himself.

He tries to imagine it, but mostly he fails.  It is not a setting, not an
activity, that he can imagine the old man engaged in.  He knows this is
his own fault, that his imagination of the old man stops at those things
that he's actually seen him doing, sitting and eating chips, playing cards,
watching television, standing by the fence and talking about the day's
news, the weather.

[80]

Bob assumes that the old man must have seen the impossible rooms, that they
were in fact actually here when the old man was here, and that they have not
sprung into being, or sprung into connection with the house, only with his
inheriting it.  It seems implausible that in the old man's time there was
something else behind that door, some ordinary correctly-sized windowless
room, with some rickety furniture, a typewriter, boxes of magazines aging
in the dimness, dust in the corners, no extra doors and no round-eyed
enigmas to efficiently repair any holes that might appear in the walls.

How can it be that no one has ever called in the police, the hordes of
scientists and investigators of the arcane, to swarm over the Anomaly
and take pictures for the newspapers?  Bob has found Methilde and
Anderson in just these first few days (few weeks?); surely there are
others, others with their own touchpoints between the possible and
impossible worlds.  Have every one of them decided to keep the secret to
themselves, and carried through with that decision?  

If the impossible rooms are only Methilde's metaphor, if they are all in
fact only metaphors themselves, compact nodes of meaning rather than 
exact bunches of atoms following the simple laws of atoms, then this is
easy to understand; the impossible rooms are about mystery and emptiness
and silence, not about newspaper headlines and flashbulbs, so no one has
called in the press.

But the story of the metaphor does not satisfy Bob, does not seem to be an
explanation so much as it is an excuse, a facade.  He could go, right now,
and get the police, or the local newspaper, and say look, behold, wonder,
observe.  On the other hand he knows he will not.  Do the rooms themselves
somehow know this, and reveal themselves only to people who will not?  Or
is that the old man's job, to have left the house only to someone who will
keep the secret?

Perhaps both.  Perhaps the door will open into the First Impossible Room
only if there is no one nearby who would call in the press, no one of the
wrong nature.  When Bob sat here watching the old man's television and
eating his sandwiches, did the old man himself go subtly back to the side
hallway, to that door, and open it and seeing that the First Impossible Room
was still there and accessible, know that Bob had been judged and found
suitable?

The thought rankles, somehow, although there is satisfaction behind it.

[81]

Lying in bed, still waiting for sleep to come, Bob imagines calling the
local newspaper, saying something low-key about having found an interesting
piece of local history in an inherited house, or something like that, so
they don't dismiss him as a lunatic out of hand.  Picturing the editor,
a perhaps harried man sitting at a desk, answering the phone because the
three editor take turns answering the phone, the paper not being able to
afford a full-time receptionist, and talking to him about local history and
the inherited house.

"What kind of local history?" he hears the editor ask, half abstracted,
thinking of that sound his car has been making, or how to pay for his
daughter's education, or if he's the young editor, still with a full head of
hair, thinking about his girlfriend's breasts, about whether she'll return
his call, whether they will go out tonight.

"It's hard to describe," Bob hears himself answering, "and I don't want you
to get the wrong idea.  But if you can send somebody out, I really think
it'll be worth your while.  A little scoop at least."

Bob wonders if newspaper people still use the word "scoop", or if they ever
really did.  The editor will say that they're always interested in local
stories, and he will think about what reporters, full-time or part-time or
even amateur, might be available to go out to Bob's house for what he
suspects may be a waste of time, some broken stone that someone imagines
might have Indian carvings on it, or an old well that's not really as old as
it looks, and has no interest.

The editor asks Bob where the house is, and Bob tells him, and because one
of their regular writers lives right nearby he shows up, or she shows up,
the next morning, and Bob takes him, or takes her, into the side hallway,
and opens the door, and what will they find there?  Will the First Impossible
Room not be there if the press is watching?  Or is it just that Bob being
who he is will never actually do this?

Bob thinks of bringing just the black-haired girl, who is not a reporter at
all, back home with him, on some pretext, or on none, or on the actual
story, which might intrigue her, and thinking about whether the room would
be there if he did that, and if any girl would come back to his house on
such short acquaintance and such a slim excuse, slips into a dream in which
he and the black-haired girl go into the impossible rooms, into the Tunnel,
along hallways and through doors that Bob has never seen, and in some of
the hallways and some of the rooms there are tigers, black tigers, panthers
really, that move sinuously and have silken fur, and look up at him, at
them, with ancient and knowing eyes.

[82]

In the morning Bob cooks himself eggs, eats the eggs, and toast, and orange
juice in the kitchen, with the television on and playing music, mostly
music, in the living room.  Then he puts the last few things into his
pack, checks his flashlights, slides his arms into the straps, and sets
off.  He laughs softly to himself at the thought of starting an expedition,
so well provisioned, by walking through an interior door of his house.

The First Impossible Room is there, and unchanged; the repaired place in the
wall is even more invisible now, as though the Caretaker's spackling had been
only a bandage, and the wall has been healing since of itself.

The Second Impossible Room is there, also unchanged.  The far door is still
locked, and Bob thinks again about keys (and thinks again, just for an
instant, of the padlocked closet in the utility room behind him).  The
windows show the same misty scene, and he has the impression that just as
he turned to look out, just before his eye managed to consciously register
it, something dark vanishes out of sight around the corner of the road.
A car, perhaps, or a horse-carriage, something substantial and boxy.  He
presses his nose against the glass and it feels cool, almost cold.

The third impossible room, the Cultist Room, is also the same; the half
sheet of paper is still under the table, and he bends and picks it up.
He puts it on the table and goes to the English part of the bookshelves,
and finds again the red book and the green book that he took out that day.
He recalls now it was the green book that he read, and opening it he finds
again Chapter 16, "Over the Hill".  He ruffles the pages, but nothing else
falls out (if indeed, as he suspects, it was this book that the paper fell
out of).

He takes the green book, leaving the red one in its place on the shelf,
and sits down at the table.  There is no evidence of the paper having
been in any particular part of the book, so he slides it in somewhere
futher back, around Chapter 37 or so, after reading the words again to
be sure he got it right the first time.

"I shall throw down the old statue of Bast," it still says, "and raise in 
its place an image of Maria, still a million miles from her perfection, but
likewise a million miles closer to it."

What, Bob wonders, has become of the status of Bast?

[83]

Today he doesn't go down toward the basement, nor up to see Methilde.  He
goes down, instead, to the Tunnel, and although he thinks it is probably
foolish he goes along until he finds the door behind which he was trapped
all those days (hours, weeks) ago, and pushes it open.

Not only does he hold the door open, he also chocks it open with a doorstop,
sets a right-angled metal brace in the doorway, tapes the tongue of the
latch down with two layers of duct-tape, and fills the latchwell with
tightly packed metal foil.  Out in the Tunnel again, he removes the stop
and the brace, lets the door close, and satisfies himself that it cannot
latch.  He then goes back inside, reapplies the stop and brace, and goes
through the room.  (The book is, he notices, still on the bed; he finds
he is unwilling to touch it.)

There are dozens of unlocked doors that he could go through without
precautions, and without the fear that the round-eyes ones might come
up behind him and undo those precautions andn latch the door again.  But
he has escaped from this trap once already, and has a proprietary feeling
about the room.  And he does want to know what lies a bit further beyond
the top of those stairs.  He won't go far.

The four bedrooms and the bathroom are all just the same, reminding him
even more than before of a modest set of staterooms on a ship.  It occurs
to him that somewhere some door might open out of the impossible rooms into
the engine room of a rusty abandoned boat at a decaying dock somewhere, or
even of a healthy ship crossing some ocean at full speed.  Or (and this
thought unsettles him even more) into the back cabin of a commercial
airliner, where the stewardesses heat the coffee and practice smiling.

But if that had ever happened, it would certainly have been in the press.

[84]

The big room, the Dance Hall, at the top of the stairs from the hallway
and staterooms, is still there, still the same.  When he gets there it is
lit, as it was before, dimly, by a few bulbs high overhead, among the
wooden rafters.  He finds a bank of switches in the wall by the top of
the stairs, and turning each one brings up another row of brighter
bulbs, hanging from the rafters themselves, until the space is full of
light.  Waiting for the dancers, Bob thinks, and he imagines bringing in
musicians, dancers, refreshments, having a square dance party, perhaps a
perpectual one, new people coming in as the old ones leave, here in the
midst of the Impossible Rooms, people guided in by a shifting company of
volunteer guides, the door to the Tunnel permanently guarded by the 
honorable crew of doormen.

He can almost hear the music.

The two doors in the far wall lead into a hallway that reminds him of the
hallway behind the Cult Room.  The hallway is dark, and he sees no light
switches, so, for now, he leaves those doors closed.

There are two other doors out of the Dance Hall, one in each of the walls
adjacent to the wall where the stairs come up.  Shifting his pack on his
back, Bob chooses the lefthand one at random, and opens it.

Behind this door is a small empty anteroom, with open doorways in the other
three walls, and hooks (for coats?) on the wall that the door to the Dance
Hall is in.  The doorway ahead leads into another large open space.  To the
right a narrow room with no other doors looks empty as well; to the left is
a more complex space, and Bob goes that way.

The room starts very narrow, just wide enough to walk past the counter and
wall cabinets.  Bob opens a cabinet door, and is happy to see food on the
shelves, sugar, dry pasta, canned goods, a jar of peanut butter, a mix of
English and that Italian or Portuguese or Martian language that they've 
seen before.  And then the room widens out, or joins another wider room,
and Bob is in a kitchen.

[85]

It's a large kitchen, institutional even Bob thinks, with two large
gleaming professional-looking refrigerators, a pair of stoves with hoods,
a shiny metal island of counters in the center with pots and pans suspended
over on hooks, two large sinks in one corner, a worn-looking but efficient
brick floor with rubber and cloth mats in all the places where one would
stand while working.

The stoves are gas, with electric pilots; Bob turns one of the knobs all
the way up, and the pilot sparks, and the flame comes on rich and blue.
The refrigerators are no more than half full, but the food looks fresh and
perfect.  (Do the Caretakers come, weekly, take away the spoiled fish and
meat and eggs, bring in fresh replacements, in all the numberless empty and
uninhabited kitchens of the Anomaly?  Or are the kitchens only metaphor also,
having food, even existing, only when one of them walk in?)

Bob takes from the refrigerator a slab of beef, a few eggs, lays them on
the counter, goes to the cabinets in the hallway for salt and spices,
finds a plausible frying pan, and makes himself an omelette over the
hot blue flame of the stove.  One of the cabinets has a stack of plates
(although not nearly enough to match the kitchen) and a small stack of
mixed utensils.  Bob pulls one of the tall stools up to the counter and
eats his omelette there, feeling the warmth and the scent pervading the
air of the room, the air in his body, feeling quite content.

This is not necessarily a kitchen that is automatically refreshed, like
Methilde's, although the freshness of the eggs and the meat (if the numbers
on their packages are expiration dates in the possible world's number and
dating system, as he assumes that they are) suggests that it is.  He will
have to come here again, when time has passed, and see what has been
replaced.

And as he thinks of time passing, he thinks of the door below, leading into
the Tunnel, and what he has done to hold it open, and that it might already
be closed again.

[86]

The door to the Tunnel, the door that he is already thinking of as The
Bottom Door, isn't closed at all; it's exactly how he left it, stopped
open, bent metal in the doorframe, tape over the tongue, foil in the
well.  No sign of any incursion by the Caretakers or anyone else.  On
the other hand, as he steps out into the Tunnel through it, he thinks
he hears something, from one direction or the other, and thinks his ears
have just failed to catch a sound.  It's a disquieting feeling.

Now Bob is balanced there, just inward from the Tunnel, in that first
stateroom with the book from the closet.  He doesn't want to leave; he
feels like he is in some sense claiming this limb of the impossible tree.
But he doesn't want to go back up, either, out of sight of the door, out
of hearing of whatever might or might not be out there, in the Tunnel,
in the darkness.

So he lies down on the bed, on his back, and picks up the book, opens
it at random, and reads.

[87]

"They have songs," the words say, in that same brown ink and that now
familiar hand, "songs about love, and dreams, songs about aging and about
family and home, songs about fire and rain.  I can hear their songs, coming
to me out of the darkness, lying here in the evening in my hammock, hoping
for a breeze from somewhere to cool me.

"And you know, Maria, of course you know that when I hear their songs I
think of you, and when they sing of fire and rain and family I think how you
are my fire and my rain, and how you are my family.

"There are so many souls in the world, and yet all of them are closed, are
closed behind faces and suspicion, behind self-interest, doubt, ignorance.
All but mine and yours, which are here, present with me, in this space
where I am aware, and where the outside world, with all those other souls,
comes only as a show projected on a screen or acted on a stage.  Only you
and I are in the audience, are the audience, are the sole member of the
audience, here together in the deep mystery of consciousness.

"Are those other souls truly real?  Does each one sit, as we sit, in its own
darkened theater, looking up at the screen, at the stage, feeling that there
are other souls out there, out in those actors and dancers and jugglers, and
yet just as unable as we are to touch, to come down from the stage (or go up
onto the stage) and make contact?

"I write as though it is only our own theater, my Maria, in which two souls
watch the show together.  Is that right?  Do I assume too much?  Hard to
imagine, to believe, that any two others could meet and touch as happily, as
completely, as impossibly, as we have, as we will, as we do.  The theater
itself seems designed for one, and it is only our unlikely unity that 
allows us to share the viewpoint.  Has this ever happened before?  Has it
happened a million times, a thousand, twice?  How implausible."

[88]

The room is quiet around him, the Tunnel as quiet and dark as ever.  His
eyelids are drooping as he reads; he shakes his head and sits up.  It is
not, he decided, a good idea to have the light on here, to have the open
door spilling yellow light out into the black of the Tunnel.

He goes to the door, switches off the light, turns on  his flashlight, and
goes up again to the Dance Hall, and through it into the kitchen (the
Dance Hall Kitchen).  With all the room's lights on, and using his flashlight
to look around behind things, he satisfies himself that there are no more
doors out of the kitchen (not counting the small utility access hatch under
one sink, into which he might, but is not planning to, crawl).

Back into the small antechamber, and then forward, away from the Dance
Hall door, into the large dark space beyond that he has so far left
unexplored.  

The floor is again of wood, and his footsteps echo here as he suppose they
must echo also in the Dance Hall, but in the darkness the echoes seem louder.
In the beam of his lantern he sees that he is in a wide space, interrupted
to  his left by a jog in the wall (to make room for the wider part of the
kitchen), and ending in front of him at a short set of steps, extending as
far as he can tell across the whole room, beyond which the wideness seems
to continue.

He walks forward, to the base of the steps, and looks around in all
directions, and also upward.  On the wall to his right, quite a distance
to his right, is a pair of double doors, and beside them a pair of
switches.  He goes over, turns the switches, and the room is filled with
a dusky yellow light.

[89]

The lower part of the room, nearest the Dance Hall, is entirely empty.  
Except for the double doors in onen wall, with the light switches to one
side and an empty corkboard (like the one back in the side hallway in his
house, back in the possible world), there is nothing whatever.

Up the steps in the upper part of the room, which is as wide as the lower
part and even deeper, with thick rafters crossing the space above to support
the walls and the roof overhead, there is more complexity.  Here and there
throughout, in no obvious arrangement, are coarse nets made of black rope,
knotted at wide intervals, held off the ground by sparse frameworks of
wooden dowels.  They look like chairs, or hammock-style beds, except that
it would be impossible to sit or lie in one without the dowels breaking, or
the rope slipping off, or the entire assemblage tipping over and dumping one
to the ground.

Bob tugs at one of these assemblies, lifts it, and finds it moderately light.
He wonders if the arrangement of them is significant, if the Caretakers will
eventually come back and restore it if he moves them around.  

As well as the net assemblies, there are also what seem to be spare parts 
for them, or unfinished kits, lying here and there between them.  A rolled
up net, several wooden dowels lashed together, a box of nails, a pair of
hammers, a paper carton, unlabelled, containing a number of nets, perhaps
a dozen, all rolled up and neatly arranged inside.  He considers gathering
the parts and adding a new one to the collection, but the thought of the
hammering sound going out around him, and down into the Tunnel, does not
appeal.

There is another set of double doors in the far wall of the upper part of
the room, and he is about to open them with his flashlight, on again now
in case of darkness behind them, when the beam picks out another door, a
small unobtrusive one, in the corner of the room where he had overlooked
it in the dim light.  He walks to it, finds it unlocked, and opens it.
Behind it is a staircase, leading both up and down.

[90]

He goes up the stairs without hestitation.  There is a landing, and then
another landing where more stairs lead up and there is another narrow door.
He opens that door just wide enough to see a hallway stretching forward,
then closes it again and continues upward.  Another blank landing, another
landing with a door to a corridor, another blank landing, another with a
door to a corridor.  Still he goes upward, too overwhelmed to think what
might be down those three corridors, behind all their doors, around all of
their corners.

Now he is at the top of the stairs; no more flights lead upward.  The door
here is just as narrow as the rest, but it opens not into a corridor but
into a long low place with a pitched ceiling and roughly-finished walls.
An attic, is his immediate impression.  Diffuse light comes from somewhere
ahead, and he snaps off his flashlight and walks forward.

A little way ahead the ceiling lifts on either side, and there are two
beds, one under each risen bit of ceiling, and above each bed there is a
window.  He looks out one of the windows, kneeling on the bed, and sees
out and down a sea of roofs and windows and walls that stretches out
apparently forever under a sky full of torn clouds.  He looks at the
edges of the window, and against all expectation finds a latch, and
opens it, and swings the window wide.  The air smells of water, and 
sunlight, and brick.

He puts his head out, and then his shoulders, looking out at the immediate
roof, the one that this small dormer protrudes from.  It is sloped but
gradual, shingled with red shingles of wood and tar.  He squirms up into
and over the windowsill, turns his shoulders sideways, lets his pack
drop down his arms and onto the bed beneath him, and then he is out on
the roof.

A wind blows over the endless building in front of him, and ruffles his
hair.

[91]

In the tall echoey space that she loves, Methilde turns off the electric
arc and tilts the mask up off of her face.  The cooling metal at the
newest joint rapidly loses the heat redness, and the sharp tang of melt
in her hose, with its familiar thrill, dissipates into the blander air of
the Inside.

She has always thought of the Inside as the Inside, since she first found it
and fell in love with it.  Bob's "impossible", and the "Anomaly" of the
basement metaphorical men (which Peter Anderson seems to have picked up for
some reason) seem to her to be ways of keeping the Inside at arm's length,
of denying it in some sense, of not letting it in, not admitting that one is
part of it.  But she sees no point in trying to change their habits.

That the world is metaphor is now so obvious to her as to require little
thought or discussion.  She's not sure that Bob and Peter really understand
what she means by it, but that's also part of the metaphor after all.  She
smiles at the thought, and touches the cooling but still stingingly hot
joint with a finger.

The work is flowing along beautifully, as it always does.  She is adding a
second smaller framework to one side, bonded to the main one by a set of
straight and similar rods arranged to form an arc, crossing each other at
irregular but smoothly meshing intervals.  And as she adds the new section
she continues to grow the old one, inward and outward, making new connections
and sometimes, rarely, breaking an old one.  She was afraid, at first, that
being her own and only critic would make the work sloppy, undirected, without
focus.  But somehow the opposite has happened.

Here Inside she has found now three different rooms, troves, that hold the
parts and pieces that the work needs, and how she grows the work is molded
by the parts that she finds.  She knows also that the parts that she finds
depend on the needs of the work, because it is all the same metaphor, all
the same story that is telling itself, both here on the Inside and there on
the Outside.  And if she is the only one that knows it, or one of the only
ones, here in her own space Inside, that is just another part of the story.

[92]

Bob sits on the roof outside the dormer window of the attic, of what he is
thinking of already as his attic, for a long time.  Around and primarily
below him other roofs, a sea of them, puncuated by scattered towers, gaps
that are probably courtyards or air wells, wide flat high places that may be
roof-gardens or helipads, stretch out in all visible direction unitl they
disappear into distance, or mist, or the curving of the Earth.

It is an entrancing sight.  Bob wonders if Anderson, or the old man, have
found their own ways, or even this one, out to the roof of the impossible
rooms.  Or if, for that matter, the impossible rooms have their own 
infinite number of impossible roofs, so coming out of some different
dormer or out a door onto some different balcony, he might have found himself
confronting something else entirely, a mazy of craggy mountaintops with
windows and turrets carved into them, or a single dense city perched on a
tiny island ringed around by a churning sea.

The next sensible thing to do, Bob thinks, is to go along this roof, to 
clamber from place to place, find a unlatched window or drop onto a high
balcony, and find other ways into other parts of the impossibility.

Unless, and the prospect occurs to him suddenly and unnervingly, he is no
longer in the impossible rooms; if he has come back into the possible world,
but into some part of it that is as different from his own ordered flatness
of houses as it could be.  Some place in the real world where the roofs
stretch in all directions, and a building can be the size of a city.  He
imagines himself dropping into a balcony, alarms going off, and finding that
he is in custody in some distant Verona, or Minsk, or Edo, and trying to
explain to the authorities how he came to be there, why he has no passport,
what has happened to his visa.

Looking out over the roofs, up at the towers, he cannot believe it is any
place in his version of the possible world.  There are no airplanes, no 
lines for streets, no sound of autos or trucks or horns.  The roofs are,
now that he looks for it, remarkably uniform in their chaos, all a dusky
red, all, or nearly all, the same low pitch.  The towers are all the same
basic design, round and upjutting, with steeper roofs perched on top like
caps.  The visible walls are also uniform, a pinkish off-white, and the
windows all match.  It is clearly one huge building, with no ground or
trees or anything else in sight.

[93]

It is a bit of a walk down the stairs and across the broad empty room, to
get from the attic, his attic, to the kitchen, and then down to the stateroom
level to the bathroom (and to check the door, which has never been altered
in any respect when he has gone down to it).  But it is not much, really.

Bob spends a few days, or a week or two, living there, sleeping in the bed
under the window that he first climbed out through, eating in the kitchen
where the food is, he has confirmed, always refreshed, not always replaced
exactly, but always kept supplied, always replenished to roughly the same
level when he eats, or when the food gets too old.  Spending the days
sitting on the roof outside his window, looking out over the other roofs,
watching for changes, watching for the sight of faces at the windows of
the towers, just watching, thinking, not thinking, perhaps dozing up there,
sometimes lying back and closing his eyes and letting the sunlight (it
seems the same sun as back in his chunk of the possible world, the same
yellow and the same heat) shine on his eyelids, just relaxing in the midst
of impossibility.

One morning, or afternoon, or at any rate not long after waking up, he
walks onward, forward, down the attic, past another pair of dormers, and
another, each dormer with another bed under it, each bed with some sort of
table beside it, some with two tables, some with a floor lamp, some with a
table lamp on a table.  He moves one of the floor lamps down beside his
own bed; there is one electrical outlet in the wall near each bed also.

Past the third set of beds the attic ends, and there is a narrow door that
opens into another small bathroom (but he will still have to go down to the
stateroom level to check his door, not that checking it, looking at it,
twice a day actually does anything to keep the Caretakers from locking it
again and locking him in), and there is another door that opens onto a
narrow stairway leading down into the gloom.  A switch by the door turns on
a light or two, illuminating the space, but the stair turns twice and
vanishes under itself.  Bob doesn't go down the stairs, not this time.
When he closes the door he looks at the knob, and sees that there is no
lock.

[94]

Methilde thinks she hears someone in her space, maybe over by the manhole
that Bob came up through.  Nothing definite, just the impression of a
footstep, or something, coming up in the silence after she dumps an
armful of clanking metal parts onto the ground near her work area.  She
has the music off today, because sometimes she likes the silence and
sometimes she likes the sound.

She walks over there, to where she first saw Bob, and the manhole is open
there in the floor.  Was it open before, the last time Bob, or was it
Peter?, left through it?  It probably was.  If someone had pushed it open
from below when she was hear, with the music off, she would have heard.
She crouches down, and with a little effort pushes the manhole's cover back
into place; it slides in with a very audible clang.

She is still worried, in a vague but nagging way, that Bob's metaphor,
Bob's version of the world's metaphor, might include things that would
intrude in hers.  His story of the men in the basement, with their
military manner, their secrets, their darknesses, has disturbed her in
some deep way.  It is exactly a thing that she wants to keep away from
herself, away from her space and what it stands for in the metaphor.

But it may be, she acknowledges, that the metaphor will eventually call for
the two flavors to meet, the perfect serenity of her space and her electric
welder and her growing work, the openness of it, and the darkness and the
paranoia and some simmering hatred of the basement.  She shakes her head
at the thought and goes back to her work, leaving the music off, listening
a bit harder with her ears as she works, pausing now and then to verify
the silence.

[95]

Bob is on the roof again, on his piece of roof outside his window over his
bed, staring at the sky watching high clouds form and dissipate as the
afternoon flows by.  He gradually becomes aware of a dark dot, somewhere high
up there, moving in long ovals between his eyes and the clouds.  It comes
lower, or his eyes become sharper, and he sees that it is a bird, or at any
rate a large something with wings, floating on updrafts with wings spread
out, now and then giving a large lazy-looking flap.

He is perhaps beginning to doze, thinking about the ways that the impossible
rooms might choose those who access them, how the old man might have tested
him or allowed the rooms to test him, what it is that keeps any of them, all
of them, Methilde and Bob and Anderson, from bringing the wondering shouting
flashing world into the silence of the Anomaly, when there reaches his ears
a long, harsh, somehow heartless and hungry cry from somewhere far above, from
probably the beak of that wheeling bird or whatever it is up there, and he
finds himself sitting upright on the roof, his blood flowing faster.

And it occurs to him that it might not be only the rooms, the Anomaly,
choosing those that it allows inside, but it might be also that once inside
they ensorcel, they condition, they woo the entrants into a condition in
which they will not, even cannot, produce any disturbing binding between the
possible and impossible worlds.

He thinks of Methilde, in love with her space and her work and never speaking
of the possible world; of Anderson, going out into the outer world for
supplies and tending to his affairs, but carefully tending his ledgers,
looking with proprietary eyes at everything beyond the metal stairs.

And he thinks of himself, dozing on the roof for hours, doing nothing, only
going to his kitchen, his bathroom, his bed, and of the taped latch and the
doorstop, and he goes inside, pulls the window closed, puts things into his
pack, and goes down, and into the Tunnel and up, through the Corridor, the
Cultist Room, the first two Impossible Rooms, and back into his very possible
living room, where he sits heavily on the sofa, and turns on the television.

[96]

After staring blankly at the television for awhile, he changes the channels
and finds some combinations of lights and sounds, some news stories and
narrative sequences, that catch his attention for a time, helping to weave
him back into this side of this world.

Later he gets up, feeling hungry, and goes to the kitchen, makes himself
a sandwich, and sits at the kitchen table eating, looking out the back
window.  Birds fly by, small darting things, not the kind with vast
outspread wings that drift on updrafts and have calls that would shatter
glass.

Back in the living room he opens the front door, with a vague intention to
go somewhere, down to the corner store for a coffee from the coffee machine,
or further afield down the commercial row, maybe to look for a movie
theater.  There is mail in the mailbox.  He takes it out and looks
through quickly.  There are  advertising flyers, as usual, in the old man's
name, in his name, in no name at all.  There are two utility bills, both
in his name.  And there is a thickish packet from the lawyers again, a
large brown envelope with a lump in the center, something hard enclosed
inside.

The hard something is a key, tightly wrapped in thin paper and tied with a
string, and with it is a letter.  A very proper and businesslike letter from
the lawyers, but with behind it a grovelling and embarassed apology, for the
key not having been delivered before this, not having been delivered with the
other keys to the house as it ought to have been, because the old man had
kept it on a differentn ring, and it had been misfiled or mislaid, and
perhaps someone's car had broken down at a bad time, or someone been
injured in a distant skiing accident, or someone taken ill or suffering
from brain-fatigue or in any case something very singular having happened
that did not, certainly, happen often or routinely at this very efficient
and professional legal practice, and that at any rate here's the key now and
we're all settled up and everything is fine, yours sincerely, and so on.

Bob turns the key in his fingers, considering, watching it catch the light
from the setting sun, thinking, of course, of that padlocked cabinet in the
utility room, and of the locked door from the Second Impossible Room, and
of the locked door that had cut him shivering off from the Tunnel, and of all
the other locked doors scattered through the Impossible Rooms.  He slips
the key into his pocket, closes and locks the door behind him, and walks
off to the convenience store for coffee.

[97]

Night falls while Bob sits with his coffee and donut, looking out at the
bounded nothingness outside the window, listening to the finite and ordered
movements of the black-haired girl, moving things around behind the counter,
opening and closing the two cash registers, coming out into the body of
the store and counting things on the shelves, noting things down on a little
hand-held inventory computer thing, brushing strands of hair out of her
eyes as she works.

Other customers come in now and they, rarely, buying coffee or the paper,
nodding, saying hello, how are you, nice weather we've had.  No one else
sits down in the few chairs by the window.  The people are ordinary, and
reassuring.  One old man shuffles in, reminding Bob of the old man, and that
reminds him of the key in his pocket, but also of himself dozing on the roof,
thinking of nothing for hours or days or weeks.

Coffee is good.  Hot coffee, black with a packet of sugar, warm and just a
bit bitter on the tongue, moist fragrant air filling the back of the mouth and
up into the nose.  How does the coffee in Methilde's kitchen, the pasta in
Bob's cabinets, the packages of meat in Bob refrigerator in the Anomaly,
in the kitchen off the foyer off of the Dance Hall, get there?  Do trucks
pull up at a warehouse somewhere, strong straightforward men unload them 
into the side of the loading bay and drive off, and then a door open and a
crew of large-eyed beings, their faces covered by hoods, swarm out to take
the crates and boxes inside, through some door into an impossible room
where they are opened and broken up and distributed?

Is it that straightforward?  Or is it, as Methilde would have it, that it is
all only a metaphor, and no detailed course of events is necessary.  An
always-replenished kitchen is simply replenished, when one's back is turned,
because it has to be to play its role in the metaphor, in the narrative, in
the story.  But, Bob thinks, holes drilled into a wall do not heal themselves
overnight; they require someone, or something, with eyes of a certain size
and a nose of a certain size, to come through a door, with tools and a can of
spackle, and shine a light, and make soft sounds of work.

A broken bit of board in a locked room requires someone to come into the room,
and repair it, and someone to leave again, opening that door long enough for
someone else in the room to escape.  Bob purses his lips.  If that visit was
only metaphor, only part of the story to allow a dramatic escape and a return
to reality, then the previous visit, to repair the wall, may have been only
foreshadowing, only a metaphor to set up the later metaphor of escape.

A car goes by outside, lights flashing for a moment in his eyes, and he
shakes his head and laughs to himself (and does not think, even for a moment,
of the harsh cry of that circling flier, drifting high above the sea of
endless roofs).  He gets up, throws away his empty paper coffee cup, nods
to the black-haired girl, and goes home to watch television and sleep.

Tomorrow, he will do something with the key in his pocket.

[98]

In the night, Bob dreams of his roof again, of the bed where he spent those
nights whose number he cannot recall.  He dreams of floating up out of the
bed, the bed under the dormer, and through the window, floating like a
spirit, upright, just above the roof, his arms held out away from his sides,
carefully, knowing that he can float here like this only if he maintains
just the right degree of relaxation, the right position of the arms, the
right attitude of mind.

He thinks of moving down the roof, past the next two pairs of dormers, to
whatever is beyond them.  The thought does not move him, and for a moment
he feels himself teeter, about to lose the proper frame of mind and tumble
down into something terrible.  But then he moves himself, not by thinking
about moving but simply by moving, slowly but steadily, arms still out,
feet and legs tilted slightly backward, past the two pairs of dormers, over
a stretch of unbroken empty roof, across a courtyard that he sees only
dimly as it passes below him (a circle of earth ringed by brick, a tree,
perhaps a set of benches set around it, perhaps a small fountain), and
then onward, moving himself with the sea of roofs moving under him, and
turning, until he is hovering there, above another roof pierced by windows,
facing a high round tower.

In the dream, hovering there, he feels the wind blowing through him, and
is afraid of the cold.  He moves himself, without thinking of whether or not
he can, through the wall of the tower and into the interior, a round space
ringed by a narrow staircase that leads from darkness below to darkness
above, and here a wide landing with chairs, and a fire, and a pot hung
over the fire with steam rising from it and vanishing upward.

Sitting beside the fire, he watches the black-haired girl, who may be
Methilde, stirring the pot, tossing in herbs from a box beside her which
is labelled in a language something like Italian, with a picture of the
sun rising over a field of wide-leaved plants.  He wants to speak to her,
tries to speak to her, but he cannot.  Then he does speak, not by trying
to but simply by speaking, and she looks up, but makes no reply.

In the dream Bob takes a cup full of steaming liquid from the pot and
holds it under his nose.  It is coffee, rich and pungent, and the smell
becomes the coffee itself, flowing down his throat, filling him with
substance, heavy, dark, grounded in this place with the pot and the
cushions and the girl and the ravens that flutter around her head.
How will he return to his bed if he is solid now, if he is no longer a
freely hovering phantom?

And here Bob turns over uneasily in his sleep, and the dream ends.

[99]

The key fits, and opens, the padlock on the narrow door in the utility room.
He closes the lock again, without opening the door.

The key does not fit the far door in the Second Impossible room, which is
still locked.  He thinks of the locked door out of the Storeroom, the various
locked doors opening out of, into, the Tunnel, but he does not want to
venture, just now, that far into the maze.  And it seems more like a padlock
key than a door-key anyway.

Standing in the Second Impossible room, he puts his ear to the locked door,
and hears nothing.  He goes to the window and looks out, and nothing has
changed there either; nothing moves in the mists, the road is empty from 
where it appears to where it vanishes.

In the utility room he opens the padlock again, takes it off, turns back the
buckle, and hangs the lock back on the eye.  But then he frowns, reconsiders,
and puts the lock, with the key, in his pants pocket.

The door opens with a slight high squeak, onto a set of cement stairs leading
down.  Which, like the Basement whose stairs are at the end of the Corridor
beyond the Cultist Room, would be entirely normal and possible in other
places, further north, toward the hills, but is already an impossibility
here.  Bob goes back to the living room and gets his flashlight.  He stands
looking at his pack, with its equipment and food, thinking of Anderson, who
must be back by now from wherever he was, done with whatever errands out in
the possible world.  He shrugs and zips up the pack, puts his arms through
the straps, and goes back to the utility room and goes down the stairs.

[100]

The stairs don't go own far; they end at a cement floor no further than one
would expect basement stairs to go down.  It is a small floor, a small
space, with a bare bulb on the ceiling that lights when Bob pulls on the
chain.  There is a collapsible card table, a couple of weary-looking chairs,
and a set of hooks on the wall.  Hanging from the hooks are an old wool
sweater (that Bob thinks he may remember having seen the old man wearing,
but then one wool sweater is much like another), and a battered-looking
and empty backpack.  If this had been the old man's base of operations in his
exploration of the impossible rooms, he must have taken most of his supplies,
his maps (for surely anyone exploring would have made a map; Methilde has no
map, but she is not an explorer; who knows whether or not the old man was
either, Bob thinks) with him when he left.  Or no, Bob corrects himself, he
did not leave, he died.  He must have tired of exploring, or otherwise
given up, and sold off or given away whatever else he had down here, if this
was indeed the place he kept them.
 
The other thing in the room, that Bob has been carefully ignoring until now,
is the dark archway on the righthand wall.  Beyond it the light shows the
top of another set of stairs, these rougher and rockier, leading down further
into the impossible ground, smelling, as he approaches, of moisture and age
and forgotten things.

He goes down these stairs more slowly, touching the rough walls and finding
them cooler and damper as he goes, down a tight flight of stairs that winds
around in a rough helix, without landings or doors or cross passages, for a
long time.  There are no bulbs here, no switches, just the steps cut into
the bare rock.  The beam from his flashlight beings to shine off of beads of
water, and ahead and below somewhere he hears small plashing or dripping
sounds, irregular, and he shivers slightly and thinks about the sweater in
his backpack.

[101]

By the time he hears the voices, his shins are aching from the long downward
walk.  The walls and the steps themselves are damp, even wet in places,
tiny shallow pools of water under his shoes, and the air is moist and very
cool, almost chilly.

The voices seem at first to be an illusion, an overinterpretation of the
sound of the blood flowing in his ears, his own heartbeat, and he ignores
them.  When he realizes that they are real, that no sound of his heart in
his ears could be this definite, he stops on the step, standing very still,
and snaps off his light.

In the darkness the voices are something like a single voice, singing in
words that he cannot understand, like a chorus chanting a liturgy in a
language he does not speak or recognize, a liturgy somewhere between
sorrow and joy, partaking of both and of other emotions that he cannot name.
The voice is rich and multiple, between a chant and a song, with no
distinct melody but with a rising and falling of pitch.  All the voices
within the voice are in unison, no counterpoint or harmony, and standing in
the darkness listening Bob feels again as though he is lying on a roof,
staring upward, looking at the sky and dozing and waiting for a bird to call
and bring him upright and suddenly clear.

He turns the light on again, but points it downward and hides most of it in
his hand, curled around the lens.  With just enough light to see the steps
ahead of him, he makes his way down, to where the stairs end at a stone floor,
and the stairway opens out into some large dripping space, filled with the
voice, with darkness, and with rough stone pillars.

[102]

Methilde thinks that the work may be finished.  It happened suddenly.  She
finished adding a new bridge between the first framework and the second,
and embellishing it as seemed appropriate, and then as she always did got
down with her mask up on her head, and walked around the structure looking
for what to add next, and there was nothing.  She smiled to herself, and went
to her pile of parts, the most recently gleaned on top, and sifted through
them with her eyes, and touched some of them with her hands, and still there
was nothing presenting itself to her as undone.

The work, the parts, even herself, all told her they were content, complete
at least for the moment, lacking and wanting nothing.

What does this mean, in the metaphor, she asks herself, sitting back with
her arms stretched out along the back of the old sofa.  Is this the end, the
moment that everything has been leading up to?  Is this the end of one road,
and others are still reaching out into the future, into their unattained own
endings?  Or is this just a period of quiet, or a symbol of quiet, a small
time of waiting, an interregnum, between acts or between actions?

She goes to the kitchen and heats up some soup, eats soup and bread and cheese
in the silence, puts her mask aside.  She showers and changes her clothes,
puts on something lighter, something that she wouldn't normally wear around
the sparks and molten heat of the work.  She feels light herself, floating,
or flying.  Between one thing and another, she decides, rather than at any
sort of ending.

The work, when she comes back out into her space, still seems perfect, or at
any rate not lacking, seems to be the thing that the space was intended to
hold, lit from all sides by the light coming from the windows high above.
What sky opens up there, she wonders as she has wondered before.  Is there a
catwalk that goes high enough to see?

She goes up the metal stair that she's been up before, to the first catwalk
that runs above the space where her work sits.  The view from here is good,
down into and among the structures, the pieces that she has placed and the
shapes and forms and voids that she has built.  She likes the perspective
because it shows her difference, shows her that the work is not only the
parts of it and the forms of it that she sees when she is down there, working,
but also another universe of shapes and forms and voids that appear when
she looks down from up here.  She stands looking, pleased, with her hands
on the slightly rusted metal, and then she turns and walks away along the
catwalk, the hem of her skirt swirling around her legs, to where another
metal stair leads upward toward places she hasn't been.

[103]

The pillars, wet with the pervading moisture, are worked stalagmites, 
something between untouched works of water and stone and intentionally
carved uprights.  Bob wonders what Methilde would make of them, what role
they play in the metaphor, as he makes his way carefully forward, his light
hooded by his hand, moving in the direction from which the voice, the voices,
seem to originate.

The ground is wet, and his feet splash quietly as he moves.  He puts his
hand against one of the pillars, and it is slick, almost slimy.  He hears
water dripping from the ceiling.

He can see now, between the last few pillars of this particular part of the
forest, a clear space ahead of him, and dim forms.  The voices are quite loud
now, the words still incomprehensible, unspellable, in both a language and
an alphabet that he does not know.  There is a wan glow from somewhere above,
and he turns his light off.

He does not want to step out into the clearing, but he wants very much to
know whose voices these are that make up the voice, which has continued
unbroken and unvarying since he first became aware of it.  He peers around
the side of one of the last stalagmites.  Out there in the clearing is a
huge stone table, and gathered around it, at intervals, not touching one
another or the table as far as he can see, are people.

Or, as he finds when the three nearest him stop their singing and turn to
face him, are things that would be people, that might be people, if it were
not that their eyes are so large and round, and their noses so small and flat.

[104]

Methilde has climbed stairs and walked along catwalks in a twisting
progression that has now brought her up to the top of the space, high among
the beams and railings, within reach of the frosted windows that let in the
light.  Her work is far below her, and she is happy to have come this high and
to be able to look down at it, see it as a small and distant thing seen from
above, all one single cohesive form, all simplified by the drop.

She does not think of herself as having a particular head for heights, but
she feels no fear up here, standing sensibly with her hands on the railing,
not leaning too far over.  She looks up at the windows, which sit in a bulge
in the roof letting in the light at oblique angles, so it filters down and
diffuses to the space beneath.  They are hinged, latched closed, with the
latches within easy reach of someone standing, as she is, on the topmost
catwalk.

She opens one of the latches (it sticks only for an instant, not like a
thing that has been closed for years, and she thinks of Bob's aliens coming
up here now and then to move and oil all the latches, although she knows that
the metaphor does not require this, may only require the possibility or the
thought of it), and pushes the window open, but even standing on tiptoe and
craning her neck all she can see is an empty blue sky and a hint of red
roof.  She closes the window and latches it again.

Further along the catwalk, she finds an efficient-looking stepladder folded
shut, leaning against the railing.  She opens it and sets it under the
nearest window, steps onto the lowest steap, and opens the latch.  Pushing
the window open and climbing to the topmost step of the ladder, she finds
she can just fit herself through the window, not onto a roof, but onto a
sloping concrete surface, at the edge of a small deserted courtyard, with the
sound of automobile traffic nearby, and the smell of city in her nose.

[105]

A wave of silence spreads around the circle of singers from the point 
closest to Bob, until all around the huge table they are quiet, and they are
looking at him with there too-large eyes.  Concealment having clearly failed,
he comes out from behind the pillar and stands, looking back at them, a
feeling of unreality strong in him, utterly uncertain what to do.

Just as he is raising an arm, to make some sort of gesture of greeting or
contact, the voice starts up again, softly, apparently from those closest to
him.  Their mouths barely open as they begin to sing, in a way that Bob did
not want to look at.  The song swells as more singers join in, and as each
voice become stronger, more definite.  They turn gradually away from Bob,
back toward the center of the table, still not touching, and the voice forms
itself again.

Is the voice different now, the chant that he cannot understand or even
break into words?  Has its flavor changed, its tempo or its intonation?  He
cannot tell, really, because his mind slips off of the voice, finding no
place for meaning to stand.  But they have turned away from him and are
clearly no threat.  He stands in the dimness, his light off, letting the
knowledge that the Caretakers really exist (to the extent that anything in
this impossibility is real, or exists) soak into him, and the voice into his
ears.

He walks to the left, staying at the edge of the clearing in the stone
pillars, keeping well away from the table and not looking for long at any
of the singers.  From what he has seen they have the same face that he has
seen twice now, in the Second Impossible Room and in that room off of the
Tunnel, looking as identical as strangely-shaped faces do, and they wear
something utterly nondescript, plain, not as functional and neat as the 
uniforms he has seen twice.  Here they are on their own, he thinks, at their
leisure, not off about their duties in the rooms. 

Sixty degrees or so around the circle he comes to a path through the forest
of stone pillars, a place where the damp floor looks different and the pillars
are far apart, a path leading away from the clearing of the table and off
toward the wall of the cavern.  He looks back at the singers, chanters, 
gathered around the table, the nearest with their backs to him, and walks
down the path.

As he approaches the wall, the edge of the cavern if cavern this is, and is
just starting to make out an archway or opening or mouth ahead of him, a
voice, a singular single voice, inhuman, as though a piece of wood, or better
a chisel, had learned to talk, said, "Hello?".

[106]

Just as Bob, down in the impossible space under his house, is hearing that
voice calling out to him, a young woman in an attic is pushing aside one
last trunk, to see if that shape in the wall was actually a door.

The young woman's name is Mia, and she is staying at the musty old house in
the country for one last summer before starting college.  It's a rainy day,
so she has a good excuse to be up in the attic, sifting time through her
fingers and making patterns in the dust; not that there's anyone that she
needs to make an excuse to.

The last chest finally moves, depite its weight and the dust cementing it
into place, and the long habit of years.  Mia has opened some of the trunks,
over all these summers, and sometimes asked people about the things she found
inside, and while that had largely been good fun, something in the way they
looked at her while answering her questions (that's your mother's Great Aunt
Edith at a resort in Canada, that's your Great Grandfather Franklin in the
family's first car) had given her the idea that they would rather she didn't.

So, this summer, or at least today, she is occupying herself with the attic
itself, its rafters and its walls and the forms and structures of its content.
She has her favorite places among the piled boxes and crates and trunks and
old pieces of furniture, chests of drawers and bookcases piled with old
books and brittle magazines, where she would sit for longn hours carefully
turning the pages, deciphering the words, reconstructing the civilizations
that produced chlorophyll pills, and whalebone corsets, and automobiles
shaped like the old breadboxes downstairs in the kitchen.

But today she had, for the first time, thoroughly surveyed the walls of
the attic itself, the farthest walls beyond the farthest stacks, in the
dimmest corners.  And in this particular far point of the wall, behind
this particular pile of heavy trunks, there seemed to be a door.

Mia thought about the door, and the wall, and how the house looked from the
outside, where the roofline ran.  It can only, she thought, open into a
narrow crawlspace in the wall itself, or perhaps a place where the pipes
run, or some sort of old electrical box, because there isn't space for
anything else.  But she has moved the trunks anyway, because it is a door
and she ought to know what is beyond it.  And now she reaches out her hand
and grasps the dusty wooden knob.

[107]

Methilde stands at the end of an alley, where it opens onto the street
proper.  At the other end of the alley is the courtyard, and on one edge of
the courtyard, at the base of a high brick building, is a row of dirty
windows that slope upward from the group to the base of the building's wall.
One of those windows is now propped open, because Methilde has propped it
open, with a stick taken from the pile of debris that the wind has gathered
into one corner.

The street is oddly familiar to her, and she frowns.  People and cars pass
by, the street intersects other streets, and she feels that she knows where
each of the streets goes, where the major shopping center is, with the
escalators linking floor to floor, the grocery store sitting on its hill
surrounded by parking lot, the center of the city -- and then she remembers.

She has been in this city before, several times, in dreams.  It is a major
city, but has only a few streets.  It is a college town, and the college
occupies a set of fields and streets and buildings that stretch out to the
south (or at least downward; who knows north and south in a dream?) and
cover an area far larger than the city itself.  There is a bus line that
connects primarily to the train stations, and the train stations are a
chaotic and incomprehensible snarl of platforms and ramps and complex signs
in which she has both wandered lost and miserable, about to miss an 
important connection, and also run joyfully from place to place, getting on
whatever train or bus strikes her fancy.

Methilde smiles at the thought that she has climbed up out of the metaphor
into her dream city, and starts for an intersection where she knows, or
remembers, or expects, that there will be a little cafe.  There is, and
she is sitting at a table, sipping her coffee and watching the traffic
and commerce going by, without having ordered or waited or paid, or at least
without remembering having done so, because the dream, or the metaphor, or
the dream of metaphor, didn't require it.

Perhaps, she thinks to herself, I will go over to the college, visit the
art museum.  Remembering a dream of the museum and its sculpture garden,
with enigmatic statues from some exotic imaginary land.

[108]

Bob stops, stock still, in the dimness, straining his eyes to see more, to
see where that odd inhuman voice is coming from.

"Hello?" he replies, softly, not wanting any of the singers to hear, although
they already know he is there.

He aims his light at the ground and turns it on.  One of the Caretakers is
standing there, by the doorway of a room or the mouth of a smaller cave.
He (she? it?) winces at the light, and turns, and goes inside.  Bob walks
to the edge and stops.

It is a small space, certainly created, carved into the stone, but looking as
though it had grown there, a low stone shelf with something shapeless on it
for sitting or perhaps sleeping, a higher shelf with shapes indistinct in the
shadow of his flashlight.

"Hello," he says again, considering turning the light off again but leaving it
on for the time being, in case it gives him an advantage he needs.

"Yes," says the person, the being, inside, and sits down on the low shelf.
"Yes."

"Do you speak English?" Bob asks, in a quiet voice.

"Yes," the voice says again, "yes, small.  Little."

"A little English," Bob repeats.  "Did the old man --" but of course the old
man wouldn't have called himself the old man, "Was it Abel Cantor --"

"Yes!" the voice says again, and the sound of enthusiasm from a voice so
inhuman, inorganic, is chilling, "Yes Abel Cantor English."

Bob frowns in the darkness.  He cannot imagine the old man down here, in the
dark and the dripping wetness, somehow singling out one of the Caretakers,
with their impossible faces and their uniforms, and teaching it English.
How do you teach a Caretaker English?  Does it now know the word "spackle"?
The word "paint"?  And, equally baffling, why do you teach a Caretaker
English?  It fits nothing that Bob remembers about the old man.  But
then none of this does.

[109]

Mia pulls on the knob, but the door does not open.  She feels around the
edges of it, and finds a handful of ancient wooden wedges driven into the
gap between door and frame, holding it shut.  She goes off to one of her
stashes, elsewhere in the attic, to get a screwdriver and a hammer.

The wedges removed (and they fall to pieces in her fingers as they come out),
the door opens with a strong tug.  The space beyond is larger than she
expected.  Crouching (the door is not nearly tall enough to pass through
upright), she goes inside.

The walls of the space are painted drywall, just like most of the rest of the
attic, and like downstairs.  But it goes forward, an awkward narrow little
tunnel, much further than it should be able to, if Mia's correctly recalled
the roofline and the shape of the house.  So she must not have.

Awkward crouching, she gets down on hands and knees and crawls forward.  The
floor under her feels sturdy.  The light is dim, but enough filters in from
the attic and its bare bulbs that she can see her way.

The space ends after about eight of ten feet of uninterrupted walls, ceiling,
and floor, at another, very similar, small door.  Eager to see what part of
the house this leads to, and to discover how she miscalculated the possible
size of this space off of the attic, Mia pushes on the door (like the one
she came in through, it opens outward, out of the space), and puts her head
through.  She finds herself looking out of an open door at the top of a
set of wooden rungs up against the ceiling of a large empty room with a
wooden floor: a room that she has never seen before.

Which strikes her as entirely impossible.

[110]

The college grounds are exactly as Methilde remembers them, or almost
remembers them, from the series of dreams that she has had, set in this 
same compact city.  Until the shock of recognition here, those dreams had
not had a place in her memory, as something known, but now that she has
recognized it the memories are bubbling up, tinged with the hazy feeling
of early-morning sunlight, of rubbing one's eyes, of a desire for coffee,
of the delicious time after sleeping and before entirely waking when dreams
are still remembered, and things done in dreams are lazily thought of,
and either enjoyed, or put thankfully behind one.

She had not realized, even in those unfocused mornings, that all the dreams
were set in the same place.  The busses, the odd open trolley-cars that were
always becoming detached from each other and stranded in odd places, the
unsteady bridge across the river that might break under the weight of a car,
but one was walking anyway, and on the other side the construction site that
had to be carefully threaded through, the complex tangle of archways and
unnumbered dorm rooms in which one must somehow find one's own.

Methilde is in the college gift shop, looking with a crooked grin through
the stacks and racks of sweatshirts and T-shirts and leg-warmers, all with
different and ambiguous logos and coats of arms; for this college cannot
decide quite what it is, whether it is a university (the University of
Vienna, in Cleveland, Ohio, USA) with innumerable differently-named colleges
and institutions within it (the College of Eyes, Monk's College, Xavier
College, the College of Science and Music), or a tiny liberal-arts school
with a single dove on its shield, or a ram's horn.

She considers taking the bus somewhere, or the train, but is not sure she
wants to get that deep into the dream, the busses and trains having usually
been metaphors for confusion, lack of direction, lack of time, being lost,
taking the wrong routes or lacking a printed schedule.  Although she also
recall pleasany sun-suffused trips into a vague ambiguous countryside in an
open trolleycar, with only ill-defined complications involving rest rooms
and lions disturbing the peace.

Off across one of the college's upper fields is the old stone building where
a winding staircase leads up to the top of the Philosophy Tower.  Walking
in that direction she comes unexpectedly to the art museum, which she would
have expected to be back north (up), in the direction of the city proper, but
the landscape is after all fluid and whimsical.

The gardens around the museum are brown and brittle, and there is a dusting
of snow on the ground.  Oriental-looking lions and dogs, carved from a greyish
brown stone, crouch on stone pedestals looking by turns threatening and
comforting, demons or guardians, the watchers or the watched-for.  She
finds herself growing sleepy, and wonders, if she dozes here and dreams,
where she might find herself.  She thinks of the propped-open window in
the courtyard at the end of the alley, back in the city center, and sits
down on a cold cement bench to rest.

[111]

Bob has no notion what a Caretaker does when not repairing damage to the
impossible rooms or, now, standing around a table chanting.  This one here,
the one with a little English, now that they have run out of things to say
in their first attempt at conversation, seems content merely to sit on the
shapeless mattress or whatever it is on the low stone bench, looking at Bob
disturbingly with its too-large and too-round eyes, presumably breathing
through its minimal nose, the too-wide slit of its mouth closed and nearly
invisible.  Bob shivers in the damp.  What does one say, here, to this
being, in this place?

"Abel Cantor," he says again, and the Caretaker nods, and says "Yes" and
does nothing else.

"One?" Bob says, "One two three?"

The Caretaker makes a motion of its shoulders and head that might be pleasure,
or amusement, or energy.  "One!" it says, "One two three four five six seven
eight nine ten!  Eleven."

"Yes," says Bob.  But it is not at all clear to him how a Caretaker that can
count in English is any great advance over one that cannot, and they lapse
into silence again.

Outside, the voice that is many voices chants, or sings, on.  Bob turns to
look out into the dimness, and his eyes now more adapted he can see quite
clearly the backs of three or four of the singers, still facing the table.
But just as he looks the voice, the voices, are suddenly still.  He tries
to remember if it has ended in a cadence, or with any change in tone or
diction, but still his understanding fails to grasp the sound, and the
memory of it evaporates quickly.  When the sound has died entirely the few
Caretakers that he can see move off to the left, and others pass by the
bit of table that is in his view.  He hears, very softly, the sound of
many feet passing by and receding.  He could follow them, he could stay here.

He looks at his companion in the room, but he, it, shows no tendency or desire
to move away himself in whatever procession or recession is happening out
there.

"The singing is over, I guess," he says, not expecting an answer of any
particular sort.  Rather to his surprise, the other makes an inarticulate
sound that might be pain, and begins to chant, or sing, its voice a thin
fragment of the one voice that has just ceased.  In the dim wet of the
little cave, the sound is almost beautiful.

[112]

Mia climbs down the rungs, to the floor of the mysterious room.  It is not a
room that she has ever seen before, and she knows the old house thoroughly,
entirely, inside and out.  Except, she says to herself, for that one last
door back at the edge of the attic, behind that pile of trunks.  And now
look where she is.

The cramped little  hallway wasn't long enough to reach any of the house's
outbuildings, and besides she knows those as well as she knows the house.
The room is large, and empty, and perfectly rectangular, as none of the
rooms in the house are empty, or (except for the dining room) perfectly
rectangular.  There is a door in the wall opposite the wall with the rungs,
and she is in a way reluctant to open it and end the mystery, and find out
just how this room is connected to the parts of the house that she knows,
and just how she has missed it all these years.  But she is also eager, for
exactly the same reasons, and the tension between the two feelings makes her
shiver pleasantly, and break out in goosebumps.

She looks down at the floor and notices that it isn't simply wood slats like
other parts of the house are, but something odder and more patterened, but
she can't distract herself with the floor for very long, and she walks over
to the door, hoping it isn't locked.  It isn't, so she opens it, and looks
through, and of course sees something even more impossible.

[113]

Methilde opens her eyes with a start, awakened by a squeal of brakes from one
of the numerous oddly bulbous buses.  She doesn't remember having dreamed, at
least once she convinces herself that she is still in the same place, on a
bench in the garden of the art museum of the city of her dreams, with her
head back against a cold curved stone.

The coffee at the cafe had been good, she thinks, even though she doesn't
remember having actually had coffee in that cafe in any of the dreams.  She
is hungry, and considers finding a place to get a sandwich, some soup, a
nice sit-down lunch of beans and rice.  But she doesn't remember, or doesn't
sense, any places to buy actual food in the dream-city, and she suddenly
doesn't relish the idea of wandering its streets looking for one.  Would
dream-city food be effective against hunger?  Or might it just as well make
one hungrier, or sad, or lonely, or maniacally happy?  Eating in strange
places has a powerful metaphorical signficance, and she's not sure she's ready
to go there yet.

She rises and starts back, cutting across the campus and not remembering
until it is too late just how dense and mazy the buildings are.  There are
ramps and stairs, archways and bridges, mostly in ivy-covered stone.  She
passes the sprawling bookstore, with its multiple stories of unorganized
shelves, multiple vendors, embedded stalls selling glassware and artistic
pottery and groceries.  She makes progress, though, as she usually makes some
progress, even in the most oppressive of the dreams.  She begins to catch
glimpses of the open street, the city north of (above) the campus, and after
only a few false trails she comes out, through the door of a building that
she does not remember having entered, onto the street, near a corner near
the alley that leads to the courtyard, she thinks, with the propped-open
window.

Methilde is half-surprised when her memory proves to reflect, to still
reflect, the structure of the dream-city, but not surprised to find, when
she gets there, that the stick is still jammed in and holding the window
open.  She crouches, pulls the window wide open, and tosses the stick
aside.

Back on the catwalk, in the top of her own space, she is certain, as she
latches the window closed again, that she has heard someone moving down
below, but when she turns and looks there is nothing, only her work
familiar and unfamiliar down below, and the light filtering down to the
distant floor.

[114]

The Caretaker sings, or chants, softly; Bob doubts that the sound carries
far beyond the mouth of the little side-cave.  Why is he, is it, here apart
from the others, why was he, it, not part of the main song?  Are there others,
in other little caves all around the walls, who are not part of the chorus,
not part of the voice?  Or is this one special, outcast?  If outcast, is it
because the old man has talked to it, taught it some English?  Or is it the
other way around; did the old man choose this one because it, because he, was
apart, not part of the procession?  Bob cannot imagine how he could ever find
out.

He does not want to talk, to interrupt this being, this Caretaker, in its
happiness or its grief, or simply its performance.  He turns and takes a
step out of the cave, back in among the stone pillars, and the voice stops
at once.  Inside in the dimness, the face is looking at him, with those eyes
set over that nose, the mouth now closed, a barely-discernable line.

What other words can Bob try, what other subjects of discussion might there
be between them, conducted through whatever bridge of language the old man
has left here behind him.  "Spackle?" Bob tries, "Paint?  White?"

"Yes," the creature says, and again it is like the wall or an old shoe had
learned to talk, "yes, white," and it walks out of the cave, and along a
path that follows the wall, twisting here and there among the pillars but
always returning to the wall, and Bob follows.  The Caretaker does not
look back, but only walks purposefully onward.  The sound of the others,
those who had at first been singing, then silent, then singing again, and
then walking away, has long since faded entirely and been swallowed up by
the wet sounds of the rock and the puddles.

They walk, the other ahead and Bob following, his light hooded with his hand
again and pointed downward, perhaps a quarter of the way around the circle,
away from the place where the stairs are that lead back up to Bob's house,
Abel Cantor's house, staying mostly near the wall but sometimes winding
among the pillars.  They pass half a dozen of the small side-caves; the ones
that Bob has the presence of mind to cast his light into seem to be the same
as the one his Caretaker, his Caretaker with a little English, was in.  None
of them are, as far as he notices, presently occupied.

The path, and the Caretaker, turn suddenly directly away from the center,
toward the wall, and they are in a tight passage between wet stone walls,
irregular and, when Bob brushes one with the back of his hand, with that
same near-slimy slipperiness.  Then the passage widens out, and they are
going up a short flight of low broad steps, and into a place lit by some
invisible source far above. 

In this place, a wide but shallow chamber in the dripping rock, are many
rows of neat metal shelves, and on all of the shelves are cans the size
of paint cans, and to one side, under a neatly-rigged awning of canvas to
keep the water off, is a bin or basket full of what look like pain brushes.
Every can has a label, and each label seems blank.

The Caretaker stops at the edge of the chamber, still a step or two below it,
and waits for Bob to catch up and stand at his side.  Then he makes that
motion again, or one like it, with his arms and shoulders and head, and
looks and the neat shelves, and looks at Bob, and very distinctly says,
"White".

[115]

Mia is sitting on the floor in the doorway, either because it seems the
safest thing to do or because her body sat down in the absence of any
attention from her mind, and looks into the room beyond.

There is nothing like this in the old house, or in any of the outbuildings
of the old house, or (Mia would be ready to swear and insist) in any
building for many miles in any direction.  There are of course things like
this in movies, and probably buried underground in Washington or the
mysterious buried places that they keep in case the government has to go into
hiding --

It occurs to her suddenly that that is what she has found: one of the hidden
bases where the government will go into hiding in the event of war or
invasion, a terrorist take-over of Washington, deadly germs released over the
capital from a stolen airplane, giant mutant sea-creatures rising out of the
harbors and destroying the coastal cities.  That one of these bases would be
attached to the old nowhere house seems implausible, but here it is.  That
she should do anything but go forward and explore it does not even occur to
her.

What she has seen as she stands and takes her first step into the room is that
there are screens.  Screens and chairs and smoothly molded buttons and keys
and dials, like the dials on audio players, touch-sensitive with no moving
parts.  They are all dark, empty, lightless; waiting.  The only light is from
dimly-glowing bulbs spaced at perfectly regular intervals along the walls,
obviously an emergency or stand-by or backup lighting system.  The wonders
if this is an active retreat-place for the government, or if it has been lost
and forgotten about due to the assassination or disappearance of a key
official, the only man (or the only woman!) to know the locations of all of
the secret government retreat centers, so that this one is now known to no
one (or no one still in the country) but her, and its silent robotic watchers.

This all flashes through her mind as she is taking her first step.  She stops,
heart pounding, mid-way through her second step, because the other, much
brighter, nearly blindingly white, lights on the ceiling suddenly come on,
and with a whooshing thrum, almost like an orchestra playing the first note
of some grand symphony, every piece of equipment in the room visibly powers
itself up.

[116]

Methilde goes down the catwalks and along the stairs cautiously, as quietly
as she can, sure that she has heard something and equally sure that she
hasn't actually, downward until she is seeing her work from almost the
usual distance and almost the usual angle.  Then she stops, just a few
steps above the ground on the last set of metal stairs, and holds her
breath, and is completely still.

There is no sound at all in her space, except for the familiar distant
humms and clicks that have always been there in the background when she was
quite, filtering through from unknown distant sources, metaphors for the
activity of distance and the distance of activity, of unknown happenings that
always continue out in the world, unaware of us, whatever we do in our own
small nearby spaces.

She goes down the last few steps, goes and uses her bathroom, goes to her
kitchen and heats up some canned red-bean chili, and eats it over thick
nutty slices of fragrant bread, sitting at the counter in the kitchen,
looking now and then out through the open door at the visible corner of her
work, and the parts of the space beyond it.

Nothing seems to have been disturbed, nothing is out of place, nothing is
missing or unexpectedly added, the kitchen has been restocked and freshened
as usual.  She finishes eating and gets up, goes out and looks over the
work, which still feels whole and complete.

Then she walks over toward the place where the ladder from Bob's part of
the metaphor comes up, and just as she notices that the manhole cover has
been pushed back again, she hears the sound of someone coming up.

[117]

Bob nods, although whether the Caretaker will have learned from the old man
what a nod means is as uncertain as whether the old man every learned what
the various gestures of arm and head and shoulder in the others mean.  The
creature, the person, the Caretaker, seems to have only a very small bit of
English; is it easier or harder to pick up body language?

Bob imagines himself saying "blue" and "red" and "green" and perhaps also
"mauve" and "fuscia" and "pearl", and being taken patiently to dozens,
hundreds, more neatly maintained paint stations, each with its set of brushes
and its shelves of cans.  If the creature actually spoke English, or he could
read its mind and project his questions into it, he would ask where the cans
came from, if they were somehow ordered and paid for, why there were so many.
(For surely this large an inventory of white paint was not needed just to
paint over the repairs necessitated by curious vandals like Bob; are there
whole new sections of impossible room, and corridor, and tunnel, going up
that need painting?  Are the Caretakers also Builders?  He wonders if the
old man had known the answer to that.)

He has no desire to be shown a dozen more paint-rooms, nor is the response
to "hammer" or "spackle" likely to be especially enlightening.  He does not
know how to ask deeper questions, about the supply routes and the economy of
the impossible world, let alone its physics or ontology.  He looks at the
side of the Caretaker's head, and then looks away.  He licks his lips, his
mind slipping across his mental landscape and finding no hold, as it found no
hold on the voice's chant, the Caretakers' song.

"Maria," he says aloud, not expecting any particular response, not expecting
anything or really having been conscious in advance that he was going to say
the word, but in retrospect thinking it a fine word to have said in the
circumstances.

The Caretaker makes an even more ambiguous gesture, this time with its whole
body, a sort of a loosening or slumping, and at the same time a change of 
angle so that it seems to be swaying forward.  It turns its head so that the
face, with the too-large too-round eyes, minute nose, slit of a moutn, are
facing him squarely.

"Maria," it says, the voice now sounding like rain that has learned to talk,
or oil spattering in a pan over an open fire on a cold night.  "Maria," it
says again, and turns and walks, even more quickly, back the way they have
come, and Bob hurries to follow.

[118]

Mia is sitting in one of the seats, which like all the others is a subtle
and very clean off-white, staring at the screen, and looking at the
universe.

Until five minutes ago this screen was like all the others, blank but lit by
a pearly irridescence from within, meaning that it was on but idle, where
before her second step it had been off.

But for this screen Mia has pressed the very obvious if unmarked On button
beneath it, and has experimented with some of the other almost-as-obviouis
buttons andn sliders and dials alongside it and above it, and is becoming
quite skilled, as the young do, with the new device.

The screen shows a long empty hallway, with windows on one wall through
which a little light comes, and a series of doors on the other wall.  Stroking
the right controls in the right way, Mia moves her viewpoint to and through
each of the doors in turn, looking into a room full of chairs, piled on top
of each other in neat stacks, an empty room, a room full of tables, a room
full of empty boxes, a room with shelves along the walls on which sit
transparent jugs of what look like water.

She strokes another control and the view veers wildly, and she is looking
down from above, perhaps from the peak of a tower, out over a sea of houses,
or at least roofs, with tall thin towers poking up at regular intervals,
and from each one a brightly-colored banner whipping in the wind.

Some of the controls she tries cause the screen to go blank, or to show
shapeless forms or formless shapes that do not especially interest her.
Some controls seem to do nothing.  Others may be moving her viewpoint from
a dark room to a light one, or to be turning on the lights in the room that
she is looking at, or turning them off.

Initial fascination wearing off, she leans back a bit in the seat and surveys
the controls situated between the screens, and above and below each vertical
column, and at the ends of each horizontal row.  There must be hundreds of
screens in this room, on the long sloping boards with their clean swivel
chairs, and many more, larger ones, on the horizontal plane that she sees
on the opposite wall of the room.

She touches another obvious control, and all the screens in the same row as
her own, her first, screen light up with images, as do all the screens in the
rows to the left and right.

Mia nearly squeals with delight.

[119]

"You've finished it then?  That's wonderful."

Peter, Peter Anderson, seems as affable as ever, more affable even, more
complimentary and empathetic, and yet the automatic liking for him that
Methilde remembers feeling before is not there, or if it is there it is
overlaid with a feeling of tension, or danger, or something not quite right.

"Well, done for now at any rate.  It might be finished, or I might just be
resting, between phases."

"You don't know?"  Peter seems amused by this, and Methilde feels somewhat
annoyed, condescended to.

"I don't know," she says straightforwardly, keeping any tone of defensiveness
from her voice, "this isn't something that you know about, not always, not
even usually."

"The creative intuition," he says, and smiles, and Methilde thinks that it is
the sort of smile one smiles at a clever performance by a child, or when one
is thinking hard about something else but doesn't mind a moment's distraction.

"And so you are back," she says, by way of changing the subject.

"Yes, I am!  And I've come to find you, and your being done with your work,"
and he smiles again, "or perhaps resting at least, is a good piece of
timing."

"Did you come looking for me before?" she asks, gesturing vaguely from where
they are now, seated as usual on the sagging couch, drinking coffee, in the
direction of the manhole, whose cover had been open long before Peter's head
reached the level of the floor.

"Ah, oh, yes, looking for you," he replies absently, vaguely, clearly not
getting the point of her question, his eyes focused on something in the
distance, not in the space at all.  "And now," and his eyes refocus on her,
"and now you must come with me!  I have something new to show you."

"Well, I don't know," she says, feeling contrary, and feeling a bit ashamed
of herself for it; she is not so young that she should resist simply for the
sake of resisting, or because she feels slighted.  But she does.  "I'd like
to spend some time alone with the work, getting to know it in this form.
You know?  Get familiar with it as a static object, so that I will later on
know whether it is actually done, or whether I will start on it again."

Peter's mouth becomes somewhat hard when she says this, and while he continues
to smile she thinks that the smile might as well be a frown.  "Oh, you
really must come," he says.  And she becomes aware that someone else is
coming up the ladder.

[120]

The rock from which the caves have been carved, by men or Caretaker or aliens
or aeons of flowing water, or some combination of these, are, it turns out, a
warren.  There are slopes, some with stairs bitten into them and some without,
there are passages that cross and separate and cross again, there are low
crawls and impossibly tight places where he is glad his Caretaker does not
lead him.  Many places in the warren are slick and wet as the cavern of the
chanting is wet, but many places are not.  In one place, crossing a long high
narrow chamber where brown roots protrude from the walls, there is so much
dust that he has to stop to clear his throat, cough, and put his hands over
his mouth as a rough filter for the air before he can go on.  His Caretaker
does not get very far ahead of him when this happens; Bob presumes that
although he never appears to look back the other must be aware of his there
following, and slow or stop if they get too far apart.

Bob realizes that he is becoming hungry and, especially, thirsty.  He
wonders if the Caretaker knows "food" (or "butter" or "soup") and "water";
but he doe want to see where the word "Maria" is taking them, and does not
want to be detoured to some chamber with neatly-shelved bottles of water or
cans of soup labelled in crisp quasi-Italian lettering.  So he goes on,
wordless, behind the striding Caretaker, whose legs are no longer than Bob's,
but whose gait seems longer, or quicker, or more efficient, and Bob trots
for awhile now and then to keep up.  His heart is beating rapidly from the
exertion, and he knows if it keeps up he will have to slow down, rest, ask
for water even at the cost of possible distraction from whatever goal the
name "Maria" has set them on.

And then there is a winding stair, and just as he is about to sit down and
say something to his fleet companion there is a landing, and off the landing
is a doorway, and through the doorway is the room that "Maria" has brought
them to.  The Caretaker stops, and Bob sinks to the ground, breathing hard,
looking with wide eyes around them.

[121]

She has powered up all of the screens in this aisle.  There are at least
four more aisles in the room, two on either side of her (it is a very
large room), and perhaps more banks of screens on the side walls, but she
feels no need for completeness there.  When first powered up each screen
seems to show a static scene from a fixed viewpoint: a set of stairs leading
up, lit by three small chandeliers suspended above; a fountain flowing with
water, and a stone bird perched unmoving on top; a slate-floored courtyard
between two brick buildings with no visible doors.  Dozens, hundreds of
scenes.  

She reaches out and touches a few controls as she walks forward, putting 
screens into what she thinks of as "shuffle mode" or "scan mode", switching
from scene to scene at random, or panning forward through doors or around
corners in some at least superficially logical way.  One screen might be
showing the view as seen by a person running swiftly along a corridor,
another the top of a sea of red roofs as seen by a bird wheeling high
above them in a cloudless sky.

Her interest, though, is now centered on the far wall, where the screens
are larger and brighter.  It feels important, and she has been saving it for
now, like a candybar saved for after school, all the sweeter for the wait.

[122]

The room Bob finds himself in, once he has caught his breath and stretched
the cramps out of his legs and let his heart slow down again, is something
between a temple and a museum.  Not the spare elegant Temple that Anderson
discovered, but a crowded and fragrant one, a shrine, a place where old women
and young boys leave tiny bundles on the altar, and light candles, and sit
for hours with their eyes closed, crying or sleeping or praying.

It is a temple, or a museum, to Maria, and to Maria in all of her forms.
Maria standing looking aloft, posed as in Anderson's temple, and in a
thousand variations of that pose.  It is Maria seated, contemplative,
reading, sewing, kneeling and looking with a heartbreakingly tender face
at something that the sculptor has not captured.

Is this Maria, Mary, the wife and daughter of the Christian God?  Bob looks
among all of the depictions, the sculptures in marble or onyx or plaster
or pewter or plastic, the paintings (oil and acrylic and watercolor), the
drawings and engravings and bas-reliefs, and nowhere does he find Maria with
a babe, or riding a donkey, or bearing a halo.  If this is Mary Maria, mother
of Jesus, it is not in her usual aspect.

The Caretaker stands in the doorway of the room, his, its, shoulders at some
new and no doubt significant angle, saying nothing.  Bob for his part is
overwhelmed at first unable to take in the size of the room, its order, if
indeed it has any order, its structure or form or function.  All that he
can see in that first minute is a jumble of Marias, all facing him (facing
the door) more or less, all lovely.

Then he notices a stairway that goes up one wall of the room, and he
notices the walls, that they are not stone and not damp, and the floor,
which is inlaid wood in an elegant pattern of light and dark.  The air
smells of incense rather than mold or dank, and the light is good, coming
from well-positioned fixtures high in the ceiling.  They are, he feels,
back in the part of the impossible world that the Caretakers tend, rather
than the part where they live (where they chant, where they sing and store
their cans of paint and their hammers).

Looking again over his shoulder at the Caretaker, who is as still an d
silent as ever, he walks between Marias, and goes up the staircase.

[123]

The controls on these large screens are not as straightforward as on the
smaller ones somehow, and it takes Mia some time just to light them, to
persuade them to display.  When she does, however, her efforts are well
rewarded, because these screens are dedicated to scenes in which things
are happening.

On this screen two men in uniform, their backs to the viewer, are walking
down a wide hallway with tables lining either wall.  On this screen someone
is repairing a wall that looks to have been damaged by water, the white
boards browned and sagging.  Here is a long view of a large courtyard,
open to the sky, in which at least a dozen figures are running here and
there, playing a game, or chasing rodents, or exercising.  And here is a
single figure, getting up from a table and turning to face the camera, and
when Mia sees the face in relative close-up, she screams.

No eyes should be that large, that rounded, that simple and shining, with
no iris or cornea, no white.  No nose should be that flat and minute, no
mouth that wide and liples.  Her initial scream fades off into the distances
of the room, unheeded, unheeded even by Mia, who can now only stare in
deepest fascination, looking from screen to screen, wondering, suspecting,
whether every one of these figures is a huge-eyed alien, whether this is
some movie set, some enormous costume party, or some equally enormous
invasion, government cover-up, alien labor camp.

On this screen is a cavern or the bank of an underground river, and a long
line of the aliens walking single file, from somewhere to somewhere.  Here
one person, or one being, lies in a dim place, perhaps asleep.  Here a team
of aliens, in that same uniform, are working some sort of crane and a pulley
system, under the direction of an overseer.  The overseer turns toward the
camera, toward the screen, toward Mia, and she sees that his face is normal,
human, with eyes the usual size, and nose, and mouth.  Not particularly
pleasant, but normal and human.  And she sees also that the faces of those
that he is overseeing are not.

This screen shows a living room with a window overlooking a bay or cove
on the ocean, with gulls wheeling in the middle distance.  Mia wonders if
the camera (if there are cameras) for these screens are responding to
movement, to signs of life.  Every screen (there are two dozen of them)
shows activity of one kind or another, building or repairing or moving or
running.  Although then you have to count sleep (or death, Mia thinks with
a shiver) as an activity.

She puts her hands to the touchpads and dials again, to see what else she
can make these screens do.

[124]

The stairs lead up to a small railed balcony above the room of Marias,
and looking down from it Bob can see that there is order in the apparent
chaos after all.  The Marias in all their tumbled variety are arranged in
concentric semicircles, most of them facing the door where Bob entered and
where the Caretaker still stands, swaying lightly and otherwise still, like
a marionette that needs to be in this scene but has to active role.  Some
of the Marias are turned to face the balcony instead, and a few are half way
between, facing some point between the door and the balcony, visible to
both.

He opens his moutht say something to his companion, the silent Caretaker,
but then has nothing to say.  Looking down at the Marias, he thinks that
while it is clear that they are all the same person, it is not clear just
why that is.  Their faces are not all the same, nor their clothing, their
sizes or shapes, or the artistic styles in which they are captured.  They
are, in fact, quite a variety of images of quite a variety of women.  And
yet they are all Maria.

There is a door in the wall, here on the balcony.  Bob tries the knob, but
it does not turn.  "Locked," he says to himself, and then nearly yells with
surprise to find the Caretaker at his side, a huge set of keys in his, in
its, thin and disturbingly smooth hand, saying "Yes, yes locked," and putting
one of the keys into the keyhole in the knob, and turning it, and opening
the door.

Bob nods to himself, going through the door to find a plain octagonal room
with two bookcases and yet another stairway leading up.  The Caretakers must
have all of the keys, otherwise how would they get to the areas that need
repair?  How many keys are required for an infinite maze of impossible rooms?
Unless it repeats itself (a thought that Bob finds he cannot at the
moment bear) an infinite series of rooms will have an infinite number of
different doors, an infinite subset of which will be locked, and an infinite
set of different keys (even taking master keys into account) will be needed
to open them all.  On the other hand, there is plenty of room for an infinite
number of Caretakers, each with only a finite number of keys, to carry each
individual key eventually where it needs to go.

The bookcases, sampled at random, hold collections of love poems, romantic
novels ancient and modern, classical odes to love and beauty.  Bob feels
almost smothered by the concentration of the theme here, as though he is
approaching some central point of attention, of condensation.  He goes
up the stairs, his hand on the richly polished bannister, spiraling up two
walls of the room, and the feeling grows stronger.

When he opens the door at the top and steps through, he is not surprised
to find himself in the Temple, emerging from a concealed door in an
apparently solid marble wall.  But he is surprised by what he sees, in
and around the archetypal Maria herself, the white marble Maria that ought
to be in the center of the Temple, grounding all the rest.

[125]

Mia has almost convinced herself that some of the controls that she has
do things at the other end, in the scenes that the screens show.  Often
when she does this thing, someone in the scene looks around, as though
trying to find the source of a sound.  (She is used to the huge-eyed
alien faces already, they are just the faces of the people, most of the
people, in the scenes.)  Once when she did this other thing, everyone visible
in the screen rather hurriedly picked up their tools and equipment and
left, in a number of different directions, and the camera shifted to another,
still-occupied, place.

She is reluctant to use that one again, because she does not want to chase
off the people she is studying, and it seems cruel at any rate to do something
that frightens them, or sends them packing in some other way.

This combination lights up most scenes more brightly, but she thinks that
may just be an adjustment to the camera or the video treatment.  This other
combination seems to actually switch lights on and off in the room she is
viewing.  Yet another one causes the ambient light to brighten or dim
somehow, without the lights themselves going on or off.  When she does this,
the people (the aliens, the workers) in the screen sometimes react uneasily,
and sometimes do not seem to notice.

Here is the scene again with the human-faced man and the alien workers.
They have, she sees, rigged up a pair of small cranes, each perhaps ten or
fifteen feet tall, each with a cylinder or a statue of some kind tied with
lots of ropes that lead to the business end of one of the cranes.  One of
the cylinders is white, human-shaped, and Mia thinks that it is a statue
of some kind.  She is just trying to figure out the other one when two
things happen: first, she notices that there are other human-faced figures 
off to one side, a woman sitting limply on a marble bench with two rather
martial-looking men standing to either side; second, a door opens in what
had until then looked to be a blank stone wall, and another human-faced man
emerges and looks around himself with an expression of great surprise.

[126]

Methilde doesn't know if she is sorry or glad when Bob makes his startling
appearance from out of the secret door in the wall.  She is glad to see him,
because he is someone that she knows, as these gruff silent men at attention
around her are not anyone she knows, and as, frighteningly, the feverish
Peter Anderson is not anyone she knows.  Also, he is human, as many, most,
of the forms moving around here are not.

She is sorry to see him here because it almost certainly means that he will
be caught, as she has been caught, in whatever it is that Peter, that this
Anderson, is doing, and he will not be out there, somewhere free to act, in
case she should need someone free and acting on her behalf.  As she suspects
that she may.

When Bob appears and steps forward into the light, looking so surprised,
Anderson barks something to the nearest of the aliens, the workers, the
huge-eyed people, and strides over to him, his hand extended.  Bob looks
around, blinking, at the crowd of aliens, the two cranes, the white marble
statue of Maria, still on its pedestal but tied all about with ropes, the
other crane and its ropes and the squat hulking statue of a giant cat in
brown rock that is tied to it.

He and Anderson exchange words, and then finally finally Bob looks at her,
and their eyes meet, and he says something to Anderson and walks toward her,
shrugging off a hand that the other tries to put on his shoulder, to hold him
back or say some additional thing.

"Methilde!" Bob says as he crosses the space between them, "What are you --"

And then he stops, eyes wide, staring at one of the silent men standing,
hands behind his back and eyes fixed ahead of him, to her left.

[127]

Bob is surprised at the anthill-like activity in the serenity of the Temple,
at the ropes tied around the white marble Maria, at the cranes, the small
horde of Caretakers, and at Anderson striding toward him with his hand out
to shake.  His buoyancy and good-fellowship seem strained, artificial, put
on out of unpleasant necessity.

"Bob, so good of you to show up, I was just going to come looking for --"

"Anderson, you're back; what is all this?"

And Anderson making some easy meaningless remark that is driven completely
out of his head by the sight of Methilde, and the sight of Methilde sitting
dejectedly on a white stone bench, with what look unmistakably like guards
around her.  He moves toward her, ignoring some tug at his arm, and says
her name.

And then is struck speechless, again, by the recognition that the man
closest to Methilde's left is the third man from the basement, the one
who did not know what spackle was, who had taken Bob's map and given it to
the other to be copied, who had so radiated suspicion and fear.

And who Methilde had been so reluctant to encounter.

Bob whirls around, to face Anderson who he has sensed following along after
him.  He begins to speak, although he does not know what he would have said.
But Anderson makes some hand-signal, some jerk of an eyebrow, some subtle
sign to someone behind Bob, and Bob finds himself suddenly and with some
force sitting beside Methilde on the bench, and the four men around them,
including the man from the basement, are holding efficient-looking truncheons
in their hands, and Anderson is scowling at Methilde, and Bob, and the world
in general.

[128]

"It is good that you are here," Anderson says, pacing with his hands behind
his back, now and then gesturing or shouting to the Caretakers that still
swarm over the white Maria and the brown stone cat and the cranes, although
their work seems done for the moment.

"It is good that you are here, because I like you both, and you have both
discovered the rooms in your own ways, and that means something.

"Those of us who discover the rooms are not chosen at random, not merely
whoever happens to turn a knob or lift a ring or push the wrong button in
an elevator.  We are chosen because we are part of what is needed.  Each of
us is part of what is needed."

And here there is some motion to the side, and another rank of stern-looking
men comes into the now-crowded center of the Temple, escorting or surrounding
or holding prisoner three more essentially ordinary-looking people: a woman
with horn-rim glasses wearing khaki shorts and hiking boots, a very young
and bewildered-looking man with a handful of crumpled papers, and a somewhat
stout grey-haired man with a sour expression and a fresh-looking black eye.

Anderson smiles.

"Ah," he says, "I believe we are all here now.  Soon, it can begin."

Elsewhere, Mia is watching the screen raptly, staring at what might be a 
moderately good television program, with no commercials.  She has just 
worked out which controls to turn to get sound, and although it is faint 
she has heard Anderson from the words "what is needed".
 
The grey-haired man starts to say something, but is cuffed on the head from
behind, and groans.  Anderson shakes his head.

"It is going to happen, whatever any of you might think of it.  The Bast
has been supplanted in the Temple by the Maria, and you have seen the
world that resulted.  Now we will undo that supplanting, the Temple will
be Bast's again, and we will see what happens then.  It may be nothing.
But in any case it could hardly be any worse."

Anderson half-turns toward the Caretaker crew, and makes a broad sweeping
gesture with one arm.  The cranes jitter slightly as their mechanisms
begin to turn, and the ropes all start to draw taut.

"I do not know what is going to happen," Anderson says, "No one knows what
will happen when the Maria is taken from her place.  We may not be able to
intervene, we may be in some limbo.  Accordingly, the cranes are programmed,
automatically, so that when I give the signal and the switch is thrown, the
Maria will be removed and swung to the side, and the Bast will be swung over
and set into the dias, without the necessity for any human or Caretaker
intervention.

"Our friends the Caretakers, as you can well imagine, are as eager for change
as I am, and our friends under Captain Farrell here," and Anderson nods at
the man from the basement, who nods grimly back, "are also in agreement.  Now
if we are all ready..."

The grey-haired man mutters an oath, but does not move.  Bob is still off
balance, mind not registering, and Methilde is resigned that the parts of the
metaphor that had to come together are now coming together.  The other two,
the woman in shorts and the young boy, stand in frowning silence.  Mia
licks her lips, and considers what would happen if she used various of the
controls under her fingers on the scene unfolding here.

"So," Andersonn says, and Bob hears in his voice some unbearable tension
mixed with the smugness and the triumph, "let it be done."

And he turns to the workers on the cranes, and waves his arm in a
sweeping arc.

[129]

A thick steel lever moves under the weight of two Caretakers.  Cams rotate,
springs unwind, weights rise and fall.  Gears mesh and pulleys sing, and
movement begins.

(Does Anderson speak the Caretakers' language, Bob wonders with a calm
part of his mind, or does he have some interpreter, or some langauge of
signs, or simply the power of his will?)

A gasoline engine chugs to life, and begins both to reel and lift the ropes
around the white marble Maria, and to raise the weights that will power the
rest of the system after she has been lifted from her base.

Anderson is taking no chances.  It may be that nothing at all will happen
when the graceful white figure is no longer at rest in the center of the
Temple, but every fiber of his intution tells him that something very large
will happen, perhaps large enough that even a gasoline engine cannot be
counted on.

The air in the Temple thickens with tension.  Methilde, caught so soon in the
inevitable friction between her metaphor and Anderson's, between her work and
his underground basement men, between timelessness and the raising of the
statue, feels a heavy inevitability in every hiss of a gear and growl of the
engine.  Bob, his heart pounding as though he had run up miles of stairs,
imagines leaping up, throwing himself against the ropes and pulleys and
chains and gears, gumming up the works to stop whatever is about to occur.
Even as he thinks it, one of the four rough men looks sternly at him and
pats his hip.  Bob thinks he sees some tension even in that hard face, but
he also thinks he may be imagining it.

The Caretakers, having set up the apparatus and set it in motion, are now
backing away from it, crouching low to the ground, some falling to their
bellies and wriggling backward away from it, as if in obeisance or apology.
Anderson is standing very straight, some wind blowing his hair back off of his
forehead, facing now toward the center of the Temple, the cranes, and the
statues.

The young man, still gripping his handful of papers, is crying.

The sound of the gasoline engine reaches a whining high note, and holds it,
and the crane whose ropes are around the Maria groans and strains, and the
statue begins to lift.  And the world changes.

[130]

Mia sits, staring with infinite intentness at the screen.  Several times as
the scene played out, up until that sweeping signal of Anderson's and the
triggering of the apparatus, her hand reached out for the controls, and then
drew back away.  She could have used, was close to using, all of the odd
reachings-out of which the mechanism had shown itself capable, turning things
on or off, dimming or brightening the light, doing whatever it was that made
everyone in the screen leave as quickly as they could.  But she has used none
of them.  Like Bob, she imagines herself intervening, but does nothing.  Like
Methilde, she feels an inevitability in the scene.  Like neither of them, she
is already beginning to remember.

When the world changes, and all meaning comes undone, all perception swallows
itself up in uncertainty and subjectivity, when the solidest stone becomes
fog, Mia reaches out with arms that are no longer there, confidently, and
gathers the mists about herself, as though putting on a familiar cloak for
the first time in a new season.

[131]

When the world changes, and all meaning comes undone, all perception swallows
itself up in uncertainty and subjectivity, when the solidest stone becomes
fog, Bob does nothing.  Methilde, the rough basement men, the Caretakers, the
young man and the stout man, the woman in shorts, all do nothing.  Even
Anderson, who has set this in motion, is lost entirely in the change.  There
is no Anderson, no Methilde, no Bob.  There is only the dias in the center of
the Temple, the two statues, the ropes, the weights, the cams, the chains.

Anderson's design, although there is no longer any Anderson to have designed
it or commissioned it, is a good one.  The sudden hissing failure of the
gasoline engine does not stop, does not even delay, the events that are
unfolding.  The crane bearing the statue of Maria, white marble and grace,
lifts another foot, and swivels, and turns, and begins to lower.  It is only
because the tip of the crane gets too far from the pedestal and crosses a
threshold, a distance that Anderson could not have known the measure of in
advance, that it topples slowly over, and vanishes statue and crane and all
into the mist.

Even that does not stop the remaining mechanism from carrying out its purpose.
The other crane, powered by the falling of weights that were raised in a
former age of the world, swings ponderously, lowering its burden in a precise
arc that ends at the pedestal, where the rough brown figure of Bast, the
cat whose face is snarling or wise or hungry depending on the angle of view,
comes to rest with only a small scrape, only a minor crunch, nothing at all
in the true scale of things.

The world changes again, and the King steps forward with the ritual knife,
its blade gleaming in the torchlight, cuts the symbolic ropes away from the
scared figure of the God, and the ceremony is over for another year.

[132]

Methilde, but no, she shakes her head, her name is not Methilde.  What her
name is will come back to her in a moment.  She is only confused because
of the intensity of the ceremony, the power of the metaphors at play here.
It touches her this way every year, but for some reason this time is has
been more powerful, deeper, more confusing than ever.

In any case, she, who will soon remember her name, rises from her bench and
turns to join the crowd of nobles moving slowly out of this part of the
Temple, her four guards closing behind her, one of the sacred panthers
moving gracefully around her legs.  As the court's only artist, only link to
that particular delicate part of the Godhead, she rates her own guards, but
only four, because art after all does not keep the peace, or keep the walls
in repair, or keep the water flowing.

Far ahead of her, ahead of everyone leaving the Temple down the broad 
walkway, moves the King, standing erect, his head back, on the golden platform
carried on the shoulders of a dozen trained bearers, their walk as smooth
and even as the turning of the Earth under the fixed stars.

The King has no memory of Anderson; the name is no more in his mind than it
is in Methilde's, or the guards', or the sacred panthers'.  But he is filled
with the flush of power, the feeling of triumph and accomplishment, to a
degree that pleases and almost surprises him.  He has reaffirmed his place
in the universe, as the center of it, the center and focus of the contingent
parts of the universe, and the primary connection between those parts and
the eternal and unchanging parts that are those of the God.  The Temple is
the center of both the contingent and the divine universes, and he is the
man that goes to the center of the Temple, and makes steady the course of
time.

Which is, of course, exactly as it should be.

Bob has no memory of Bob, or Methilde, or Anderson, or Maria, or of any
other name.  Panthers, even the sacred black panthers of the court, do not
have much use for names.

[133]

In her tower, the impossible tower that rises above the impossible roofs of
the court and its universe, Maya sits heavily back in her chair, limp and
exhausted, but smiling.  She remembers Mia, as she remembers Maya, as she
remembers past and future together, and cannot always tell them apart.  This
is because she is a sorceress, The Sorceress in fact, her place in the
metaphor being that of the one chaotic challenge to the King's perfect order,
the one spanner in the works, the one exception to every neat picture of the
world.  The universe is divided into the contingent, and the divine.  And
then there is The Sorceress.  The center of the universe is the Temple, and
all things in the universe, in either universe, radiate out neatly from that
center, in thair proper places.  And then there is Maya.

She squints (being neither young nor old, but remembering both) over at her
great crystal ball, which sits in a crab-footed receptacle on her conjuring
table.  Its flickering lights still show the recession from the ceremony of
the God, and she smiles at the walking people, the King borne above their
heads by his bearers, the artist with her handful of guards, the lithe
almost slithering shapes of the sacred panthers slipping in and out around
the legs of the elegantly-moving crowd.  She gestures idly at it, and it
blurs and unblurs again, showing rooms lined with windows through which pour
dense red light, rooms full of clocks, courtyard surrounded on all sides by
facades with doors in the shapes of gaping mouths, a delegation from the
Palearchy, waiting to meet the King after the ceremony and the recession are
over, their great shining eyes and small noses and lipless mouthsh making
their faces into the usual unreadable masks.

Maya shakes her head and wraps her cloak, wool and cotton and the wispy stuff
that stars are made of, cloud and metaphor and linen, around her shoulders.
Then she gestures with her fingers, and her kitchen brings her a drink of
lemon-water.

[134]

The artist dismisses her guards and stretches herself out on a cushioned
stone divan to one side of her work area.  In the center of the area, lit
by the diffuse light the filters down from above, is the work itself, the
work that she has been solely engaged with ever since last year's Temple
ceremony, to the consternation of her supporters at Court, and the silent
amusement of her detractors.

She feels utterly tired, utterly lazy.  She still cannot recall her name,
or the names of most of the Court.  She has no stomach for intrigue, although
her memory tells her that it is one of her favorite pasttimes.  She wants,
at this moment, only to lie here, with the work in one corner of her eye,
watching the light in the space turn gradually darker and redder as the
sun sets outside.

The work, as far as she can tell, is still complete.  She could stand now,
walk to it, stroke her hand over the softly curving lines of wood, and listen
to the thrumming sound, the beats from the beaters and the deep singing
vibrations from the bass, her hand caressing from the wood of the work a
song that is a metaphor for the metaphor, that describes the world without
revealing it, that is in some way the opposite of the Palearch's chants,
which reveal all while saying nothing.  But she does none of this, only
lying on the divan as the light reddens, her eyes half-closed.

One of the sacred black panthers comes in, its fine fur shining even in this
diffuse light, pads over to her, and nuzzles with its noble face at her hand
where it dangles languidly to the floor.  She sighs, and scratches its head
with her fingertips.

[135]

The King is at table, drinking and laughing with this week's favorites at
court.  He has seen the Palearchs, made polite motions at them, observed the
forms, and then foisted them off on his diplomats, his functionaries, because
after all how interesting to a King, to The King, is a party of quiet
inhuman animals in their long plain robes, their love of chanting and wet
stone, their odd obscure poetry.  They have power in the land, he knows,
they have their part to play, but it is so subordinate to his, as everything
contingent is subordinate to him, but even less interesting than most, that
he feels no need to give them much time.

Being King, he reflects at table, is about tearing meat with one's teeth,
about good wine, and comely table-wenches to take to one's bed.  It is about
the ropes, and the knife, and the face of the God, in brown stone in the
Temple at the center of one's empire, and about the people gathered for the
Ceremony.  And there, in the center of all of their gazes, cutting the
rope with the knife, freeing the God to touch the world once more, affirming
their joint rule, their mutual recognition, and the rightness of all things.

Tomorrow he will return to affairs of state, to the granting of audiences,
to the furrowed brows of his advisors, the condition of the Treasury, the
progress of the new walls.  But tonight, when the universe is at its most
stable, he feels that he is King and God in one, and that this is the hub,
the fulcrum, the meeting point of all things, here, on this table, with this
turkey and this wine, these red-haired serving girls, and these logs
burning monumentally in the fire.  Perhaps he will declare a new County,
off amid the rooms of the universe, and make one of them Countess.  Perhaps
he will commission a new mural showing the dependence of the world on the
King.  He smiles and puts his feet up, legs crossed at the ankle, and snaps
his fingers for more wine.

[136]

In her tower, because she is always in her tower, and her tower is wherever
she is, Maya meditates on love, and on ignorance.  On love because, like her,
it is a chaotic force in the world, an exception to all neat rules, a piece
that is always out of place however well the rest of the puzzle fits together.
And on ignorance because ignorance is vital.  She herself depends on the
ignorance of others to maintain her position.  The King's men can never take
her tower, because they can never come to know where it is.  They can never
cut off her sources of supply, because they do not know, because even she
does not know, what those sources are.

She, who knows both the past and the future, both this world and the other,
who draws the stuff of the cosmos about her as a cloak, pays for this
knowing through ignorance herself; ignorance of order, of sequence, of time,
of which of her memories are past and which are future, of who she is and
where she is going.  It is an ignorance that she thinks well worth the
price, an ignorance that in most weathers she enjoys.

Maya wraps blackness about herself, lets it grow into wings, and launches
herself out into the sky, a storm-crow or banshee, a pterodactyl skimming
high over the roofs of the world, over the gold-burnished sky-scraping
towers of the court, out over the humble red roofs of the people, the
hulking rough shapes of the Palearchy stretching off into invisibility to
the East.

Bast is a cat, and a cat is the center of the universe.  Somewhere below her
is the Temple, paradoxically the center of the contingent and the divine
universes, and at the same time only an indifferent speck on the vast
expanse of the world.  Hold the center, and you hold the whole.  Except,
that is, for The Sorceress.

Maya opens her mouth at the thought, and gives a high fierce cry.

[137]

Night.  The sun down, the moon up, with attendant stars.  Maya back in her
tower (though she is, remember, always in her tower), back in front of her
great crystal ball, watching the passing of time.

The artist, still nameless, strokes her hand over the work as she passes it,
and from it comes a rich throaty note of sorrow or exultation.  The light
that filters down here now is moonlight, wan and evocative.  She is hungry,
but she does not go to find, does not summon, food or drink.

She walks out of the work space, out along a dark passage, to the courtyard
where the old tree still grows out of its patch of earth, surrounded by the
shin-high stone edging.  She stands in the door, looking out at the night,
and something moves.

[138]

In her tower, Maya sees the artist standing there, sees the panther moving
gracefully in the shadow of the tree, about to stop out into the moonlight.
It is, because this is the night that it is, and the moon is the moon that
it is, a small thing for her to reach out through her crystal and alter the
moonlight, or alter the metaphor, so that when the panther passes into the
light, it is not a panther but a man.

The man walks forward, in ignorance.  The artist walks forward, not knowing
her name.  When he is close enough to see her face, he says it.

"Maria," he says.  And he takes her hand.