 |
|
|
| |
 |
|
ime moved more strangely now than in all the hours of the house. Until now, I had only been trapped in the timeless eternity of the house, passing through the hallways and past the multitude of doors that led to alien times and places. I had suffered a sense of the plasticity of time and the vague unreality of my surroundings.
But now there was added the perfect blackness of an unknown ocean deep and the monotonous thrumming in my ears of the water. And still I wondered how it was that I could hear so much as that and yet feel nothing—how I had passed through other doors and seen and heard, while yet feeling nothing as though I had no physical body by which to see and hear.
More than that, I wondered whether I was really ascending through the water or whether I remained motionless, only imagining that I moved. I felt as though nothing were real except consciousness. There was only my awareness, the monotonous sound in my ears and the feeling that I passed an eternity.
But then light did appear faintly overhead, and grew with every moment. I saw the wavering of the water against the sky. I almost expected to break the surface of the sea with a noisy splash, as though I were there in the flesh. And I thought there was some sound but very slight. But then I heard the sound of the wind and the ripple of the water, and I supposed it must have been my imagination.
I saw an island in the distance and was curious to know where I was. But I saw the need to act carefully now. I was still lost—doubly lost, in a world beyond the door of an immaterial house. And I saw that to return—to escape—would require that, once and for all, I understand my real situation.
I have already said that my ability to see and hear but not to feel had puzzled me. There was something unnatural, strangely inconsistent about my whole existence. But it was not the first unnatural thing. Even the house itself had not been the first.
In my house in Arlingdale, before I had ever met Thomas Bale, there had been the strange dreams of Bale’s house and the creature within—dreams that had not been mistaken. There was something to my own mind that made me see him and his secret house. And he had seen me. He walked up and down my house, looking not at me but at my mind. He had paid his visit and invited me to his house. And then he had lit that strange incense that had filled the room and closed my eyes to the waking world—a world that now seemed impossible to regain.
I couldn’t guess his motivation in doing away with me, but I had felt it immediately on waking in his phantasmal house. And I remembered the creature that was Bale crouching by me, felt his thoughts, his fear that even in the second world he could not overpower me, heard his attempts to reason me out of suspicion—and saw him run from me into the depths of the house where he disappeared through one of the many doors.
I thought all this and felt a growing suspicion. Bale had made his hidden house, but did he have any power more than I did?
I stood over the waves, staring at the island far off on the horizon, and felt the wind against my face. Another moment and I felt it no more.
Again, I gave myself a greater substantiality and again I felt the air. And with each resurgence of tactile sensation, a sharpness of sound came to my ears and a vividness of sight returned. I felt awake and alive as I had not felt since the first wisp of smoke had risen from Bale’s censer. And yet I remained hovering over the waves as before. With my suspicion rising to uncertainty, I resumed my relative insubstantiality and descended once more into the sea.
I was aware now of the renewed dulling of my senses and the plasticity of time. Once more, the world I passed through seemed faint and dreamlike. But I knew a power unknown before. I wished upon myself a light and saw it shining in the water all around me. I increased its intensity and only the opacity of the water itself kept it from illuminating the contents of the sea from horizon to horizon. But I could see well enough to mark clearly my descent. I passed down as though in free fall. I felt none of what I knew must be the enormous pressure accumulating with the greater volume of water above me. I seemed somehow out of phase with the world while still experiencing it through a veil.
Down and down I went. I did not doubt now that the door was somewhere below me—visible only to me and existing only for me. Only I and Bale could have seen it where it hovered untouched in the sightless water. And I expected momentarily to see it appear below.
But instead of the door, I saw something that made me doubt my confidence. Below me, on one hand, stretched what appeared to be a vast plain, featureless and interrupted. I saw no living creatures of any kind. On the other hand, and directly below me, ran a wide chasm that ran before and behind me to the limit of my sight. No increase in the intensity of my light revealed an end to it or a bottom.
I was later able to guess (although, from the scant details, always unable to verify) that I stood just above the mouth of the Marianas Trench. This black and icy crack in the ocean’s abyssal plain descended as far below the waves as Mt. Everest rose above it. Uninhabitable to all but the smallest and most exotic forms of life, and as near to an uninhabitable Hell of darkness as the earth provides, this was where Bale had meant to keep me forever.
Nevertheless, I continued my descent. I felt a perverse certainty that the door had been placed in the remotest distance of the deep. Still down, I continued in the glow of a light that still showed me nothing but the nearest wall of the chasm—so broad, it might better be called a canyon—receding into the impenetrable distance of the murky water.
I have tried, in the aftermath, to contrast my ascent and descent of the deep. In rising from the door, I had passed into perfect darkness, not knowing where I went or whether I moved at all. In returning, there was no doubt that I was going relentlessly down and that I must sooner or later reach bottom, but I could not be sure that I was going in the right direction. I remembered that every second of compass error magnified the error of actual location with the length of direction. And the orienteering method of striking to the right or left of a destination along a line and then following the line along the correction—that is, bearing to the east of a camp along a river then going west upon reaching the river—was useless to me here since my original location was unknown. I had only a guess, an intuitive sense of where the door actually stood. And if I reached bottom without finding it, it was impossible to think how long I might wander the ocean in search of it.
But then I did see the door. It stood not at the bottom but in a place where, even by my light, no near feature of floor or chasm wall could be seen. In a few moments more, the door was open and I was standing once more in the house.
Several things puzzled me then. I was suspicious of the ease with which I found the door. Also, knowing the enormous pressure exerted at that depth of sea, I wondered how even a half- or quarter-physicality could withstand the pressure of the water in opening it. I had felt the knob of the door in my hand as I turned it, and I should have been crushed in doing so.
During my descent, I had resumed the dulling of senses and plasticity of time that had been my normal condition of the house. But now that I was safe inside, I assumed the concreteness I had known above the waves. And with that clarity, several thoughts came to mind.
My own form and senses were subject to my intent. The house itself seemed molded according to a freakish design. Everywhere during my residence I had seen signs of the physical world mingled with and conformed to a dreaming mentality, like a house built half from the world and half from thought, a semi-palpable hippogriff of mind and matter.
Thinking of it, I willed myself to wake. Seeing that I remained, I beat my fist against the wall to shock my senses into a real environment. The wallpaper and the plaster beneath it cracked and tore away but I remained standing where I stood. I knelt and took a fragment of the plaster, ground it up and watched the dust fall from between my fingers. A sleepy wonder came over me and I felt the loss of that substantiality just attained. Something forced a kind of sleep over me—caused me to be lost in the particles that fell from my hand—and brought with it the dulling plasticity, the interminable twilight, that I associated with the cause of my imprisonment.
Someone, I thought, was in the house with me. And if I slept again and forgot myself, that person or thing might keep me here forever.
I shook myself and rose. If I had no way of understanding or controlling my circumstance, there was at least some possibility of bringing it to an end.
I went downstairs and pulled down several tapestries from the walls. I dragged into the same room books, furniture and other things I knew would burn well. In a few minutes, it was all arranged in a pile and I had several small flames burning along the pile’s circumference. Slowly, while I watched with exultation, pieces of wood caught and started to burn, then glowed and crackled. The flames at the edge put forth branches and joined together, and the whole blaze, as it grew, threw the room into a weird red glow.
I was so absorbed in the sight and sound of the fire, I almost missed the creature as he was slinking through the room. He was edging along the wall of the room behind me. His eyes were full of reflections of the flames and his face was twisted into an expression of unknowable terror. But I saw him moving and turned on him before he could get away. I caught him by the wrist and dragged him to the floor.
I said, “How do you like your house? Will this take care of it, do you think? I’ve been here for a while now and I’ve gotten tired of it, so I thought I’d burn it down. What do you think, Bale? Do you know how long I’ve been here?”
He struggled to get free but it was useless. I had been stronger than he was when I was first imprisoned and now I was wide awake.
“What will happen when the house is consumed? What will happen when the flames burn us? Will we go back to your sun room? Will it be the same afternoon? Will it be a hundred years later? A thousand? While you’re still alive, why don’t you tell me where we are?”
Until now, the creature called Bale had kept its silence. Now it screamed.
“No! The house is out of time! Out of space! But it still burns! Let me go! Let me go! We’ll die here!”
|
|
|
|
