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ven as the flames spread, creeping up the walls and glowing from our faces, I held Bale in my grasp and would not let him go. He struggled, screamed, shouted incoherencies, and still the fire burned on, consuming the house that consumed so much of me and shutting with destruction the innumerable doors to so many alien places and times.
And when he saw that there was no help for him but in confession, he gave me a stammering explanation, which I took and verified as much from his mind as any other source and which, now that all is done, I have no reason to doubt.
Bale’s age was unclear both from his jabbering, panicked talk and from the confused morass of his memories, but there was no doubt that he was old, far older than the town he lived in. Mixed in with familiar sites were scenes of generations past and from undoubted antiquity—faces, places, words seen and heard no longer but belonging to the oblivion of history. Yet how much of that belonged precisely to Bale’s past and how much to innumerable forays through the many doors of the phantasmal house was impossible to say.
The only unequivocal truths were his possession of a strange power and his recognition of the same power in me.
The creation of the house came to him, he said, in a dream. It was an ancient wanderer who found him (dreaming) in the woods and showed him the way. The old man, paler than any winter sky, of leathery skin and somehow translucent eyes, showed him a tree, his likeness in all respects—hoary, cragged and unreal. Bale saw the trunk, the branches, the subordinate limbs with all their variegations, reaching forth into the sky in everlasting subdivisions. And the old man showed him the roots, reached down with his white right hand and lifted the earth to show him. There again were the branches, subdividing, varying, growing smaller. And the old man put his finger to the taproot, and smiled inscrutably.
Bale awoke cold and filmed with sweat but furiously grasping after the fragments of the dream. He had a power, it was true. From his infancy, he had known the thoughts of men—had been able to divine their secret purposes, fears and desires. Yet it had been a trouble to him and nothing more.
But here was something new. It was something, he remembered, about branches like that of everlasting corridors, like the involute windings of an infinite mansion—and it was somehow related to time.
Thus he began, little by little, the construction of his house. This dream to him, and hell to me, held its place night after night as with unseen hands Bale constructed the floors, walls and ceilings—stocked it with necessities from the store of his imagination’s strange power, supplying now by his thoughts where he had once only stolen from others’. Yet there remained to fit even the first door, and this was a work he saved for last.
He at last framed the first door, chose carefully its dimensions, fitted it in place and opened it. But he was puzzled to find that it concealed nothing but a bare wall. So for many days, the house remained unfinished and the mystery was unfulfilled. It puzzled him. He was sure that the old man had given him all the necessary instructions. In the curious smile and gestures of the wanderer, there had surely been nothing left out. He felt that it was so, and the half-invisible eye of his teacher had reassured him of the fact. But then—what was lacking?
There was perhaps something in the likeness of the tree to the wanderer. The old man had been very pale—and the tree, in its stem and all its leafless limbs, had been of an almost perfect whiteness. And the craggy line of bark and withered cheek had been of precisely the same quality, so much that they seemed carved by the same hand from the same original and inchoate material.
It was a strange hour when he held his hand before the blind door and compared his flesh to the flesh of his creation. He saw how unlike they were and smiled faintly (much as did the wanderer) to think that, for likeness, they had better be made from the same material. And so he took by his mind a knife—as he had taken the lamps of the winding hallways and the innumerable books of the library—and cut from himself a portion of his flesh. Then he remade the door, refashioned it from his own body, and opened it once more.
There was nothing there. But the nothingness was not now that of the blind wall. It was the nothingness of a roiling and limitless expanse, a wilderness of space more chaotic and directionless than the abyss of stars. He looked long through the door and puzzled over it as he had over the blankness before.
There came unbidden to his thoughts an image of the future, of the home he had known so many years after a generation’s lapse and transformation. And with that thought, the chaotic nothingness took shape before him, coalesced and defined itself until it assumed a solid familiarity. Bale smiled, and for the first time set foot across the threshold of space and time.
His explanation to me didn’t enclose all his years of wandering, thieving, murdering—of putting on times and physicality like a garment. What I saw of those things came directly from his mind—came in fleeting glimpses as he spoke and as I slowly realized the circumstance that connected us. I saw broken episodes of a city overrun, its palace invaded and inhabitants slaughtered—and knew only by the unmistakable dome of Sancta Sophia that I looked on the sack of Constantinople. I saw too dirty men in dirty uniforms amidst drifting black smoke, their bodies littering the ground amid the trees—and I knew I saw with living eyes some nameless hours of the endlessly bloody Civil War. I saw these and less comprehensible things—streets filled with ashes—a cramped square tunnel, lit only by torchlight, sloping interminably into darkness—a blood-sacrifice on a ziggurat by twilight—a pyramid of skulls—a blood-red moon—and a bright, midday sky turned black as midnight while the air was filled with the sound of rending.
But what I saw more than all was the degeneration of Bale. His physical form remained unchanged. But his soul wasted with every door he made. His face and limbs twisted out of resemblance to humanity. Even as he survived by an untold age the generation of his birth, he lessened in secret and became something monstrous.
And I was a trouble to him. The same power that had made the house was latent within me. It had come to his notice on the first day of my arrival, creating distortions in the house, obscuring doors or blocking them entirely. And his dreams were uneasy, as though the life and power of my mind gave a too-lucid reawakening to his own and reminded him horribly of the past, of the natural life that he had never lived. I was an obstacle and a torment to him, and I became intolerable.
The only question that remained to him was that of disposal. He was pleased to stay where he was, working in silence and peace. No one bothered him. It was altogether better, he thought, to murder me where I could not be found.
He invited to visit, brought me into the sun room with the lulling fumes of the incense that put us both to sleep. But when I awoke, I saw him for what he was, and he saw that I was too powerful to destroy. He escaped from me and I was left behind.
Then came the bitter stalemate between us. I could not escape to the world that was my life, and he remained shut out from the house that was his soul. He was forced to become my jailer, and I remained an unknowing threat, drifting half-aware through the somnolent hours of unphysical reality. And meanwhile—what had become of my body?
Now that he was in my hands, I forced him to answer. What might have been the result if he had refused—if we had remained to be consumed in the fire of the house—is to me an unanswerable question. But in his terror, he showed me the way.
He led me to a door. I opened it and saw that it disclosed the sun room. It was nearly as I remembered it, but now empty and the incense hung only faintly in the air. I dragged him inside.
We awoke. How it happened—how the laws of the house operated to restore us to our places—I had no way of knowing. But as though all the long weeks or months had been nothing, we now sat in our chairs as we had on the day of my visit, in precisely our former spots, awakening from the deepest of sleeps. There was no sign of the door by which we had entered. My head was heavy and I felt sluggish. I barely moved. And meanwhile I saw Bale recovering himself, now possessed of his full stature, in the flesh of the world and climbing slowly from his chair.
I could only watch as he staggered from the room. I wondered faintly where he was going but I was still fighting off the influence of the fumes and could do little more than move my hands and arms where I sat, trying to restore feeling and power to limbs that felt like stone. I heard him moving, his feet pounding unevenly across the floor as he made his way through the house. Then the noise of his footsteps ceased and I heard a rattling and a clatter of steel.
I had by now raised my head from the table and was weakly striking my legs with my fists in the hope of restoring their feeling and motion. I braced myself on the chair and tried to raise myself. As I did so, I heard him returning, his steps more even now, while his throat uttered a low, eager, inarticulate noise.
Near where I sat, on a table in the corner, there lay the bowl that held the ashen remnants of the incense. Whatever had burned there, it was almost entirely consumed. But the ashes remained. And now, as the footsteps came near the door, I clutched at the bowl and carefully held it to me as I turned back to the table and waited for Bale.
I heard him come in—heard his feet on the threshold—and I saw in the window of the sun room, now black with night, the reflection of the butcher knife in his hand. I turned and flung the ashes in his face. He was blinded, but still came on and cleaved the air with the blade, trying to strike me even in his blindness. He opened his eyes wide and blinked. With all my might, I pushed away from the chair, caught at him and we tumbled to the floor.
For an interminable time, we struggled. And when he could see again, I thought he would kill me. But with each passing moment, the feeling returned to my legs and arms. My fingers crawled up his face, found his eyes and pressed deep in the sockets. He screamed—but there was none to hear his screams any more than there would have been to see me murdered. It was night and we were alone.
He still struggled, and with a ferocity and desperation borne of horror—the horror of so much time passed and so much that might still be his to come—the horror of blindness in one who had seen all—and the horror of death in one who had nearly thought to outlive the world.
He fell, the blade of the knife fastened in his own gut. He bled and choked like any ordinary man. And he was still.
It took me some time to find the incense and be sure of it. But in a few minutes more—after dragging the body out of sight and covering up the blood—the incense filled the room. As before, I felt a creeping stupefaction and a drowsiness before falling into darkness. And when I again saw, I looked on the furious blazes of the house.
It was burning, but not consumed. No time at all seemed to have passed since my absence, and I required very little time for what I meant to do.
Now that I knew the way, I made a door of my own. I took from my flesh and gave it to the dying house. I opened the door—and looked through into the past—into the house where I had lived before I came to Arlingdale and met Bale. I saw by its appearance that the time was right. It was years ago. I stepped through, and awoke. |
Strange to say, the day I went to Arlingdale has not yet arrived. But when it does arrive, I will stay where I am or move to some other town—but not to Arlingdale.
It is not bad memories that keep me from the place. I might go and live there as happily as before. But I have reason to avoid it, since I could not let Bale live.
This may not be understood.
I awoke—in my old home far from Bale and years before our meeting. But I remembered him—and built a house of my own. Time was no object. Bale never knew I was coming.
I used a butcher knife, just as he had intended, and found him lying awake in his bed. And when it was done, no weapon remained and no discoverable motive. There was only Bale, dead among the bloody sheets, his face locked into an expression of the most perfect surprise—surprise, because I came with a knife, because I was a stranger, and because I came from nothingness.
As for me, I went back the way I came and never returned. All the time I lost is restored to me now. All the months of imprisonment are only memories of time I have not lived. And the secret house I made is a place I never visit. It is a house with only one door, which always remains shut—which covers my only victim, and leads to a house that hides a house of a thousand doors, which is burning. |
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