Open the door, Sam.

I’ve left them outside and come up here alone to the end of the third-floor hallway, unable to put it off any longer, but unable, either, to do it. The closer I draw to the door down that cramped and narrow hall, the more terrible it seems. Standing here now, I am hardly able to lift the key, it is so heavy, and I cannot help but feel that something is simply wrong with this place, this room, this suffocating windowless hallway.

It is a door that should not be opened. What if it is meant to stay shut?

Shivering, I slide the key into the lock, and it clicks into place.

Open the door, Sam.

All right. I open the door.

9

The door opens.

The air smells like it has been shut up for a long time, like the breath of an ancient desiccated corpse. When I step inside, spider webs creep down and cling to my skin like sticky whispers, invisible in the fragile light from the hallway, which offers only enough for me to know if I might bump into one of the brooding funereal shapes that inhabit the room.

It is only a room, I think to myself. Only a room that has been closed off for a very long time, like the abandoned wing of a hospital or a shuttered factory. There is nothing inherently bad about the room but that we have made it so, by locking it up for so long. This is what I tell myself, even with my heart in my throat and the subconscious hint, from which I deliberately turn away, that there is something else to this place, that it is more than just a room, that what I see is not necessarily what is there.

If there ever was a light in here, I do not know how to find it, and it’s unlikely still to work, so I feel my way across the darkness, my arms outstretched as far as they can extend, until I find the window and pull aside its heavy drapery.

Now the daylight can have its way with this place.

The tall, narrow window is so dusty that it lends a grayish quality to the sunlight.

In that light the color of winter, I can see the room now. The shapes are of roughhewn furniture, including a set of drawers and a table coated with dust. The ceiling here is unfinished; wooden beams crisscross overhead, spinning shadows for the spiders. Here and there the floor sags, made soft by rot; I see holes in the decayed wood; a dusty, cracked mirror sits along the back wall; a confetti of broken plaster gathers on the floor around a tattered old armchair, exposing the uneven slats of lath where the wallpaper has peeled away; and even along the rest of the walls, the ancient florid wallpaper of an infinitely repeating pattern clings barely, hangs down in yellowing strips.

Yet none of this truly conveys what the room is, how it feels when you step through the threshold. These details tell you of dust mites and neglect, but they do not explain the goose bumps chasing each other across my arms, or the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, or the almost dizzying, magnetic impression of the air, charged not with electricity but some older, primal force, some undeniable strangeness that makes one’s head feel thick and fuzzy.