The door opens silently, all the way back, and the Girl, smiling shyly at me and a little shielded by the door, waves me in with an easy sweep of her left hand. The Girl closes the door as I come in to the dim house. Everything is shining and dark, polished wood and metal. The entryway is round and not very wide, with a flight of many low steps rising three or four feet to the level of the hall. The house is perfectly still, as if it and everything in it were one completely solid block. The Girl’s skirts rustle, and the trailing white ribbons of her apron, which stream from both the small of her back and the top of her spine, leave trails of fragrance behind them.

The door closed, she steps in front of me and repeats her gesture, still smiling shyly, and I follow her up the steps. She is indiscriminatably young, with dark hair. Her dress seems unusually sumptuous to me, and I note the large, dark stones dangling from her ears. While cinched very tightly into this dress, and most likely into a corset, her waist moves with athletic elasticity. She flows ahead of me, guiding me to the staircase. The hall is neither deep nor wide, but it is evidently tall—just above the staircase all is pitch dark. The ceiling could be hundreds of feet overhead.

The Girl leads me across the second floor landing and into the wings. Though the house is large, I get the feeling it has no spacious rooms; it’s all narrow halls, closets and chambers. Everything gleams beautifully, not a speck of dust, not a trace of the earwax smell of old mildewed houses, rather an odor like generations of incense smoke molded into wood and brass. The Girl turns and stops me with an outstretched palm and a smile, knocks softly on a door, her shoulder nearly against it and her head leaning in. If there is a reply, I don’t hear it, but the Girl opens the door and gestures me through it.

I step into a small room filled with pale, even light. The ceiling is less than a foot from my head, the walls papered above the wainscotting with faintly violet fronds on an ash background ... potted ferns, a screen, a virginal ... The windows are all on the left, a continuous bank of glass like the wall of a greenhouse. As I turn that way, I see that she sits there at a round table by the windows, a book open in front of her. She only that moment lifts and her eyes.

The dress is the same, or nearly.

I am wafting forward into the room, confusedly aware that the door has been closed quietly behind me, and that I am in the hold of a undertow of light from the windows, which streams past her face toward me.

*

“Have you ever seen a ghost?”