They knew he was here. They had to know he would not go away. Perhaps they didn’t answer because they knew he would get in one way or another, because they knew they couldn’t keep him out, in which case maybe they wouldn’t even bother to lock the door. He tried it, and it opened.

He stood staring into the foyer, which featured a Tiffany-style chandelier in a wisteria pattern, cascading glass petals in rich shades of blue. Past the foyer, a hallway led to the back of the residence.

No one appeared.

The wind shifted direction, bulleting a barrage of rain against David’s back. He stepped across the threshold.

Drawn by the wind, the door crashed shut behind him.

In any other circumstances, he would have called out, would have asked if anyone was at home. But clearly someone waited here for him and knew that he had ventured inside.

| 88 |

David stepped farther into the foyer and halted when he heard what he first thought were footsteps. Here and on the upper level, the floors were of tightly joined, darkly stained walnut. The rooms featured replicas of antique Persian carpets, but no carpet runners softened the hallways on either level. These steps were heavy and rhythmic. Then he realized they were not footfalls, after all, but instead the low throbbing that he had heard—and felt—rising from the basement on his previous visit. The sound was much louder this time, insistent. And now the electronic hum, woven from several frequencies, swelled in accompaniment.

The air became chilly. His breath plumed in a cold smoke.

He recalled what Richard Mathers reported about his experiences in this place. Mathers believed that he had been face-to-face with someone or something invisible. David knew better. No spirit roamed the hallway; the noise and the cold rose from whatever machinery lay in the cellar.

He also remembered the dream that had afflicted him in the early hours of Tuesday morning, when recollections of real events, buried in his subconscious, had fashioned a nightmare of timepieces that had run out of time, of clockless rooms, of driving his Porsche into a void, with its digital clock blinking zeroes. He looked now at his wristwatch and saw that the second hand—and surely the other two as well—was frozen, as if there might be no future in this place, only this one moment, eternal.

And yet time passed here. If time were frozen, he would not be able to move, and all within these walls would lie in stasis.

Down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. Day by day, a sea of weirdness had washed through his life, and now it seemed that a high tide of unreason might sweep him away.