At this Carmen moans, whispering harshly, pleading with him, going up with him a step, trying to stop him, but he still reaches it despite her pulling on one of his hands. He no longer thinks this is an illusion. A terrible curiosity has overtaken him, a monomaniacal drive to witness what waits on the other side, the inexplicable source of the noise. What is it? A tunnel to everywhere? A carpet of stars? A minotaur slavering to chase them down and root around their corpses in some shadowed corridor of the building? Perhaps nothing at all, an empty roof just how they left it, or really nothing, a silent void of it like the null set had pushed up against physicality, a bauble of the blackest black pushing out . . . or perhaps a great probing unblinking eye surrounded by a wall of white rubbery flesh that fills the entire doorframe. He must know! He must open the door. Beyond will be a new Babel. A last and perfect language, syllables made from the sound of Bruno’s flesh reknitting, unburning. Beyond is Descartes waking from a science-fiction dream of a glittering city in a new world, a new Amsterdam, amid the monoliths of which some rough beast is slouching toward birth . . . Kierk knows that he must not open the door . . . must abort this creature clawing its way out from somewhere unthinkable—yet I am going to open it. For behind it there is the thing itself, the answer, Carmen, I am so sorry for this—the deafening knock comes a fourth time, even louder, and faster, a growing impatience. Carmen jumps at each individual sound which go off like rapid gunshots. The light she’s holding is violently shaking as she’s still silently tugging at Kierk’s shirt as his mind ricochets between possibilities—I am not going to open the door. I cannot open the door. If I do it will eat us up. Consume us. I must not open the door. It will dig open our insides and spread them around the stairwell but before it jellies my eyes I will see its face and I will know. I must open the door. Just so I can know. I am going to open the door, to see what it is behind, I will embrace it even as it eats me even as it blinds me . . .

He wants to open it because he wants to finally wake up, for the first time in history.