Past the door which had grown on the back wall was a narrow hallway. The floor was rough, like pumice, and my socks snagged as I slid across it. I considered turning around and leaving them in the bathroom before I went on, but when I turned, the distant sight of the mirror and the dull glow filling the room made me nauseous. I pulled my socks off and held them in one hand, tracing the other against the wall to steady myself.
After about ten minutes’ walk, the hallway widened abruptly into open air. I was in a massive cavern, lit from above by bright, reddish light, its walls flecked with glittering patches of mica or quartz. The floor was gently sloped, like a crater bowl, a mile across at least. The alarm from the house behind me was still audible. It reverberated off the walls now, a low and bone-shaking hum like some alien pipe organ or an ancient warhorn.
A queue of human figures spread across the cavern, curling back on itself endlessly like a looping stretch of twine. There were more people there than I’d ever seen at once—thousands of them; millions, perhaps. I couldn’t make out where the queue began or ended, but it was evidently moving, because every few seconds, a ripple would pass through it as someone took a step forward, and those behind them took a step forward, and so on perpetually in a shimmering, always-moving tangle. The sound of cloth rubbing against itself rose each time the line stepped forward, which mingled with the roar of the alarm with a sort of crowded flapping like a flock of bats.
I approached the queue and got the attention of the person nearest me, a tall man holding a pair of huge poles who swung himself forward on them each time the line moved.
“What’s this?” I asked, not knowing what else to open with.
“Supplicants,” he said. His voice was quiet and flat, but it seemed to come from under my skin, the way a bass speaker rattles your whole body when you stand in front of it.
“Supplicants for what?”
“Here to see the oracle.” He narrowed his eyes, propped one of his poles against himself, and scratched at the grainy stubble on his chin. “Back to the back of the line if you’re new.”
I moved in the direction he’d indicated. Further up the line, someone caught my sleeve and shook it, a tiny woman with wiry, badly-bleached hair and an expression of grief.
“You,” she said, “you remind me of my son!” She clasped her hands, unclasped them, rubbed them against her forehead, and blinked rapidly. “I had a son once, like you. Trying to find him. Went off, like all of ‘em do!”
There was a foolish, singsongy lilt to her voice. I smiled weakly and passed on. I was a little at a loss. As I went along the queue, I set myself to thinking.
The ease with which I’d taken to this warped reality frightened me a little, but there was a cohesiveness and stability to the scenario that seemed to reject the obvious explanation—that it was a dream, that what I saw was false, that I’d leave it soon. And even if it were a dream, it had been both extraordinarily lucid and (to put it frankly) not very good, so either way, I might as well make the best of what I had. All or nothing: there wasn’t a practical alternative.
Two sharp claps rang out behind me. I turned with a start.
Some five hundred feet or so away, a woman was waving at me, threading her way through the queue at a fast and determined walk.
“Hello, hello,” she said, when she’d gotten closer. “You’re Garland, aren’t you? You’re holding socks.” This last part she said with an intense glare at the anklets I was clutching in my hand and a several-second long pause. Then she looked back up and continued. “Are you Garland? I’m Skinner Foster. You know me.”
“Yes,” I said, to the first part of what she’d said. Then: “No.”
“Which is it?”
“To which question?” I asked.
“I only asked one.”
“Then yes to that,” I said. “I think.”
“Excellent. I have some concerns. Let’s walk.”
She struck off alongside the queue as though it were the walls of a maze. I struggled to keep up. The rock was uncomfortable under my bare feet.
“Hold on,” I said. It registered that she’d introduced herself as Skinner Foster: the character in my story that morning—the fictional character in my story that morning. Of anything I’d expected through the already sanity-straining door that had opened in my bathroom, this was near the bottom of the list. “Is this—real?” I asked.
Foster looked over her shoulder at me, not slowing. “What else would it be?”
“I don’t know. A dream?”
“Do you mean to ask if you’ll wake up? Probably. But it’s the same thing when you wake up. I bet you already have. Multiple times, maybe. I’ve got an idea about that; you’ll have to ask me later. The point is you’re assuming ‘will I wake up’ and ‘is this real’ to have different answers. That’s stupid—“
She stopped. The cadence of her voice sounded as though she were about to go on, but she didn’t, and the silence afterward went on a touch too long before I realized the ball was in my court.
It struck me that she’d called me stupid.
“I’m going off what I know,” I said, following her in edging sideways between two opposite-going strands of the queue like a waiter squeezing behind a chair. “I feel like that’s normal.”
“What does that have to do with literally anything?” she said. “You’re perfectly normal. Of course you are. Completely conventional.”
“Then why the fuck’s all this happening?” I asked. I was getting both winded from the terrific pace Foster was setting as we weaved between the people and annoyed from her absent-mindedly insulting air. I felt foolish holding my socks in my hands, too, so I stuffed them into a pocket with rather more force than I needed to. A bit of fuzz came away in my hand. I stuffed it in after the socks.
“That’s what I was going to ask you. Could you tell me a little about this room? Is this something you do these days? Tell me about the oracle.”
We had arrived at the side of the plateau, and she stopped short and surveyed the line.
“As far as I can tell, the oracle’s that way, right? And people are coming in from there.” She punctuated her sentences by pointing rapidly across the cavern. “It’s a religious thing, isn’t it? And you’re Garland, and”—she blinked. “You’re writing about me. Not at this exact moment. But in general. Right?—And quickly, if you don’t mind. This is my first time meeting you for real. I’m honored.”
It was dizzying.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, growing more frustrated by the second.
“Why?” she asked. “And when?”
“‘Why’ and ‘when’?” I said. I couldn’t tell whether she was being intentionally obtuse or just baiting me or both. “What does ‘why’ and ‘when’ have to do with anything? Your words are nonsensical. You’re using nonsense words.” It sounded cleverer and more insulting in my head than out loud, but I managed to stop with the same abruptness she’d used on me before, so I fancied that I’d stuck the landing at least.
She studied me. “I can’t tell whether you’re angry or not. Or why. You’re not a very nice person, are you, Garland? I was just asking you about the room, that’s all.” She gestured broadly at the cavern. “We can take a few steps back if you want. Figuratively I mean. To catch up.”
“I don’t need to catch up with shit,” I muttered. “And why would I know anything about the room?” I was filled with a complex sense of resentment. It wasn’t for her insults or her condescension—though both were grating enough—but for the fact that she was mine on the bottom level: my fictional creation, my brainchild. But this version of her seemed, through some quirk of my subconscious, to be moving off the path I’d imagined for her—the pages’ worth of detailed material I’d been churning over in my mind to be taken down on paper later. It was a bizarre revolt of my own mind that she should behave this way, I thought, and so my frustration boiled at both Foster herself and, in part, at me.
The feeling wasn’t, it should go without saying, arrogance: it was artistry, craftsmanship, the anger of a professor at a book-burning.
“Why wouldn’t you know about the room?” she asked. “It’s your room.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Are you or are you not writing about me? Skinner Foster? The moon trip?”
“It’s not the moon,” I said obstinately. “It’s the thing behind the moon.”
“That’s what I meant,” she said. I was about to shoot back “but that’s not what you said,” but she continued: “If you’re Garland and we’re here, then it’s your room. Full stop.” She broke off and set off along the wall of the cavern again. “Let me put it this way: your typewriter. It has the little”—she waggled her hand like someone miming playing the piano—“fingers, right?”
“Typebars,” I corrected her.
“Does it have them?”
“Yes.”
“Noted. Now imagine you take a step to the left, and boom, now the fingers—typebars—are graphite instead of metal, so now your typewriter is a…typepencil, for lack of a better word. Take a step to the right and it’s metal again. Now if I forcibly moved you a step to the left and you didn’t notice—“
“Why wouldn’t I notice?” I interrupted.
“Maybe you’ve shut your eyes to feel superior,” she said severely. “Regardless, if it happened in an instant it’d seem to you like your typewriter had turned into a typepencil. But you’re really just using it somewhere else. The typewriter was both of them all along.”
“So whichever version I’m using would be an illusion,” I said.
“Nope. Same typewriter. Same typepencil. Same thing.”
“But it’s not.”
She pointed at me like a teacher singling out a student for praise. “Now you’ve got it,” she said, beaming triumphantly.
We came suddenly to a door in the side of the cavern, a bewilderingly normal one, plain scuffed ivory with a loose black knob. “Look here,” Foster said. She knocked at it once and swung it open.
The door opened into Calf’s bedroom, or it looked that way. I’d only been in the room once before. The layout was like my own, with the addition of a wicker vanity against the back wall, a black tape deck on top of it, and a scuffed steel barstool like the ones at Kip’s downtown in front of that.
The light from the cavern fanned across the floor like a spill of blood. My head started aching again as I tried to piece together the geometry of the layout I’d travelled through. Foster stepped into the room and motioned for me to follow. The door shut behind us.
I shivered as the chilliness of the air registered. I was still in the thin shirt I’d put on for the Executors earlier, and now I was sockless. I yawned a couple of times, seized with drowsiness.
“Sleepy?” Foster said, eyeing me.
“No,” I said. It couldn’t have been much later than noon, but I felt as though I’d been awake for three or four days. I was down to the dregs of my strength.
“I’ve got an idea about that. Ask me later. What time is it?” She reopened the door we’d just come in through to reveal not the cavern but the house’s hallway, and set off down it with a determined stride. I followed her. Stepping down into the parlor—there was a step-down of about eight inches—she craned her neck and looked up at the wall clock. “Six and a half? No. It’s stopped. It wasn’t, last time I was here. Do you have a watch?”
“There’s one in my room,” I said wearily.
“A clock in your room. Of course. To your room, then. I usually get here around noon. Let’s see how I did.”
Something clattered behind us. I turned to see Calf round the corner of the kitchen door, holding a bowl and looking the worse for wear. She was dressed now but clearly still suffering the migraine she’d announced that morning.
She stopped as she saw us and pointed at me with a spoon. “First, Garland,” she said, “you forgot your eggs on the stove, so I ate them. I’ve warned you a billion times and I’m not sorry.” She directed the spoon at Foster. “Second, who’s this, and why’s she in the house?”