Deeply Odd(32)
Some days I wonder about my sanity. A good cheeseburger usually restores my confidence. If that doesn’t work, I watch an episode of some reality-TV show like The Real Housewives of Wherever, and by comparison with the stars of the program, I feel as solid as a blacksmith’s anvil.
The stairwell seemed unnaturally clean. In the becalmed air and the cold light, no dust motes drifted in suspension. Not one tattered strand of spider silk waited for a draft to flutter. No desiccated flies or shriveled moths or single scrap of lint littered the stairs.
No cracks or water stains marred the surrounding concrete. Stepping across the threshold, onto the bottom landing, I felt that I must be somewhere outside of time, the only living creature in a place to which even the spirits of the lingering dead never ventured.
Warily, I climbed the stairs.
Eleven
HALFWAY TOWARD THE MIDFLOOR LANDING, I WAS overcome once more by the perception that these concrete walls were not concrete at all, but were instead the idea of concrete, a thought that first occurred to me back at Star Truck, when Shower 5 in the real world abruptly became Shower 5 Elsewhere. I didn’t know what I meant by that, but my suspicion was evoked by the continuity of color and texture: an unvarying gray without the smallest stain, without a single line or trace of wood grain from the lumber forms into which the concrete would have been poured, no surface voids or exposed aggregate.
When I slid my left hand along the inner wall, the surface felt at first like concrete, but then like fiberboard with a high-gloss finish, although to my lying eyes it remained curiously perfect concrete. When I put my right hand to the outer wall, my questing fingers slid across bricks and recessed mortar joints that I could not see, although a moment later the texture of a smooth concrete surface returned.
I didn’t know what to make of all this, except that my reality and Elsewhere seemed to occupy the same space at the same time. In Elsewhere, my world floated just below the surface of things; and in my world, Elsewhere was submerged and waiting. Whether this was true everywhere that I might go or only in some locations, I could not know for sure, but I suspected that the two realities intersected only rarely, as in some rooms of Star Truck and in this abandoned industrial building.
Wherever and whatever Elsewhere might be, I didn’t think that it was a world like ours, that it was either peopled by different versions of ourselves or by another race entirely. The cowboy trucker had parked his rig here, leaving the keys in the ignition, because he knew that in Elsewhere it would remain undiscovered and safe, which suggested that Elsewhere was a dead zone of sorts, populated neither by anyone nor anything.
The midfloor landing had no windows. I paused to listen but heard nothing other than my stomach grumbling about not yet having received the cheese meatloaf, steak fries, and coleslaw that I had all but sworn an oath to consume back at the truck stop. I continued upward and, at the top of the second flight, I came to a landing door on my right, with more stairs on my left leading to the third floor.
I didn’t need to seek the highest vantage point. Any second-floor window would satisfy my curiosity about the untimely darkness that seemed to lie beyond these walls.
In my world, this building was perhaps eighty years old, dirty and battered and unoccupied if not even abandoned; it had not in any recent decade been refurbished. Judging by the design and the details of its construction, the metal door on the landing was as old as the building. It should have been scratched and dimpled, as no doubt it was in my reality, though here it appeared to be as unmarked as it was on the day it had been installed.
The immaculate condition of the door seemed not just improbable but impossible. And when I concentrated closely and entirely upon it, searching its smooth surface for a sign of wear, I was more than half persuaded that it was merely the drawn image of a door, like that in a clever trompe l’oeil painting or on the backdrop of a cunningly designed stage setting, convincing not because of elaborate detail but because the artist’s use of perspective and light was masterful.
Nevertheless, the knob felt solid in my grasp, and it turned without resistance. The knuckles of the barrel hinges revolved soundlessly around the pivot pins, and the door opened as smoothly as one liquid flowing into another, so that I could almost believe that I was adventuring in my sleep.
Beyond lay a hallway. The ceiling, walls, and floor were as uniformly gray and smooth as in the garage and stairwell. Overhead hung the usual crude lamps. When I stared hard at the nearest one, it produced less light, not because the bulb dimmed but because the bulb, the shade, and the chain all seemed to diminish in substance when studied intently, as if sufficient scrutiny might in time cause them to disappear altogether. I didn’t test that hypothesis because I didn’t want to be left whimpering in the dark.