Free House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski Page B

my attitude.
    The call’s for me. Lude’s on a pay phone in the valley with important info. Apparently, there’s some significant doings at some significant club. He tells me he can guest list my boss and any cohorts I deem worthy. Sure, I say, but I’m still shaken and quickly lose hold of the details when I realize I’ve just forgotten something else as well, something very important, which by the time I hang up, no matter how hard I try, I can no longer remember what I’d meant to remember when whatever it was had first entered my head.
    Or had it?
    Maybe it hadn’t entered my head at all. Maybe it had just brushed past me, like someone easing by in a dark room, the face lost in shadow, my thoughts lost in another conversation, though something in her movement or perfume is disturbingly familiar, though how familiar is impossible to tell because by the time I realize she’s someone I should know she’s already gone, deep into the din, beyond the bar, taking with her any chance of recognition. Though she hasn’t left. She’s still there. Embracing shadows.
    Is that it?
    Had I been thinking of a woman?
    I don’t know.
    I hope it doesn’t matter.
    I have a terrifying feeling it does.
     
     
     
    Nevertheless regardless of how extensive his analysis is here, Heidegger still fails to point out that unheimlich when used as an adverb means “dreadfully,” “awfully,” “heaps of,” and “an awful lot of.” Largeness has always been a condition of the weird and unsafe; it is overwhelming, too much or too big. Thus that which is uncanny or unheimlich is neither homey nor protective, nor comforting nor familiar. It is alien, exposed, and unsettling, or in other words, the perfect description of the house on Ash Tree Lane.
    In their absence, the Navidsons’ home had become something else, and while not exactly sinister or even threatening, the change still destroyed any sense of security or well-being.
     
     
     
    Upstairs, in the master bedroom, we discover along with Will and Karen a plain, white door with a glass knob. It does not, however, open into the children’s room but into a space resembling a walk-in closet. However unlike other closets in the house, this one lacks outlets, sockets, switches, shelves, a rod on which to hang things, or even some decorative molding. Instead, the walls are perfectly smooth and almost pure black— ‘almost’ because there is a slightly grey quality to the surface. The space cannot be more than five feet wide and at most four feet long. On the opposite end, a second door, identical to the first one opens up into the children’s bedroom.
    Navidson immediately asks whether or not they overlooked the room. This seems ridiculous at first until one considers how the impact of such an implausible piece of reality could force anyone to question their own perceptions. Karen, however, manages to dig up some photos which clearly show a bedroom wall without a door.
    The next question is whether or not someone could have broken in and in four days constructed the peculiar addition. Improbable, to say the least.
    Their final thought is that someone came in and uncovered it. Just installed two doors. But why? And for that matter, to quote Rilke, Wer ? [ 34—Neatly translated as “Who?” which I happened to find in this poem “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes.” The book’s called The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. 1989. See page 53, Vintage International.]
    Navidson does check the Hi 8s but discovers that the motion sensors were never triggered. Only their exit and re-entrance exists on tape. Virtually a week seamlessly elided, showing us the family as they depart from a house without that strange interior space present only to return a fraction of a second later to find it already in place, almost as if it had been there all along.
     
     
     
    Since the discovery occurred in the evening, the Navidsons’ inquiry must wait until