A Map With No Exit
Every door leads onward and back to the first; the house circles endlessly.
Merrin could not say, afterward, at what precise moment he stepped into his own drawing.
One instant he stood at his desk; the next, he stood in a cold, papered hallway.
The corridor was exactly as his pen had made it, down to the seventh door.
He walked forward, because forward is what corridors are for, and opened the nearest door.
Behind it lay a kitchen, with a cold hearth and a child's chalk mark on the tile.
He crossed the kitchen and opened its far door, expecting a way out, or at least onward.
Behind it lay the same hallway, with the same seven doors, waiting in the same grey light.
If he turned left, he arrived where turning right had, only minutes before, already delivered him.
If he climbed the stairs, he descended; if he descended, he found himself climbing once more.
Were he to run, he sensed, the house would simply lengthen the corridor to match his speed.
Were he to stop, the walls would wait, endlessly patient, for him to begin again.
Every door was an , and no door, however he approached it, was ever an exit.
He returned to the first room, then left it, then returned to it, then left it again.
The house repeated itself the way a frightened mind repeats a single, , unanswerable thought.
He began to mark the doors with chalk, hoping to a path he had not retravelled.
But each mark he made appeared, already drawn, on the very next door he reached.
The chalk in his hand was the child's chalk, and the marks were older than his fear.
He understood that he was not lost inside the house so much as inside its remembering.
A memory has no exit; one may only arrive, and arrive, and arrive at its centre.
The corridors did not lead outward because the house had no outward left to offer.
Everything beyond its walls had been demolished, and only the inside had survived, folding endlessly inward.
Had there been a window, he might have measured his against the turning of the sky.
But the windows opened onto other rooms, and those rooms opened, at last, onto the first.
He sat on the cold floor of the kitchen and listened to the house breathe around him.
It breathed slowly, the way the sleeping do, or the way the patient dead are said to.
Somewhere at the centre of all this , he knew, one final room was waiting.
And from that centre, faint and , a voice began, at last, to call his name.