THE DOOR · OPEN

You are at the door.

The door is open. You do not remember opening it.

Beyond the door: steps. Stone. Going down. The light below is not artificial — there are no fixtures, no bulbs, nothing that explains why you can see. But you can see. The steps are dry. There are fourteen of them. You counted them the first time. You will count them again on the way back, and get a different number.

"I had been building up to this for three years. The greenhouse door. The staircase I could see through the glass. The fountain water that tasted like memory. I thought I was investigating something. I was not investigating anything. I was being invited." — C. Jiang, written at the top of the stairs, 2022-02-14

AIR TEMPERATURE AT THRESHOLD: measurably colder below. approximately 4°C. exact measurement uncertain — thermometer behaved oddly near the bottom step.

The walls of the staircase are stone. They are older than the house. Older, possibly, than anything above them. There are marks on the walls. At first they look like scratches. They are not scratches. They are characters in a script that has not yet been identified. They are also, somehow, familiar — as if you have read them before, in another language, and have forgotten the translation.

At the bottom of the stairs: a corridor.

→ DESCEND