Just past the short, brushed shaft he had uncovered behind the wall there, the father found another house. An exact copy of their own house—a copy kitchen, den and bedrooms, and so on. The replica connected in mirror to the air where during the day they ate and night they slept. The copy house had the same furniture and junk as the other—same pictures, carpet patterns, rub marks, dishes in the sink—though here their personal adornments, family items had turned a smoke-licked shade of black. Black bulbs, black quilts, black clothing—black food cartons, utensils, mail. Only the doors, floors, and walls—the body of the house itself—remained the same as in the other, if made paler by their darker contents in relief.
As well there were no windows in the walls where to look out onto a light. In locations where in the first house there had been a glass pane, instead the house appeared fully sealed. There were no keyholes in the doors or ways to peep through. No vents or holes beyond the way the father had ripped in. The black clocks all read a certain number. Each black bowl or black glass left out had been turned over upside down, holding its air.
The table in the dining room was shorter, stacked with clean plates, finger bowls. A square black cake—oblong, like an office building. The father touched the icing. Smoke rose in sigh, and stunk. The father tried to wipe the icing off. A tingling. It clung hot to his skin—to his fingers and his shirtsleeve and the tablecloth and air. He rubbed it on the wall there, his fingerprints repeated, smudged.
The father tried to call out into the house around him but his air would not come out—the quick words caught inside him, wobbling. His breath burned in his holes.
In the hall, along the long wall, someone had made a mural of, the father surmised, the sun being crushed into the moon? It was hard to say what was there exactly, but something bright and muddy. Words were written in the pigment’s ridges that the father could not read, or else the words were numbers, small directions. Some seemed to shift when he turned from them. The small door that had before opened into the hair closet was no longer there. The father’s nose began to bleed.
The guest bedroom door was locked. Behind the door, some muted choral moan: low tuba, a beaten box, a gong. Blood from his ears now, too, a little. Throbbing in his eyes.
In the den the books had been turned to face their spines toward the wall. The pressed-together pages packed in grinning, silent with their billion flattened teeth. The father took down a skinny volume, flipped it open, found the pages fudged with see-through gel, lined like a cell inside a hive.
He passed the wall again where the mural had been just before, and in its place a mirror hung. The father was wearing dark pants and a dark shirt, he realized, though he’d come in wearing blue. He had the black cake icing on his face and arms and in his hair and on his teeth. Blood from each hole, a set of greasy spigots, rolling. He was wearing gloves and smoking a cigar. Each inhale, in the mirror, twinned. Each blinking, posed. He was so old.
The hole the father had hacked in through watched him walk back along the carpet to the front room where the front door also had been sealed. No drip of blood or mud or must on any inch of any.
Here the stairwell to the second floor, the father found, went down instead of up.