Speaker 1: It was the last house on Hofforn Lane, a sea
Speaker 1: greens bowl of a place, squeezed montidy clapboats with painted porches,
Speaker 1: but refusing every rule of symmetry. On the day of
Speaker 1: the neighborhood open house tour, its eaves bristled with flowering
Speaker 1: vines and sunburn shingles, and the gardens built their sodiums
Speaker 1: onto the walk. I'd seen the house nearly every day
Speaker 1: for two decades, waving sometimes to the Oobnaur passcross. I'd
Speaker 1: never paid a close attention. There were other prettier houses
Speaker 1: on the street, tollbrick, prouque nan two Arts and crafts,
Speaker 1: bungalows that always made the Association newsletter. This one looked
Speaker 1: from the sidewalk as if a dozen ambitious additions had
Speaker 1: been tacked on over the years, with barely a plan
Speaker 1: among them. But the torment I could finally see inside.
Speaker 1: I'd always liked open houses, even after retiring from teaching,
Speaker 1: because you never knew what people would reveal when the
Speaker 1: doors came open, Corks that never made the way into
Speaker 1: yard gospel garden competitions. I walked over with my yellow
Speaker 1: sun hat and a small notebook, taking a printed floor
Speaker 1: plan from the welcome table in the front garden. There
Speaker 1: was a big sign welcome lemonade and cookies inside. Please
Speaker 1: enjoy your self guarded exploration Hartly. I could already hear
Speaker 1: the trickle of conversation drifting down the wide steps. Miss
Speaker 1: s Hartley herself greeted us at the door, brought hipped
Speaker 1: silver bob sherp was dressed battered with tiny pastel boats.
Speaker 1: Take your time, mind the sunken step in the back corridor.
Speaker 1: She said, this a big placed twenty nine rooms, believe
Speaker 1: it or not. Her smile was bright and unhurried. The
Speaker 1: phrase caught my ear, not twenty or twenty five, but
Speaker 1: twenty nine. I glanced over her head past old wavy
Speaker 1: glass that mumbled a view to stuck a so shallow
Speaker 1: it looked almost folded. Twenty nine. Not many people can
Speaker 1: keep track of all those, I replied, half joking, and
Speaker 1: she burst out with a laugh. Though you'd be surprised
Speaker 1: everyone ends up with their own number, she said. At
Speaker 1: the time, it just sounded like one of her stories.
Speaker 1: Inside was a soft chaos of light and rugs. Rooms
Speaker 1: opened with the apology into one another. Music crined Paarlor
Speaker 1: Paula to dem with low bookshelves, bookshelves to what could
Speaker 1: have been a sewing room, but all, I says all
Speaker 1: were rubber boots and a half dunk cross were penciled
Speaker 1: onto a window sill. A pair of little girls sat
Speaker 1: in the bay window, reading aloud in two different voices
Speaker 1: at once. As the hubbub of visitors filled the central hallway,
Speaker 1: I let myself slow down, counting as I went making
Speaker 1: marks on my pamphlet. It became a game. One for
Speaker 1: the dining nook, two for a room of glass cabinets,
Speaker 1: three for the sloping library that looked toward the garden.
Speaker 1: I walked with precision in a way teachers learned to
Speaker 1: left to right, then upstairs, pausing after the landing for breath.
Speaker 1: And another two rooms that fit together like puzzle pieces,
Speaker 1: only the corners didn't quite me At the end by
Speaker 1: that stair, I stopped and counted my marks twenty eight.
Speaker 1: I flipped the pamphlet over, recounted twice. I must have
Speaker 1: missed when they had to be a closet a back
Speaker 1: hallway to slit by. I doubled back, echoed by two
Speaker 1: other guests, one with the camera and one with the
Speaker 1: sensible blue card again, both brows knit and silent arithmetic.
Speaker 1: Near the cookie table, busy with proofs of lemon and almond,
Speaker 1: the woman in a cardigan handed her sheet her friend thirty,
Speaker 1: The friend said, shaking her head, I swear I only
Speaker 1: marked twenty six. A man college age with the camera
Speaker 1: slung around his neck called over, Hey, does any one
Speaker 1: have twenty nine? That's the magic number? Or await, how
Speaker 1: many did you have? His tone was lightly mocking, but
Speaker 1: I saw his eyes flick towards the owner. Misss Hartly
Speaker 1: bustled over her beaming. No te alike. I do hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed yourselves. It's always twenty nine. She said the
Speaker 1: phrase with a little flourish, as if it were a
Speaker 1: punch line I'd missed. I left the lemonade, half finish,
Speaker 1: my map clutched in one hand, Standing on the walkway,
Speaker 1: watching neighbor's stream behind me, I found myself grinning at
Speaker 1: the impossibility of it, Hooked by a mild but persistent
Speaker 1: itch curiosity, nothing more. There's something appealing about a puzzle
Speaker 1: that everyone solves differently. That evening, in my own garden,
Speaker 1: I found myself turning over the house in my mind.
Speaker 1: I had always considered myself precise, the sort who counts
Speaker 1: bolts as I planted them, saws library books, answers trivic
Speaker 1: questions before the television host finishes the sentence. The teacher's
Speaker 1: habits die hard, My lake husband used to say, But
Speaker 1: this little discrepancy, the utter inability of a dozen sorber
Speaker 1: visitors to count the same rooms, felt mischievous, like a
Speaker 1: gentle prank. Yeah, Yet it was persistent. The neighborhood was
Speaker 1: well mashed to idiosyncrasies, half on lan culled under old
Speaker 1: Maple's houses, stitched in place by nearly a century's worth
Speaker 1: of substitutions. The east end was all brick and light,
Speaker 1: a glass solid as packed lum full of pensioners who
Speaker 1: had read every birth and death announcement twice over. Farther
Speaker 1: up with the experiments around herded Victorium a taxi to
Speaker 1: me above the stairs, the sunken ranch of bottle windows
Speaker 1: that looked like a jigsa puzzle started by an enthusiastic
Speaker 1: child and finished reluctantly by a tie at one. I'd
Speaker 1: been here since my early fifties, after Daniel's death, in
Speaker 1: a paleol of cottage with a patch of peonies too
Speaker 1: well to impress the flower patrol, but met with loving
Speaker 1: indifference by me. My routine was solid. I supped at
Speaker 1: the elementary school now and then read a book or
Speaker 1: three each week to wat siege with Clara, who lived
Speaker 1: two blocks over. I played the Everdaese lead crosswords, corocery coupons,
Speaker 1: local Trevine Knight. Never the sort to go hunting for secrets,
Speaker 1: yet people brought them to me. Sure my teachers, I
Speaker 1: caught what others let slip. Missess Hartley was fictious and
Speaker 1: she inherited the Otause twenty years earlier. Known for her elaborate,
Speaker 1: sometimes contradictory, always vibrant stories, she was the sort of
Speaker 1: person who made jokes with the mailman and cold teenager's
Speaker 1: dear heart. Rumor said the house was bequeathed by a gnat,
Speaker 1: but there were whispers of a lottery ticket, a lost cousin,
Speaker 1: even a wedding gun amok. In nineteen eighty seven, I'd
Speaker 1: hurried them all often from mister Prescott across the way.
Speaker 1: Mister Prescott, with his cane and Seir's ca hat, prided
Speaker 1: himself on knowing every brick on the street. He'd lived
Speaker 1: here before the post was split, as he liked to
Speaker 1: remind newcomers, since before the paint on the house dried,
Speaker 1: he once told me, frowning in his direction. He rarely
Speaker 1: joined festivities, but his porch was a source of running
Speaker 1: commentary on politics, pruning the teak of sized spaniel next door.
Speaker 1: The local children. Some mine more in spirit than a
Speaker 1: genetic circulated in the yards, like wind, inventing games, pumping
Speaker 1: rumors about treasure, obsecret doors, and magic always in the
Speaker 1: sea green house. Once I'd overheard a breathless eight year
Speaker 1: old confde a friend that if he listened in the
Speaker 1: closet under the stairs, the walls whispered. Their parents mostly
Speaker 1: cared about bilaws and the annual flowerred competition, dismissing house
Speaker 1: oudities as signs of a bygone era or architectural excess.
Speaker 1: Even so, the police drew conversation that old barn is amazed.
Speaker 1: Prescott would say, you'd freeze to death in there by October.
Speaker 1: Others complained about drafty corners, inexplicable heat in the attic,
Speaker 1: the window seats deep enough to nap in and lose
Speaker 1: your shoes. Everyone accepted it was unusual but no one
Speaker 1: pressed for more. I walked the lane most days, sometimes
Speaker 1: with Chlora, other times alone. We always passed Missus hartly,
Speaker 1: trading greetings through a thick screen door until the open house.
Speaker 1: The interior never stirred much interest. It seemed there immutable,
Speaker 1: a polite neighborhood secret that didn't matter much to anyone.
Speaker 1: Now my mind returned off, sidestepping the ordinary puzzles. The house,
Speaker 1: with its jumble, unlilled, refused to settle into shape. The
Speaker 1: more I thought back, the less clear the path I
Speaker 1: had taken began twenty nine, twenty eight thirty. The numbers
Speaker 1: had all been claimed. Was it simply bad? Counting the
Speaker 1: nerves of a crowd, the confusion of converging hallways. The
Speaker 1: next morning, beneath the quiet sweep of the wallot tree
Speaker 1: outside my window, I found the pamphlet from the tour,
Speaker 1: dotted with my Keffel marks. I reconsidered the tally. Every
Speaker 1: room had seemed definite as I entered a kitchen that
Speaker 1: must have been remodeled more than once, and quit heavy curtains,
Speaker 1: admitting only a slant of dust, A staircase that rose
Speaker 1: like an afterthought. Yet the math would not align maybe
Speaker 1: I missed a door, or my own sense of direction
Speaker 1: betrayed me. One reflection too many in the large old mirrors.
Speaker 1: But it was not just me. While I watered the
Speaker 1: hydh rangers, I remembered the conversation from the lemonade table.
Speaker 1: None of the visitors had the same number people with
Speaker 1: digital photos, in Nephon's argue, besides shy retirees with pen
Speaker 1: and paper notes. If it had merely been a model,
Speaker 1: the numbers would have clustered. Instead, they spread out, not wildly,
Speaker 1: but stubbornly enough to unsettle. It would be easy to
Speaker 1: drop the matter there, decide that the confusion belonged to
Speaker 1: the old house, and let it join the catalog of
Speaker 1: neighborhood oddities. But something in the lightness with which Miss
Speaker 1: s hartly repeated it's always twenty nine stuck with me
Speaker 1: a certainty, yet not quite an explanation, as if she
Speaker 1: relished a puzzle as much as I did, would act
Speaker 1: the need to settle it. By mid morning, a pair
Speaker 1: of neighbors strolled past my gate, debating the room count
Speaker 1: in low amuse forices. Their tennis rackets were gartten. I
Speaker 1: called out, did either of you get twenty nine the
Speaker 1: ground and shook their heads, their answers diverging by more
Speaker 1: than one. Danielle, I thought, would have laughed at me
Speaker 1: for fussing over a number, But then I could already
Speaker 1: feel a familiar friend liege at the age of my curiosity,
Speaker 1: the place in me that refused to let a puzzle
Speaker 1: rest unsolved, especially one paraded so openly amid lemonade and gossip.
Speaker 1: That afternoon, I decided the simplest way to lay it
Speaker 1: to rest would be to go back one more walk.
Speaker 1: A systematic approach, I resolved to as missus Hotley to
Speaker 1: open her doors again, just once for proper count. Even this,
Speaker 1: I tried to tell myself, was nothing more than neighborly thoroughness.
Speaker 1: I returned that even to the memory of the blue
Speaker 1: cardigan woman standing just inside the entry map in hand
Speaker 1: her friend had marked thirty, she only found twenty eight.
Speaker 1: Both were insistent their numbers would not line despite digital evidence.
Speaker 1: To compare shead photos showing a pale green corridor a
Speaker 1: friend's camra showing an archery in its place. Some one
Speaker 1: pointed to a door that others wore was not them
Speaker 1: minutes earlier, and another guest showed a photograph of a
Speaker 1: corridor elan couldn't recall, its windows glowing with late light
Speaker 1: by the entryway. Missus Hartley seemed delighted by the growing confusion.
Speaker 1: When I mentioned the disagreement, she just grinned, It's always
Speaker 1: twenty nine, isn't it a wonder? She handed at napkins
Speaker 1: with cooky shaped like keys and teapots, the picture of calm,
Speaker 1: as though we all were enjoying nothing more mysterious than
Speaker 1: a word game. The more evidence I gathered, the less
Speaker 1: idea I had of what precisely was happening. Guests who
Speaker 1: compared their lists were met with shrugs, laughter, in the
Speaker 1: growing sense that some trick was being played, but by
Speaker 1: whom the house itself felt physically unchanged unapologetically There yet
Speaker 1: agreement over its contents kept slipping further away, even as
Speaker 1: the sunlight angled down and the lemonade jug emptied. Walking home,
Speaker 1: I made the decision almost absent mendedly. I would return.
Speaker 1: I would count methodically room by rooumen from my own
Speaker 1: peace of mind, I would enlist help. The next morning,
Speaker 1: I rhymus, says Hatley's bell apology and request in hand,
Speaker 1: she met my cushion with enthusiasm. Of course, I'd rather
Speaker 1: get to the bottom of it myself, she said. I
Speaker 1: nushered me into her front Paula, with the matter of
Speaker 1: factor of someone who expects to be proven right but
Speaker 1: welcomes the effort. Her house coat was blue that morning,
Speaker 1: with incongruous orange flowers, and she offered me tea instead
Speaker 1: of lemonade. I gathered my tools, a fresh, gritted notebook,
Speaker 1: colored pens, measuring tape because in old houses nothing as
Speaker 1: ever quite as labeled, and a small digital recorder left
Speaker 1: of her from my supen days in case I wanted
Speaker 1: to dictate observations. I called Clara, a friend, a neighbor
Speaker 1: who taught at the community college and was forever photographing
Speaker 1: things for her side project on personal geographies. Plora was skeptical,
Speaker 1: but entertained. I don't doubt you, Ellen, but there are
Speaker 1: weirder things than confusing floor plans. What if you just
Speaker 1: missed a closet, she teased. I insisted that every room
Speaker 1: would count and nothing would be left to memory alone.
Speaker 1: When we arrived, masss hotly led us in and left
Speaker 1: us to our devices. To just call out if you
Speaker 1: get lost she advised quick to laughter. The rainstorm had
Speaker 1: rolled past in the night, so every window was webbed,
Speaker 1: with droplets throwing in certain patterns of light crossed to flows.
Speaker 1: We agreed on a plan. I would sketch each true
Speaker 1: as we entered, noting mode of entry, furnishing doors, window exposures,
Speaker 1: and whatever oddities. Plara would photograph each threshold and take
Speaker 1: panoramic images at every major turn. We mapped the first
Speaker 1: floor steady is a school project, marking kitchen, breakfast room, pantry,
Speaker 1: sun room. The ladder my favorite, with its entidy fern
Speaker 1: pots and view of a while tomatoes was easy to place.
Speaker 1: Plora said, this is room six. Yes. Then I nodded,
Speaker 1: both of us, noting the number. We pressed on study, parlor, den,
Speaker 1: sterile closet. The house had short, broad corridors in surprising corners,
Speaker 1: rooms joining at odd angles, like a game of geometric
Speaker 1: telephone played over a century. The must of old paper,
Speaker 1: the scent of cut grass from the open back door,
Speaker 1: a faint trace of lilacsanny in a hole which every
Speaker 1: room had a personality, a bit like the people who
Speaker 1: passed through them upstairs. Confidence grew, our notes match and
Speaker 1: we moved steadily talking through our process room fifteen sewing nook,
Speaker 1: two windows, three doors, I said. Clara took two shots
Speaker 1: showing the light pouring and from unexpected angles close to
Speaker 1: the eavese a cozy alcove, paneled and dark wood seen.
Speaker 1: Took sist solely for a stack of jigs or puzzles
Speaker 1: and a strip of vivid a match Wallpepper nineteen. Plora asked,
Speaker 1: yes nineteen. They felt almost too simple. As we neared
Speaker 1: the attic, scrap and s is crept in the sun room.
Speaker 1: I loved so much. Ellen's room mate, Klara couled as
Speaker 1: somehow was not on her own count, and she frowned
Speaker 1: over her camera. I didn't photograph a sun room, she insisted,
Speaker 1: scrolling back through a time mine. There should have captured everything.
Speaker 1: I paged through my own sketches. There it was plain
Speaker 1: as day. Sun room, south window, Potts bird feeder nineteen
Speaker 1: paces from kitchen. She pointed to her own list to
Speaker 1: study where I had seen a reading nook, an octagon
Speaker 1: or room I couldn't recall. I definitely remember windows all
Speaker 1: a round. Look here ropt again, stained glass. We turned
Speaker 1: through our maps, each with distinct shapes. Both confident. At
Speaker 1: the end, Klara's count was twenty eight, mine had become thirty.
Speaker 1: We shrugged, puzzled after masking a deeper surprise. We tried
Speaker 1: reconciling sketches, but found each had rooms the other failed
Speaker 1: to recall. Further tests only multiplied our confusion. Some of
Speaker 1: Klara's photos, taken at identical co ordinates to my own drawings,
Speaker 1: showed brickton doorways where I drawn open thresholds where my
Speaker 1: notes at Wholwilly's to small powder room. Her camera only
Speaker 1: found a wall in one photo, verdant light stream for
Speaker 1: a large bay window on to threadbare rug. My memory
Speaker 1: insisted there was no winter. There is certainly no bay. Curious,
Speaker 1: we tried a physical check. We re entered rooms together,
Speaker 1: relying on each other's directions, but we found our ruts
Speaker 1: altered slightly out of step. In one instance, we smelled
Speaker 1: lilac in a small parlor, apparently missing from every map.
Speaker 1: We agreed to market room mixed for laid a cross checking,
Speaker 1: yet upon returning the room was a normal, rather dingy bathroom.
Speaker 1: We met two graduate students in architecture, their arms full
Speaker 1: of note pads, who wandered about, eyes wide debating in
Speaker 1: low voices about experiential geometry and psychological wayfinding. They shared
Speaker 1: our buildiment, blaming each other for getting distracted. Clara lent
Speaker 1: them appendon. We compared notes, Their diagrams rendered in hasty
Speaker 1: lock letders diverged wildly from our own. The day ended
Speaker 1: in a mess of papers, ketches, and digital images. Proof
Speaker 1: after proof that could not be arranged. A match overlaying
Speaker 1: our work only deepened the dissonance. The sequence of rooms,
Speaker 1: the orientation of doors, the order of passages were all changed.
Speaker 1: There was no way our separate records could possibly refer
Speaker 1: to the same house, though we'd walk together the whole time.
Speaker 1: Back at my kitchen table, map spread beside a cold
Speaker 1: cup of coffee, Chlora whistled softly. It's like the househeadits itself,
Speaker 1: she said, half joking. As brightened by the problem, I
Speaker 1: stared at my paper's multiple versions of small windows, staircases
Speaker 1: bending the wrong way, a sun room that might have
Speaker 1: been a memory rather than a room. If it were
Speaker 1: only me, I'd of guess fatigue, nostalgia. But with evidence
Speaker 1: in hand, from two, then four, then half a dozen observers,
Speaker 1: each account impossible to overlay on to the next. The
Speaker 1: puzzle only grew deeper. It wasn't a matter of miscount.
Speaker 1: It had become a problem of reality itself, or at
Speaker 1: the very least the stories we told about it. I
Speaker 1: thought back to the kit seeker, howiys the parent's impatience,
Speaker 1: and wondered, was this some elaborate trick, or had the
Speaker 1: house itself slipped anchor? That night I found myself restless
Speaker 1: with curiosity, not dread, not the feeling that the house
Speaker 1: posed a threat, but that it offered a glimpse of
Speaker 1: some larger stranger, a way of being if only I
Speaker 1: looked at it from the right angle, if there was
Speaker 1: an answer, it might live in memory in the way
Speaker 1: people recalled the shape of the house. I decided I
Speaker 1: did to look backward as well as within, beginning with
Speaker 1: the person who remembered every changehol from Lane had ever endured,
Speaker 1: mister Prescott. Prescott answered my ring with the shop about time,
Speaker 1: but ushered me up to his porch, a bright red
Speaker 1: geranium casting pattern shadows at our fee, Prescott, I began,
Speaker 1: have you ever gone inside the Hotly House for the
Speaker 1: association tour? He snorted, too drafty, like walking through a sieve.
Speaker 1: If you ask me. But I've been in as a
Speaker 1: boy in the forties, and since no two visits match.
Speaker 1: He leaned back, came across knees, hashadowing his sharp eyes,
Speaker 1: remembering Allah, when they build it, it was ordinary enough,
Speaker 1: ought to have had maybe sixteen rooms, not much more,
Speaker 1: But there was always some wing being added, a wall's
Speaker 1: coming down or following over. My uncle helped wired in
Speaker 1: fifty one, came back saying there were rooms, he'd swear
Speaker 1: weren't they before. Did you remember any specific story about
Speaker 1: a changing I pressed, half expecting him to wave me off.
Speaker 1: There was a summer must have been nineteen fifty two
Speaker 1: when a whole wing showed up, library of summer rooms
Speaker 1: something like that. Nobody could say how a why. But
Speaker 1: the taxes went up, and the blueprints didn't match what
Speaker 1: he saw inside. Even city inspecters threw up their hands.
Speaker 1: He shook his head, amused in a little proud of
Speaker 1: the neighborhood' quirks. The city kept pro drawing maps. Old
Speaker 1: Miss s Hampson, Missess Hartley's an. I suppose she insisted
Speaker 1: it had twenty nine rooms and would brook no argument.
Speaker 1: The more oppressed, the more tangled, the stories became. Some
Speaker 1: said the house was always a bit of a war
Speaker 1: and a rabbit maze with impossible right angles. Others were
Speaker 1: sure it was sensible until boarding house days in the sixties,
Speaker 1: after which the ruins, not the walls, but the actual
Speaker 1: room count never matched. Two visits in a row, determined
Speaker 1: to push further a visit City Hall. The clerk perky,
Speaker 1: but Harry quinted at me through wire room glasses as
Speaker 1: I requested the house's blueprints, which ones she qupt, flipping
Speaker 1: through manilla folders. We've got at least rien recor all
Speaker 1: supposedly originals. She produced resets, each labeled by different architects,
Speaker 1: hand dated decades apart. They were at best rough cousins.
Speaker 1: Each blueprint showed broad similarities, a central hall, a staircase,
Speaker 1: roughly the same footprint, with details diverged. One included a
Speaker 1: music room with French windows, which existed nowhere in the house.
Speaker 1: Another had a whole west wing missing an a study
Speaker 1: in its place. I scrutinized the property tax recos and
Speaker 1: found more contradictions. Some years the house was taxed on
Speaker 1: twenty eight rooms, others on thirty. Several inspector's notes read
Speaker 1: site does not match fl upland provided or discrepancies in
Speaker 1: internal measurements. Survey records were a palimpsyst of edits and
Speaker 1: margin notes. There were scattered boomers too. One of the
Speaker 1: city's older residents, Ms. Jason, a tiny, sprightly woman in
Speaker 1: her late eighties, was adamant the original architect was an
Speaker 1: odd one, like to leave clues, briddles and woodwork, eccentric
Speaker 1: as a mappie. Another neighbor suggested the house was briefly
Speaker 1: a boarding house in the nineteen sixties and seventies, rooms
Speaker 1: re arranged to accommodate families in Nothing so odd, just practical,
Speaker 1: she insisted. I followed the line to a former resident,
Speaker 1: Mister Wilkins, met at a community lunch. He was tall,
Speaker 1: bent in his mid seventies, and full of the warm
Speaker 1: nostalge of someone happy to have left the oddities behind.
Speaker 1: I only lived there year when I was nine, he
Speaker 1: told me. I phase alike from memory. There were always
Speaker 1: jokes about losing your socks, your hat, your sense of direction.
Speaker 1: He thought. A moment once I found the door in
Speaker 1: the upstairs hallway that wasn't there the day before, opened
Speaker 1: onto a room fild with blinding sunlight and flowers lilacs.
Speaker 1: I think I shut it, ran to tell my mother,
Speaker 1: and when I came back, it was gone. Never managed
Speaker 1: to show any one. He rustled in his wallet and
Speaker 1: withdrew a faded black and white snap shot marked a
Speaker 1: room seventeen. It showed an overexposed rectangle enty but with
Speaker 1: a flood of light, wooden floor in distinct shadows. It
Speaker 1: doesn't match anything there now, but I remember the smell,
Speaker 1: like curly summer, strange thing to forget or remember. I
Speaker 1: thanked him photograph carefully returned. As I walked home, I
Speaker 1: reaplayed a story in the others, and the assertion grew stronger.
Speaker 1: The house was not only confusing, It was unstable in
Speaker 1: a way, a defied simple explanation or error. The problem
Speaker 1: was no longer one of miscounted doors or hurry visitors.
Speaker 1: It was something more fundamental, more disorienting, a house whose
Speaker 1: very identity, over decades, refused to settle. The next logical
Speaker 1: step was to see hard a evidence, something less fleeting,
Speaker 1: more grounded and out of act in memory. I called
Speaker 1: upon the modest, if under appreciate it store of the
Speaker 1: local Historical Society, a warren of arcades under the library,
Speaker 1: run by volunteers and fiercely defended against medlows by mister
Speaker 1: Prescott himself, who sat on the board with permission from
Speaker 1: Messess Hatley and the archivist. I sorted through shells and
Speaker 1: assid free boxes looking for proof. I found hand drawn
Speaker 1: room by room illustration faded and annotated without dates, programs
Speaker 1: from church events held in the music room, second floor,
Speaker 1: north wing, which had never existed on any of the
Speaker 1: blueprints in my files, and an annotated guests brook its
Speaker 1: curly handwriting referencing entertainments in rooms that by any current
Speaker 1: acount were nowhere to be found. Among the photographs, two
Speaker 1: the discrepancies appeared. I set to image aside by side
Speaker 1: taken a year apart, same angle, but one shrewed three
Speaker 1: windows where the other shout too, with the siding painted
Speaker 1: in subtly different shades, neither matching Missess Hartley's current sea green.
Speaker 1: In a group shot from a nineteen ninety seven birthday,
Speaker 1: a guest was visible standing where by current plans there
Speaker 1: was only a wall. Some one had drawn attentive finger
Speaker 1: on the print, writing question marks in red ink. Missess
Speaker 1: Hotleigh herself at my polight request produced a shoe box
Speaker 1: of personal memorabilia inside small brass room, placoudts of room seventeen,
Speaker 1: a room twenty three, polish to a dull gly increased
Speaker 1: invitation CODs to parties in the east library, and more
Speaker 1: paper fragments, each pattern but non matching current walls. Eager
Speaker 1: to clarify, I organized yet another visit, inviting Clara and
Speaker 1: a visiting architect, doctor Ramish, who'd come from the college
Speaker 1: after hearing about our impossible architecture. We assembled with earphones,
Speaker 1: tablets and a sense of anticipation. Deck as clotted cream.
Speaker 1: We began our walk, each recording impressions allowed. First room entryway,
Speaker 1: hardwood floors, two arched doors, Chlora narrated second room, round dining,
Speaker 1: three windows. Doctor Ramis strode ahead, dicted into mensons in quick,
Speaker 1: precise jargon. I kept to the middle, updating my sketches
Speaker 1: in real time. Rooms diverged without warning. For Clara, the
Speaker 1: double parlor existed rich with velvet chairs. For Raymish, there
Speaker 1: was only a pantry, its shelves unremarkable. I tried to
Speaker 1: resolve the contradiction by pays and or orientation, to no avail.
Speaker 1: Each person's documentation tallied a different route, different contents, different counts.
Speaker 1: Each insisted on the reality of their experience. Nothing would reconcile.
Speaker 1: Then the architect interjected. Half way through a narrow corridor, stop,
Speaker 1: he said, kneeling by a bookshelf that jutted unevenly from
Speaker 1: the wall, This panel is loose. He took gently, and
Speaker 1: an near door, all but invisible from afar, creaked open.
Speaker 1: The air was chill inside, and the room empty with
Speaker 1: full scrape row seemed to breathe, cold and accustomed. There
Speaker 1: I stepped inside, the sensation of newness almost electric. I
Speaker 1: sketched it quickly, and Chlora photographed over my shoulder. We
Speaker 1: exited pulse quickening, but when we checked Clara's photo a
Speaker 1: minute later, it showed only blank wall, nothing behind the bookshlf,
Speaker 1: but empty plaster. Doctor Raymish, peering over her shoulder, frowned.
Speaker 1: That is impossible, he whispered, equal parse, bewildered and delighted.
Speaker 1: We all agreed the room had been narrow, real physical
Speaker 1: space we'd entered. Yet the only records from a quick
Speaker 1: sketch and now living memory, no I Nels's arriving later,
Speaker 1: could find any door. It left us at an inflection point.
Speaker 1: The house could not be described as merely confusing, nor
Speaker 1: explained by the jumble of odd extensions. It was not
Speaker 1: simply miscanted or even misunderstood. Instead, it appeared to exist
Speaker 1: differently for every observer, each investigation reshaping. What was there,
Speaker 1: a living, shifting contradiction that danced just outside the reach
Speaker 1: of proof. As the sun set, I found myself sitting
Speaker 1: on a guarden bench out front, a stack of sketches
Speaker 1: and notes in my lap, breathless with a kind of wonder.
Speaker 1: The puzzle, it seemed, was deeper than the number of rooms.
Speaker 1: The house's reality, the very fabric of its being refused
Speaker 1: to be fixed by observation or measurement, or the careful
Speaker 1: hand of any chronicler. I folded my notes as the
Speaker 1: street lights flickered on, their glowed, pooling against the green clapboards.
Speaker 1: As Missus hotly locked her door with a smile, she
Speaker 1: turned to me. Found all twenty nine yet, Jess, her
Speaker 1: eyes sparkling, her hands still lightly dusted in flower. Not yet,
Speaker 1: I replied, my voice shaky with delight. But I am
Speaker 1: not sure I want to any longer. What I did want,
Speaker 1: what I needed, was to understand how a house could
Speaker 1: resist consensus so perfectly. I sensed that the answer would
Speaker 1: not be found in numbers alone. Misss Hartley's front patch
Speaker 1: lights had begun to glow the brass lands faring line
Speaker 1: across the uneven flagstone. A thin wedge lamplight followed her
Speaker 1: as she closed the thick many window door, leaving me
Speaker 1: alone on the garden bench, a stack of sketches at
Speaker 1: my side, cool air on my arms. The house behind
Speaker 1: me looked and changed, humming its quite refrain to the street.
Speaker 1: Yet I knew now that any certainty would shift if
Speaker 1: I step across the threshold again. I tapped the latest
Speaker 1: of my maps beneath my arm, and rose, following the
Speaker 1: pulled lamplight back toward the sidewalk. The garden heavy with
Speaker 1: sweet alsoon, and the green hush of approaching dusk. Everything
Speaker 1: should have felt familiar. But inside me, under the surface order,
Speaker 1: I could feel something and coiling, the dizzying sensation of
Speaker 1: a puzzle refusing to be solved, and my own desire
Speaker 1: was shaping itself. The next day, the neighborhood bristled with
Speaker 1: word of our attempts at the bakery. Two mothers compared
Speaker 1: notes about the room that fits itself around whoever visits, laughed,
Speaker 1: to chasing away any suggestion of alarm. My friend Carr called,
Speaker 1: still amused, and said, you realize you've startled a movement.
Speaker 1: The architect, doctor Raemish, left a message on my answering machine,
Speaker 1: his voice crackling with a mixture of frustration. In law,
Speaker 1: it goes against everything I've ever measured, Ellen, I want
Speaker 1: to try again with a larger group. Perhaps have you
Speaker 1: ever heard of collaborative mapping? I hadn't, But the sea
Speaker 1: cot if the house confounded two, three, or four observers
Speaker 1: even more, perhaps the solution depended not on individual memory,
Speaker 1: but on the emergence of a patent that only community
Speaker 1: might reveal. What if the house's puzzle was bigger than
Speaker 1: personal perception. That Sunday, the word a brisk I phoned
Speaker 1: missus hotly and floated the idea. There was only a
Speaker 1: beat of silence before she erupted an approval. Delighted at
Speaker 1: the prospect of so many clever eyes by all means,
Speaker 1: she said, let's have a party. Why not a mapping party.
Speaker 1: Will supply a lemonade and tape. He supplied the map
Speaker 1: makers so began the preparations, news travel fast by that weekend.
Speaker 1: The open house was reborn at this time as a
Speaker 1: neighborhood experiment. Volunteers from the Historical Society, students from the College,
Speaker 1: my trivia night crowd, several children, dragged along by amenable parents,
Speaker 1: everyone eager to try their hand at the enigma. Even
Speaker 1: the practical people from the Neighborhood Association conceded one could
Speaker 1: tolerate little voganized when for the sake of curiosity. On
Speaker 1: the day itself, I arrived early, clipboard in hand, and
Speaker 1: watched as Missus Hartley and a pair of teenagers set
Speaker 1: out tables, led and with supplies. Each participant received an
Speaker 1: identical blank forp in a soft blue sheet bared but
Speaker 1: for numbered thresholds, and a wadg of colored posted notes,
Speaker 1: three feet of painter's tape, and a portable recorder if
Speaker 1: they wished. People joked about teams, but most drifted off
Speaker 1: singly on loose pairs, each determined to walk their own path.
Speaker 1: My group included Flora, two architecture students, and a pair
Speaker 1: of children under ten named Elitt and Saint Mirra, who
Speaker 1: ran ahead, enchanted by the promise of discovering secret doors.
Speaker 1: The college's focal professor, a tall woman named doctor Tenor,
Speaker 1: with sleeves roll above the elbow tagged after us, note
Speaker 1: taking in a battered spiral as she murmured about recurrent
Speaker 1: motifs and immigrant house stories. Once ins I the rules vanished,
Speaker 1: conversation faded to people funneled into different rooms, each intent
Speaker 1: on their own survey. I traced my usual route, counting
Speaker 1: the familiar entryway, then the circular dining alcoho, the library
Speaker 1: with its brace window, the kitchen still warm with bread.
Speaker 1: Each room I counted, sketched double checks, and recorded. Klara
Speaker 1: stuck to the left, photographing and counting, calling now and
Speaker 1: then how many Ellen seven for me? This is nine already.
Speaker 1: Soon a house hummed with the gentle confusion, people passing
Speaker 1: in hallways, sometimes squeezing past tape across the doorway. Don't
Speaker 1: go through here, I need to map the foscide first.
Speaker 1: The children called out, delightedly. We found a secret hallway,
Speaker 1: they shouted, waving their arms, clutching a handful of post
Speaker 1: its mark with crayon vines, arches and mysterious door. Their
Speaker 1: excitement was contagious. Even the most methodical adults found themselves chuckling,
Speaker 1: their dignities sweetly eroded by play. After an hour, the
Speaker 1: explorers trickled into the kitchen, claiming victory or defeat. Maps
Speaker 1: and nuts in hand, I gathered the finished floorplands, laying
Speaker 1: and side by side cross masss Hartley's broad kitchen table.
Speaker 1: At first we tried to match them room by room,
Speaker 1: number by number, thrushold by threshold. It was feudal. No
Speaker 1: two maps were alike. Some agreed on the number twenty eight,
Speaker 1: twenty nine, thirty, but never in the pattern or order.
Speaker 1: Where one person's map showed the sun room, another presented
Speaker 1: a closet or a stairwell. A hallway appeared in one sketch,
Speaker 1: a cloak room in another. The children's map bore a
Speaker 1: fantastic tangle of rooms, vine covered corridors snaking through the center,
Speaker 1: places not found by any adult. One of you must
Speaker 1: have doubled back tease mister Prescott, though his own map,
Speaker 1: when pressed into service by the assembled, made no more
Speaker 1: sense than the rest. People tried to rationalize at first,
Speaker 1: maybe a mistake or a result of distraction. Someone's wore
Speaker 1: a door had been locked al ere and now sad
Speaker 1: Ajar others insisted the count was accurate, pointing to photos
Speaker 1: or post its. The after tangle bemused frustration, until gradually
Speaker 1: a quiet delight grew in a space left by confusion.
Speaker 1: After a while, the architect Raymush spoke a little above
Speaker 1: the crowd. It's almost as if the rooms exist for
Speaker 1: the act of counting, but vanish or appear when you
Speaker 1: try to check again. The harder we seek a fixed plan,
Speaker 1: the less the house allows one. I saw a window
Speaker 1: bench with initials carved into its, said Missess Betts, a
Speaker 1: neighbor in her seventies. Looked like my lay husband's hand,
Speaker 1: but I never saw it before. She seemed largely pleased,
Speaker 1: even wistful. The focal professor Grinn, collecting impromptu interviews, This
Speaker 1: is exactly what I have heard from oral history, stories
Speaker 1: of slippery houses, rooms that wander or hide themselves, always
Speaker 1: echoing the mood or memory of the people inside. Not haunted,
Speaker 1: it just deeply, stubbornly alive to attention. This not a
Speaker 1: ghost story, but something about the persistence of possibility. I
Speaker 1: linger gathering impressions samere The Kuito of the children handed
Speaker 1: me her tipmark map shyly her eyes alight with satisfaction.
Speaker 1: There's a hallway with fines, she said, madder of fact.
Speaker 1: No grown up found it and notlt to meet her gaze,
Speaker 1: Sliding her map alongside the others. What did you see there,
Speaker 1: I asked? Her answer was gentle her voice, sure. I
Speaker 1: think it's where you find things that got lost. That's
Speaker 1: where the cat went last summer too. We saw him
Speaker 1: through the window. Further questioning uncovered a scatter of detail sunlight,
Speaker 1: the blue vase, the feeling of being somewhere or not
Speaker 1: meant to stay. That evening, when the crowd had scattered,
Speaker 1: miss As Hotly and I sat down in her back garden,
Speaker 1: mugs of tea beside us. The air was scented with
Speaker 1: cut grass and distant magnolia. We spread the overlaid maps
Speaker 1: between us, each one in artifactive effort desire memory. More
Speaker 1: than a catalog of failures. The collection had the ore
Speaker 1: of something jointly created, a puzzle with only collaborative shifting solutions.
Speaker 1: Missus Hotley watched me trace sundrum on my map, my
Speaker 1: pen skimming over black space and clars. Years ago, she said,
Speaker 1: I tried to photograph every room in order the way
Speaker 1: my aunt insisted they be remembered, but the album never
Speaker 1: laid flat. Half the photos vanished. One time, the negatives
Speaker 1: were blank entirely. The more I tried, the less I recognize.
Speaker 1: She sipped quietly. Some things aren't meant to be pinned
Speaker 1: down and labeled. Daniel, my late husband used to say,
Speaker 1: certainties overrated. Her use of a name startled me. We
Speaker 1: had never before spoken of her own, Daniel, who died
Speaker 1: only a few years after my own. She caught my
Speaker 1: look and shrugged. Sometimes I wonder if I count rooms
Speaker 1: because he did, or maybe he did because I did.
Speaker 1: Now I just watch what happens. Her chuckle was soft,
Speaker 1: but not dismissive. The house is happiest, I think when
Speaker 1: it confounds the people who want unto his most. I
Speaker 1: gazed at the profusion of paper in front of us,
Speaker 1: at the way the house, so sturdy and insistent from
Speaker 1: that side, refused to be finalized from within. It was
Speaker 1: a living history, rumors, tricks embodied in every failed effort
Speaker 1: to fix its nature. The mapping party blurred in my
Speaker 1: mind is nigh deepened. I thought of mister Prescott's reminiscences
Speaker 1: of Ms. Jason's ruddles and woodwork of mister Wilkins's memory
Speaker 1: of Room seventeen, splashed with sunlight and lilacs. More than that,
Speaker 1: I thought of my own repeated attempts at sketches and
Speaker 1: aligned counts, refusing to reconcile. A part of me wanted
Speaker 1: stubbornly to find the right version, but a different part, older,
Speaker 1: perhaps humbler, with age, began to cherish the impossibility. Yet
Speaker 1: the problem still tugged. What sort of place can exist? Only?
Speaker 1: Is a sum of private versions, each when in complete,
Speaker 1: every attempt a consensus generating further incongruity. Is it illusion,
Speaker 1: trick or some deeper property? I wanted a sharper answer,
Speaker 1: when that would reach beyond the polite boundary between nabally
Speaker 1: amusement and professional compulsion. A letter arrived the next morning,
Speaker 1: when I had not expected Doctor Tenner from the college.
Speaker 1: The Folkhorp professor was writing a piece for her department's
Speaker 1: journal and enclosed a draft section about the house with
Speaker 1: twenty nine rooms in it. She sketched in brief the
Speaker 1: phenomenonous community ought of act, not a spirit nor a prank,
Speaker 1: but a shared ambiguity rooted in the overlapping claims and
Speaker 1: wishes of dozens of lives, architecture as palimpsist, each retelling
Speaker 1: a quiet rebellion against closure. It was elegant, almost poetic.
Speaker 1: It also suggested something I had not actively considered. What
Speaker 1: if the persistent anomaly was not a thing to resolve,
Speaker 1: but to invite participation, Each mapping an act of personal
Speaker 1: expression and negotiation with collective memory. That night I could
Speaker 1: not sleep. The house beneath the moon. I took on
Speaker 1: a slightly different sheen, at once vexed and infinitely potential.
Speaker 1: Every window a question, every shadow cast by both presents
Speaker 1: and absence. I wrote a letter inviting a handful of
Speaker 1: past residents, those who had moved away yet still replied
Speaker 1: to the news of her to visit. A small group agreed,
Speaker 1: three adults who had grown up in the house and
Speaker 1: kept their own quiet records. When they arrived, all friends,
Speaker 1: now scattered adults with young families or distant spouses, They
Speaker 1: walked through the entry with the reverence I had not
Speaker 1: seen in others. Their faces shifted, flickered with recognition and
Speaker 1: surprise as they moved from room to room. Where's the
Speaker 1: front music room? Asked one, a woman in her mid forties,
Speaker 1: with lively hands, ice sharpening as she entered, but was
Speaker 1: now a study. My mother practiced piano here every morning
Speaker 1: before school. It's not she trailed off, frowning where I
Speaker 1: saw a rolltop desk in books she described high windows
Speaker 1: and a battered metronome. A man a decade ald to
Speaker 1: glance furtively at the base of the stairs, his voice unsteady.
Speaker 1: I remember a secret passage behind the pantrey, but it
Speaker 1: seems gone now. He looked at the prison arrangement, confessed
Speaker 1: he must have mistaken it. But I saw something in
Speaker 1: his posture. Certainty eroded by the reluctance of reality to
Speaker 1: corporate their stories bifurcated further. Even among three who had
Speaker 1: shared years in these rooms, their recollections were not a
Speaker 1: harmonious composite, but a set of partial, mutually incompatible maps. Listening,
Speaker 1: it struck me more forcefully. The house was composed not
Speaker 1: only of its wood and brick, but of the hopes, losses,
Speaker 1: and narratives poured into it by its inhabitants. Could it
Speaker 1: be the very process of recounting and remembering, the joint
Speaker 1: and perfect project of describing, that sustained the instability Eager
Speaker 1: for day to be on memory, I returned to the
Speaker 1: local archives, rummaging for anything I might have missed. In
Speaker 1: a set of locked drawers. At the far end, I
Speaker 1: discovered a sheaf of blueprints. Various hands and decades represented
Speaker 1: the paper worn to a soft translucency. Each plan was
Speaker 1: labeled original, but in truth none matched any other or
Speaker 1: the current house web. Penham mended some coroners with questions.
Speaker 1: Balcony added nineteen forty seven, none found, stairway to no
Speaker 1: word demolished another annotated attic dressing rooum entry incertain a
Speaker 1: faint trailer noted while margin caught my eye. Each new
Speaker 1: hand leaves and mark revises remembered not as built this
Speaker 1: orient m s Chan who joined me exuming records, paused
Speaker 1: when I showed her it's as though the house writs
Speaker 1: emarse itself. With every survey look here reach new architect
Speaker 1: races or overwrites rather than clarifies. She peered closer to
Speaker 1: set of initials beside a pencil's sketch of a room
Speaker 1: no longer extend to rectangular balcony room with a roof
Speaker 1: line unfamiliar to any now living copyer at this orian
Speaker 1: suggested at first, but softened, or maybe just a different
Speaker 1: way of being honest. Building plans are always partly guesswork,
Speaker 1: a story told for the benefit of future guesses. I
Speaker 1: gathered up my notes. The sense of dissolution became less troubling,
Speaker 1: more quietly wonderful. There was no way to pin this
Speaker 1: house to a single narrative, no path to a definitive
Speaker 1: ants are not one that survived a change of witness,
Speaker 1: a new decade, or even the turn of a door up.
Speaker 1: I explained the latest to Cora, who scribbled furiously in
Speaker 1: her notebook, asking is the missing room? I memory then,
Speaker 1: something seated by suggestion and grown by need, the mind
Speaker 1: filling an expectant gap. I shook my head. It's not
Speaker 1: only mine, the maptis agrees each time, but the evidence
Speaker 1: blueprints for too shift to There's no stable past to
Speaker 1: appeal to. Even now, with the room numbers documented by
Speaker 1: city inspectors. Nothing aligned to tax form from nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: two said thirty one. A school in Moment card from
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy said twenty eight. The next morning, alone and restless,
Speaker 1: I walked to the house. Missess Hartley greeted me. House
Speaker 1: goat fluttering as always, unruffled by my freshly of questions.
Speaker 1: Come in if you like, she said. The lilacs are
Speaker 1: in bloom by the back fence to day, and the
Speaker 1: house is feeling friendly. I stepped through the familiar blue
Speaker 1: green door, no book in hand, and drifted by old
Speaker 1: habit to the staircase. The air was cool, faintly scentered,
Speaker 1: shadows soft as ever. I walked up stairs, expecting the
Speaker 1: ordinary sequence to resert itself, but something was subtly wrong.
Speaker 1: I paused between the curve of the second floor landing
Speaker 1: and the narrower at ex stairs, where the light struck
Speaker 1: differently than I remembered. Ahead, the wall shimmered in the
Speaker 1: late afternoonla Suddenly there was a door, a plane slightly
Speaker 1: warped panel, neither grand nor hidden, but simply there. My
Speaker 1: steps thickened, A whisper of hesitance crept into my chest,
Speaker 1: but curiosity held me. I reached out, twisted the handle,
Speaker 1: and the door swung away. Inside was a room I
Speaker 1: had never entered, A small, peaceful space, tiled with sunlight,
Speaker 1: its windows open, the air sweet with lilac. The floor
Speaker 1: creaked faintly. Beneath my shoes there was a battered chair,
Speaker 1: a low desk with a faint ring of ink, and
Speaker 1: the sense of arrival of something neither new nor foreign,
Speaker 1: but quietly inevitable. I stepped inside. The sensation was unmistakable.
Speaker 1: This was the room seventeen from Wilkins's photograph, the space
Speaker 1: that had flickered through stories, memory, rumor. For a moment,
Speaker 1: it seemed the whole of the house was holding its breath,
Speaker 1: as if in gentle approval. I opened my notebook, fingers
Speaker 1: trembling only a lettl, and sketched the windows, the odd
Speaker 1: angle of the sunlight, the scattered faded petals on the desk.
Speaker 1: I tried. I had to fix the scent to memory,
Speaker 1: to transcribe the precise pattern of the curtains. I made
Speaker 1: a brief audio note describing everything, allowing my impressions to
Speaker 1: tumble up, the taste of the air, the exact shade
Speaker 1: of morning glory blue. Then, as quickly as the moment began,
Speaker 1: I heard voices downstairs, laughter, footsteps, the small noises of
Speaker 1: every day. I closed the notebook, stepped backward, eased the
Speaker 1: door gently shoot behind me. My heart hummed a mix
Speaker 1: of elation and uncertainty. When I turned to retrace my steps.
Speaker 1: The door was gone, plain wall again, empty of any
Speaker 1: join back in the entryway, everything was back to order,
Speaker 1: massess hotly in the kitchen, steeping tea chlor arriving, arms
Speaker 1: loaded with new film. My hands tightened on the notebook.
Speaker 1: I glanced down at the sketch I just made, except
Speaker 1: now the lines were half vanished, the writing blurred, as
Speaker 1: if the paper kept only an echo of what I
Speaker 1: have recorded. The audio file replate with muffled static. My
Speaker 1: own voice cut short after a single word light. If
Speaker 1: I was disappointed, it surprised me how little the feeling persisted. Instead,
Speaker 1: I felt a gentle affirmation I had experienced the impossible,
Speaker 1: and though the proof to solve, the impression deepened. The
Speaker 1: Eulse's rooms were not merely inaccessible. They were perhaps contingent,
Speaker 1: real in the moment of being seen, invited into the
Speaker 1: world by observation, by intention, even by longing. Clora looked
Speaker 1: over my shoulder and saw only a blank page. But
Speaker 1: she didn't tease. Instead, she said, did you see something?
Speaker 1: I smiled and replied, I saw what I needed. Sometimes
Speaker 1: that's all remasques. In the days that followed, word of
Speaker 1: the mapping party's failure or success, depending on one's temperament,
Speaker 1: spread beyond the neighborhood. A minor local curiosity made the
Speaker 1: rounds at the university, then in a Sunday magazine supplement,
Speaker 1: then in a letter from a poet who claimed the
Speaker 1: house inspired her latest cycle verse. People debated the cause
Speaker 1: aspace filling curve, a logical paradox, a highly eccentric original builder.
Speaker 1: Some invoked ideas from mathematics, like non Euclidean geometry or
Speaker 1: the Bannock Tarsky paradox, as if the house itself enacted
Speaker 1: a conceptual riddle with every visit. Others, like doctor Tenner,
Speaker 1: preferred the mythic frame. It is a living enigma, she
Speaker 1: told a gathering during a book club discussion. In the parlor,
Speaker 1: it exists in the ovalap between was remembered and was constructed.
Speaker 1: A record of the stories were willing to share in
Speaker 1: those we cannot repeat. Missus Hartley, always practical, pronounced herself
Speaker 1: satisfied so long as compliments kept flowing about her cookies
Speaker 1: and tea. I looked again at the data, overlaid maps, blueprints,
Speaker 1: faded photos. There was no deeper pattern that I could extract,
Speaker 1: no consensus that grew out of multiplying the perspectives, the
Speaker 1: anomaly remained. The missing or extra room was never resolved,
Speaker 1: but rather displaced the side of everyone's uncertainty, memory, and expectation.
Speaker 1: It was a function of attention, of hope, of loss.
Speaker 1: The more finely we tried to pin it, the morelusive
Speaker 1: it became. On a quiet walk home with Chlora, she asked,
Speaker 1: do you mind that there's no answer? Not really, I
Speaker 1: found myself surprised by my own containment. It matters more,
Speaker 1: I said that the attempt to solve it brings us together,
Speaker 1: that we discover how reality waivers under share its scrutiny,
Speaker 1: how every version, however fleeting, tells us something about what
Speaker 1: we hope and remember. I used to think cacuously matter
Speaker 1: at most. Now I am not so sure. The room
Speaker 1: is missing for everyone at once, But each return invites
Speaker 1: a new story. That sense deep and slowly was every
Speaker 1: conversation on the street, every glance exchanged between mess At
Speaker 1: the next association meeting, some un joked about their twenty
Speaker 1: ninth agenda item, and the room burst into the kind
Speaker 1: of laughter that closest distances our weekly walks to conneue
Speaker 1: meaning neighbors speculating about which room they would find if
Speaker 1: on need, they had the right company, the right intent,
Speaker 1: the right story in their hearts. Over time, I found
Speaker 1: myself less troubled by what could not be measured, more
Speaker 1: attuned to the shifting harmonies of memory and conversation that
Speaker 1: bound us as a community. My annotated maps, the ones
Speaker 1: I'd once hoped would reveal a singular truth, became cherish
Speaker 1: dart of acts, their contradictions, a record of collective wonder,
Speaker 1: treasured more for their disagreements than for any promise of solution.
Speaker 1: One evening, I found myself standing on the sidewalk before
Speaker 1: the house, as the sun dipped red behind the trees,
Speaker 1: sky painted in wide and certain brushstrokes. A new group
Speaker 1: of visitors gathered on the steps, their voices hushed with anticipation.
Speaker 1: I watched as they entered, Their images bend neared the
Speaker 1: old glass laughters, drifting and faintly through an appendable walls.
Speaker 1: At that moment, I realized a house with twenty nine
Speaker 1: rooms would never be fully mapped, nor should it be.
Speaker 1: Assessence would refusal the constant invitation to count, to question, share,
Speaker 1: to begin again. The twenty nine room might exist just
Speaker 1: out of reach, or in each attempt to grasp it,
Speaker 1: or perhaps only in the stories we invent for ourselves.
Speaker 1: Standing under the walnut tree, outside sunlight dappling the garden,
Speaker 1: I let myself feel the freedom in not knowing, in
Speaker 1: never quite resolving where the lost door lad. The house endured,
Speaker 1: full of shifting corners and subtle doors as long as
Speaker 1: someone was curious enough to keep looking. Perhaps all of
Speaker 1: reality is less a fixed ledger and more house with
Speaker 1: twenty nine rooms, always different depending on where you stand
Speaker 1: and how many stories you are willing to follow. I
Speaker 1: imagine the next set of visitors, maps and pencils in hand,
Speaker 1: disappearing inside. Each servant they'd finally resolve the count, each
Speaker 1: destined to emerge changed and delightfully confounded, just as I
Speaker 1: had been. And I was grateful, as truly grateful as
Speaker 1: I have ever been for the room just out of reach.
Speaker 1: The answer always deferred, the collective wonder that made every
Speaker 1: walk down Hawthorne Lane a new beginning. And that is
Speaker 1: the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see
Speaker 1: you in the next one.