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The first time Sarah Raphael entered the House, she didn’t actually expect it would work. So she wasn’t at all properly prepared. After taking just long enough to scratch down a few notes, she walked out, went home, and put together a bag of things to bring with her.
Water. As her parents always did for their country rambles: two bars of brown Kendal Mint Cake, a bag of nuts, a bag of dried fruit, 200g of biltong. A compass. Chalk, in a suitably bright and unnatural yellow. A sturdy A6 notebook and a Fisher space pen. A spare charging pack for her phone. A torch. And, keeping in mind what Arne-Sayles told her about forgetfulness, she uses a self-laminating luggage tag to create a card that says:
Your name is Sarah Raphael. You are a police detective. The exit is between the two minotaurs in the entrance hall. You are looking for Matthew Rose Sorenson.
She puts the card on a long cord that she wears around her neck and under her shirt, like a Roman Catholic scapular.
Later, she makes a new card. The first three sentences remain the same, but she adds different text at the end:
You are the friend of the man known as Matthew Rose Sorenson, who now calls himself the Beloved Child of the House.
It’s difficult to resist the urge to slip away into the House whenever people get to be too much for her, which frankly has always been rather too often to begin with. Knowing that it’s there, and that it will welcome her back every time, that Matthew (for lack of a better name) will be there more likely than not—the temptation is profound and constant.
Every day, though, she reminds herself: you are needed in the world.
Every day, there is something to stimulate her sense of justice and her anger. They keep her rooted in the world, even as her soul longs for the House.
In the spring of 2020, she discovers the limits of what her anger can accomplish. As a police detective, she isn’t as housebound as most of the populace; she’s one of those essential people who still has work to do out in the world. Lockdown doesn’t stop people being stupid or cruel to one another, after all. Possibly it’s made it worse, bottling up things that might otherwise have had some other outlet.
It keeps her busy and far from a mindset conducive to achieving a pre-rational state. For two months, she does not go to the House.
In the mornings, she makes herself coffee and stares out the window of her flat at a school playground that on this day and at this hour would normally be full of children. When she opens the window, she can hear a blackbird chirruping. But otherwise, the world has gone quiet; a bigger, more expansive sort of quiet than that which permeates the House, but one that she has previously only experienced in the aftermath of a snowstorm. She likes it. She tells herself that this muted world has made retreat to the House at least slightly less necessary.
Every day she whistles a bar or two of her mother’s favourite folk songs back at the blackbird. After a couple of weeks of this, she is startled to hear it whistle back its own variation on “Sovay”.
At night, she has bad dreams of statues crumbling away into sand, fish floating belly-up in the flooded halls, upper halls empty of birdsong.
The three dots of his typing flash off and on for a solid five minutes; Sarah waits, but in the end, he never does hit SEND on whatever message he’s trying to formulate. She feels guilty; later she starts to type her own message, trying to articulate her misgivings, but her facility for the written word once again seems to be coming up short.
(It always comes up short next to his, if she’s being honest.)
Finally she manages a few words:
The next day, she packs her bag and puts on the lanyard. Takes a deep breath, clears her mind, and lets the secret paths unfold before her.
The First Vestibule. She takes a deep breath, smells damp stone and salt water in the air. Hears the susurrus of the breezes that blow through Halls and Vestibules, hears running water some distance away. Sparrows flutter and twitter somewhere high above.
She smiles. When was the last time she properly smiled?
It’s going to be all right, she tells herself.
He’s there beneath the statue of the Angel Caught in a Rosebush, looking intently up at something in its hand. When he hears her approach, he gestures for her to go softly, and points.
“Look,” he whispers. “A pair of flycatchers have made a nest in its hand.”
And there, indeed, in the curve of the Angel’s palm, is a small bowl of twigs and other detritus, in which a little brown speckled bird sits. Her mate perches on the Angel’s head, giving them a distinctly doubtful look.
“We’ll leave you to it,” Matthew says, and with a polite nod, moves away.
Sarah stands rooted to the spot, staring at the little bird. There’s an inexplicable animal panic rising in her, a bizarre sense of having done something wrong by coming here. She takes a step back, then another, and stumbles; Matthew catches her arm and keeps her from falling. She flinches, but only because she’s become unused to human contact.
“Sarah? Did I hurt you” he asks. Worried. Picking up on her mood immediately.
“No—no, of course not.” His hand on her arm steadies her, and she feels calm starting to return. “I’m … I’ve grown unused to all this.” She puts her hand over his. “Unused to being around people in any kind of … ordinary way.” She laughs, a hollow sound. “Never thought I’d miss being around people.”
They walk together toward the northwest, passing the statue of the Faun, and wandering into the halls where—so long ago now, it seems—she left her first messages for him. ARE YOU MATTHEW ROSE SORENSON? He is and he isn’t, she knows now. He answers to that name and he will publish his book with it, but there’s always the sense that he only wears that name because he has to, like a suit that doesn’t fit particularly well.
Here in the House, he can do without it.
Sarah feels her pulse grow slower and steadier, her breathing calmer. How could she have left this place for so long?
They walk in silence until a statue catches Sarah’s eye. She must have passed it a dozen times before, but it stands in a shadowy alcove that she’s always glanced past it at other things. Today the sunlight reflects off a puddle on the floor and a ragged splash of light illuminates the shape of two figures. One is clearly profoundly ill, gaunt and wasted, and is only able to sit up with the help of the second, who holds a cup to the lips of the first.
Sarah’s breath catches in her throat and she stops. There’s the animal panic again. She wraps her arms around herself tightly, trying to stop whatever this sensation is.
“Sarah?”
“I shouldn’t have come here,” she says.
“Why not? What do you mean?”
She swallows hard, unable to look at him. “I’ve been afraid. That’s why I’ve been staying away. I told myself I was too busy, but what it is—it’s that I’ve been afraid. Afraid of bringing it all with me. Not—not a literal contagion—” though she has to admit, the notion had preyed on her more than once, “—well, not entirely. But the anxiety, the dread, all the wrongness that’s in the world now.”
She sinks to the ground and starts to cry. She hates crying so much, but she can’t stop herself, and knows, somewhere deep in her heart, that Matthew will not judge her for it. And he doesn’t; he sits down beside her and wraps his arms around her. He smells of soap and of all that is warm and comforting, and eventually her hiccuping tears subside.
“I wish,” she says, “that there was some way to bring this into the world. The peace. The quiet of it all. The infinite kindness.”
“But there is,” he says. “That is what you do, is it not?”
How to answer that? “I don’t … I don’t know. I thought I did. That’s why I wanted to be a detective. I believed I was doing good. Maybe I still am. But it seems so futile.”
He’s quiet for a moment, then: “May I show you something?”
“All right.”
He stands and offers his hand; she takes it and scrambles up after him.
He leads her through a series of vestibules that she doesn’t travel often, angling off—according to her compass—to the north. It’s a long walk, but she doesn’t mind. At one point they stop and share a mint cake; he winces at the sweetness, but grudgingly admits that it isn’t terrible, which makes her laugh.
“Here we are.”
Twilight is falling. She’s had to turn on her torch to light their way. He takes it from her and points it upward.
On a wall with no other statues, there stands the statue of a person holding a lantern—Sarah thinks it is a woman, but after a moment’s consideration decides it could just as easily be a man, or neither—walking forward and peering ahead, as if into a deep and profound darkness. And yet they continue forward on their chosen journey, with their lonely light.
Some kind of recognition strikes like a blow to the solar plexus, and Sarah feels tears start to well up again.
“The House contains us all, I think,” he says softly, “in some way or another. Whatever you’re afraid of bringing here—it exists already, hidden amongst the statues. But by the same token, the Beauty of the House and its Kindness are part of the world as well.”
And in a flash Sarah grasps it all with extraordinary clarity. The House as a mirror, but only in the way that the surface of a pond is a mirror. A reflection of all that is, but with hidden depths of its own. Or is it the other way around, the world as a reflection of the House? Or is there really no distinction at all?
She looks up at the figure with the lantern. “They aren’t really alone as all that, are they?”
Matthew casts the torch around the room, picking out other figures. A child playing with a dog. A sculptor standing before an uncarved block of stone. A scribe, surrounded by scrolls and books. “No, not really.” He reaches over and gives her hand a squeeze. “And neither are you.”
Somewhere in the shadows above, a blackbird starts to sing its own version of “Sovay”.