Mount Terminus by David Grand Page B

indifference with which she looked at everything. She replaced the slips of paper in her pocket, along with the illustrations she had presented to the boy with his meal, and pointed with the same hand to his sandwich and then to the lemonade, indicating to him that he should eat. So he ate, and while he ate, she stood over him and watched him eat, and when Bloom had taken his last bite, he looked up again to Roya’s face to see, this time, a chink of light in the darkness of her eyes. For an instant, he could see a violet-tinged nimbus flare on the circumferences of her pupils, and he knew when she turned and walked away from him and rounded the head of the table, he was meant to follow her.
    They entered the kitchen through a swinging door and walked past halved heads of cabbage arranged on a woodblock, and on they went to the service entrance at the base of the tower, where from a leather pouch nailed to the cellar door Roya removed two flashlights, one for him and one for her, and together they descended below ground. Shining his light onto the pleats of her skirt, Bloom followed her through the archways separating food stores from wine racks, old furniture from hot water tanks, empty space from empty space, and in one of the vacant vaults, in which the dry afternoon heat was trapped and felt most oppressive, in which the hiss and groan of the plumbing sounded most monstrous, Roya stopped and stood before a brick pillar wider than any of the other supports that bolstered the load of the villa. She paused for a moment to look at Bloom. She stood very still with the light shining up the middle of her blouse and onto her chin; then, for the first time Bloom had ever seen it happen, Roya smiled. She smiled not a radiant smile, or a smile that signified hope or delight. She smiled as she would if she were asleep and dreaming of something colorful and airy. And with this listless expression from which glistened a thin sliver of her teeth, she reached out her free hand, pressed it against the bricks, and, with only the slightest force of her weight leaning onto the pillar’s exterior, its face gave way and swung inward to reveal at its crack the hinges of a door. When the door had opened fully, there before Bloom was a dark shaft.
    Roya stepped back now and stretched out her free hand. Twice she pressed at the air with her palm. Then a third time. At which point the boy stepped inside and pointed his flashlight upward. The dim bulb cast a cone of orange incandescence onto the rungs of a wooden ladder that so far as Bloom could see climbed into a thicker darkness. He turned to look back at Roya, but she was no longer there. Into the darkness of the cellar, she had silently withdrawn. Into the darkness, she had noiselessly stepped away as only she could. The boy thought for a moment he hadn’t the courage to climb the ladder to see what secret was at its top. But as soon as he placed his flashlight in his trouser pocket, whatever trepidation he felt was overtaken by curiosity, and in no time at all he had scaled high enough so that when he looked down to see what progress he had made, darkness filled the space below him. At the ladder’s end, he arrived at a door, behind which he anticipated finding a corridor like one of those he had seen in the diagrams presented to him by Roya in the dining room, one that would take him on a Thesean journey through internal passageways, but when he lifted the door’s lever and pushed it away from him, instead of encountering what he saw imprinted on the parchment, he was met by a soft expulsion of stale air and the sight of an enclosed room whose ceiling slanted with the pitch of the roof.
    There were no windows here, yet, strangely, the space filled with a dull gray glow that misted out into the chamber and clung to him as would a fine silt. He stepped into the pall, and with each footfall forward, the floorboards creaked with vague, cacophonous sounds, not unlike those a