Beyond the fountain is a hall with a lower ceiling, its entrance obscured by a bookshelf and an armchair. He has to move the chair to proceed. The hall is dimly lit with closed doors and as Zachary walks he realizes what is strange about it. It is not the relative lack of books or cats, rather that the doors along the hall have no doorknobs, no handles. Only locks. He pauses at one and pushes but it doesn’t budge. A closer inspection of the wood around the door reveals streaks of black char along the edges. There’s a hint of smoke in the air, like a long-extinguished fire. There’s a spot on the door where the doorknob had been, a vacancy that has been plugged with a piece of newer, unburned wood. Something moves in the shadows at the other end of the hall again, too big to be a cat, but when he looks there’s nothing there.
Zachary walks back the way he came, toward the fountain, and chooses a different hall. It is more brightly lit but “brightly” is a comparative term here. Most of the space has light enough to read by and little more.
He wanders aimlessly, avoiding going back to check on Dorian and mildly annoyed that so much of his mind is occupied by thinking about it (him).
He passes a painting of a candle and he could swear it flickers as he goes by so he investigates and it is not a painting at all but a frame hung on the wall around a shelf, a candle in a silver candlestick set inside and flickering. He wonders who lit it.
A meow behind him interrupts his wondering. Zachary turns to find a Persian cat staring at him, its squished face contorted in a skeptical glare.
“What’s your problem?” he asks the cat.
“Meooorwrrrorr,” the cat says in a hybrid meow-growl implying that it has so many problems it does not even know where to begin.
“I hear you,” Zachary says. He looks back at the candle, dancing in its frame.
He blows it out.
Immediately, the picture frame shudders and moves downward. The whole wall is moving, from the picture frame down, sinking into the floor. It stops when the bottom of the frame reaches the tiled ground, the extinguished candle halting at cat-eye level.
In the vacancy where the frame had been is a rectangular hole in the wall. Zachary looks down at the cat who is more interested in the candle, batting at a curl of smoke.
The opening is large enough for Zachary to step through but there’s not enough light. Most of the light here comes from a fringed lamp on a table across the hall. Zachary pulls the lamp as close to the newfound hole in the wall as its cord will allow, wondering how the electricity works down here and what happens if it goes out.
The lamp consents to coming close to the opening but not all the way in. Zachary rests it on the floor and leans it—the fringe delighting the cat—so it tilts toward the opening. He steps over the not-painting and inside.
His shoes crunch on things on the floor that are known only to the darkness and Zachary thinks maybe it’s better that way. The lamp is doing an admirable job of illuminating but it takes his eyes awhile to adjust. He pushes his borrowed glasses up closer to the bridge of his nose.
He realizes that the room is not getting brighter because everything within it is burned. What he’d guessed to be dust is ash, settled over the remains of what was, and Zachary recognizes precisely what was, before, some indeterminable amount of time before he arrived.
The desk in the center of the room and the dollhouse atop it have been burned into blackness and rubble.
The dollhouse has collapsed onto itself, the roof caving into the space below. Its inhabitants and surroundings have been incinerated and left to memories. The entire room is filled
with charred paper and objects burned beyond recognition.
Zachary reaches up to touch a single star suspended on a somehow intact string from the ceiling and it falls to the floor, lost amongst the shadows.
“Even tiny empires fall,” Zachary says, partly to himself and partly to the cat who peers over the top of the picture frame from the hall.
In response, the cat drops out of sight.
Zachary’s shoes crunch over burned wood and broken bits of a world that was. He walks toward the dollhouse. The hinge that once opened the house like a door is intact and he unlatches it, the hinge breaking with the movement and the facade falling onto the table, leaving the interior exposed.
It is not as thoroughly destroyed as the rest of the room but it is burned and blackened. Bedrooms are indistinguishable from living rooms or the kitchen. The attic has fallen into the floor below and taken most of the roof along with it.
Zachary spots something in one of the burned rooms. He reaches in and lifts it from the ruins.
A single doll. He wipes the soot from it with his sweater and holds it up to the light. It’s a girl doll, maybe the daughter of the original doll family, painted and porcelain. Cracked, but not broken.
Zachary leaves her standing upright in the ashes of the house.
He’d wanted to see it as it was. The house and the town and the city across the sea. The multitude of additions and overlapping narratives. He’d wanted to add something to it, maybe. To make his own mark on the story. He hadn’t realized how much he’d wanted to until faced with the reality that he cannot. He can’t decide if he’s sad or angry or disappointed.
Time passes. Things change.
He looks around the room, the larger room that now houses a single girl standing in the ashes of her world. There are strings where stars or planets may once have hung from the ceiling, little wisps like spiderwebs. He can see now that there is more that has survived whatever conflagration consumed the room. A shipwreck in one corner that was once an ocean, a length of train track along the side of the table, a grandfather clock falling from the window of the main house, and a deer, black from its hooves to its tiny antlers but intact, watching him from a shelf with glassy pinprick eyes.
The walls are covered with former wallpaper curled up in strips like birch bark. Next to the shelf with the deer is a door with no doorknob and he wonders if it is the same one he passed by earlier.