Things keep getting stranger here. In fact, they are now positively surreal.

If you’ll remember from my last post, Dan’s packaging device was having some unintended consequences.

Those consequences have broadened out a great deal in the past few days.

It happened last night. It was around six o’clock in the evening when Dan knocked at my door. He looked shaken and pale, as he often does now. He asked me if I had much in the way of woodworking tools. I said I didn’t, but my father-in-law did and I could certainly get some from him. Dan said that wouldn’t be necessary. Specifically he was looking for sealant, or maybe soundproofing kits. Strips of rubber, things like that, and maybe a few boards and nails if we had any.

I said I had a few things along those lines (having just redone the whole house), and asked why he needed them. He just shrugged. I went and got them from the garage, and said I could help with whatever he was trying to do. After all, I’d done this a few times in the past weeks.

He looked me over and said, “Are you sure?” He seemed to imply that it was a question I should seriously consider.

I said I was pretty sure, yes.

“All right, then,” he said, and he led me over to his house.

I asked what we were sealing up. “A door,” he said as we mounted his porch. Before he opened the front door he stopped and glanced at me over his shoulder, like he hadn’t made up his mind about something. Then he shook his head and we went in.

I immediately noticed something was different when we entered the foyer. Something in the way light moved throughout the front room. It doesn’t make sense to say it out loud, but it was almost like the light itself wasn’t sure which direction to move in. I think Dan knew it was there, but he didn’t remark on it. He just led me through his house to the stairs. It seemed to take a very long time, more than any walk to the stairs should.

I forgot it as I heard a noise from somewhere upstairs. It sounded like a person, but they were terribly distressed. “Is that Bridget?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “That’s my problem of the day.” And we continued on into the house, which, to my consternation, just kept going. It was as though the house kept expanding, and that feeling of offness kept intensifying with each step I took.

Now, I’m no expert in architecture, but there are obviously basics. There are floors, walls, and ceilings, and though they come in all kinds of shapes and colors they all generally behave the same way. But the ones in Dan’s house didn’t seem to, or at least didn’t anymore. As we walked and I looked at, say, a stretch of ceiling, I got the overpowering, queasy sense that it was not a ceiling but a wall, and I was standing on the ceiling or another wall. Then I would take another step and it would be a ceiling again. There were still other strange elements to the house. I had the feeling that if I walked towards a corner then it would just keep moving away, further and further, and I’d never reach it. Shadows seemed to group at the edges of the rooms, like mutinous crowds waiting to attack, and in other places the rooms were queerly lit, as though there was a light nearby that I could not see. It all made me somewhat nauseous.

I asked Dan if he had opened up some windows, because things certainly felt pretty spacious here now. He grimly said he hadn’t, and we went up the stairs.

The second floor was now even odder than the ground floor. I hadn’t spent much time up in the second floor before, except when I went to see Dan’s office, but now it seemed as though there were more hallways than I remembered, and more rooms than I could count, and sometimes I saw tangles of stairways hidden in the corners of the halls. I almost wondered if Dan had a third floor he never told me about, but then I doubted myself as I wasn’t sure if the stairs went up or down. As we moved my sense of space slipped away, but I was almost certain that if what I was seeing was true then the top portion of his house was much larger than the bottom. Eventually I realized I hadn’t seen a window that opened on the outside yet at all. But if that was true, where was the light coming from? Because I hadn’t seen any lamps on yet.

Most of the rooms were empty. I nodded towards one and nervously mentioned that I didn’t remember that being there.

“I don’t, either,” said Dan. “They keep appearing.”

“What do?” I asked.

He stopped to think. “Rooms,” he said. “Rooms, and hallways, and doors. And angles of walls or floors that I’ve never seen before. Angles my eyes can’t even translate. They’ve been appearing for the past few days.”

“Have they?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Bridget is pleased.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. She likes the storage space.”

“Oh. I see. But you’re not?”

“No. Not at all.”

I could understand why. Not only did it no longer feel like a home up here, it no longer felt anything like a building at all, at least not in any recognizable sense. It felt more like a maze, or perhaps like the house had become lodged in some sort of greater architecture, where rooms and hallways yawned open in sections of the house you weren’t even aware existed before. The overall sense was one of a steady opening, like a chasm at your feet cracking wide. You felt as though you might tumble at any moment and never be found again.

We came to a darkened hallway. (After how long? Minutes? Hours? Months? I wasn’t sure.) Like many of the others, I couldn’t recall seeing it before. Mean little candelabra lamps were set along its vast walls, dribbling out puny slivers of light. At the far end of the hall was a door, and from that door was coming a sound like someone was crying. Sometimes it was a soft weeping, but other times it was a sound of painful agony, like they were being tortured.

Dan started off down the hallway towards it without a word. I hesitated, and then followed.

My sense of vertigo came and went as we made our way towards the door. It felt as though the hallway was worming through space, twisting around and around. One moment you were walking on your side, the next with your feet in the air, the next along the wall, and then you were right again. But the door at the end of the hallway stayed anchored. It was like we were spinning down to it in a whirlpool.

We finally came to the door. Dan made no attempt to open it, to my relief. The crying was very loud now, as though the person was begging to be let out. I knew this even though I cannot recall hearing any words in their sobs. Dan ignored it, and simply knelt and took out the caulking and the sealant we’d brought, and began sealing up the cracks in the side.

I asked if he knew who was crying. He said he did not, and did not want to. He simply wanted some peace and quiet to think.

I began to help him seal the door. Though the crying never wavered, there was a shadow at the crack of light at the bottom of the door as though someone was standing right on the other side, pacing back and forth a little. There was a snuffling sound from the bottom. I was reminded of a dog catching a scent. I shifted away, hoping that whatever it was it did not smell me. And still the crying continued.

We sealed up the door and nailed it shut. We did not discuss why, nor did it occur to us to do so. When it was done the crying was muffled and whatever had been trying to smell us had given up in frustration. Then we walked back through the hallway to his first floor, and then down to the backyard.

I asked what that was.

“A door,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of them, recently. They come and go. That one seems more permanent, though. I just couldn’t stand the crying anymore.”

I asked him what was causing it, as I’d never heard of anything like it in my life. He said he thought it was the machine, somehow. He felt it was now unpackaging more than apples, as he’d feared, and it certainly wasn’t keeping things contained in the steel and rubber box. Instead it was making connections.

I asked what sort of connections, and he said he thought they were connections to the places the other apples had been coming from. When it had pulled those apples through, somehow it had made openings. And now it was making more.

“Openings in what?” I asked.

He waved his hand through the air, as though to say, “Everything.”

I goggled over this for a bit. “Why has it picked your house, though?”

“I don’t think it has. I think there are doors opening and closing in all sort of places. In the middle of the ground under the machine, maybe. I found one on the trunk of my tree, but it’s gone now. But it’s pushing on the house the hardest. Pushing at the edges of things. Making things… stretch.”

I asked what could be done.

“Well,” he said, “I just need to make some adjustments. That’s all. And now that I have peace and quiet, I can do that.”

I said that was good. Hopefully peace and quiet would make this as speedy as possible. He said he hoped so. Then he walked me out.

I think I may call my father-in-law anyway. Maybe that door needs more layers.