The House on Gossamer Street

This happened to me many years ago, but I just can’t get it out of my head. Maybe writing it down will help, so here it goes.

My divorce had been finalized a few weeks before all of this happened. There were no hard feelings, no drama. To make a long story short, we had been one of those couples. Barely out of high school when we tied the knot, didn’t really know what to do with our lives, and once we figured that out, we realized our newfound directions didn’t align. We put it all on the table and agreed that it would be best to make a clean cut, move on, and not needlessly complicate things.

My ex had always been content staying in our little hometown. So had I, until my parents decided to sell their house and move to Hawaii out of the blue. It came as a surprise when they told me, but the more we talked about it, the less surprising it became. They had spent their entire lives in the same place, doing ‘what one does’. Worked 9 to 5 jobs day in day out, raised two kids, saw them graduate, get married, start lives of their own. Now that both my brother and I were out of the house, there was no reason to wait for retirement to pursue their own dreams.

That’s when I realized that I didn’t want to live my parents’ life. That I had ambitions I didn’t want to put on the backburner for decades. That there was more to life than going with the flow. I went back to school for another, more specialized degree in my field. During this time, when I spent most of my waking hours either at work or studying, the shaky foundation of my marriage began to show. My ex never once complained about my busy schedule. We didn’t talk about children anymore. Or much at all. We slowly, silently settled into separate lives, each pursuing their own goals, hoping it would all fall into place somehow. Well, it didn’t. In the end, there was nothing left to do but pull the plug. And so we did.

The new degree opened up new career prospects in other parts of the country since my specialization was in high demand on the opposite coast. That hadn’t been the deciding factor when I picked the program, but it had certainly added to the appeal. With nothing tying me down in my hometown anymore, I was ready and anxious to begin my new life. My bags had been packed weeks before I signed the final papers and I just couldn’t wait to jump into action.

I rented a small furnished apartment, six flight hours away from home. Nothing fancy, just a temporary solution to crash between interviews and house viewings.

I already had several properties on my shortlist when the realtor told me about a new listing that fit my criteria. At first I was skeptical because she mentioned a large garden and a square footage that sounded well above my budget. The location was interesting enough when I looked up the address – 23 Gossamer Street. A well-kept neighborhood, halfway between two potential jobs, and not too out of the way for the others. The price turned out to be lower than expected as well, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to take a look. Since I had some downtime before the next round of interviews, I scheduled a viewing for the following day.

The realtor was already waiting for me when I arrived. Her prim and proper sports car stood out like a sore thumb under the knobby tree that had scattered most of its orange-brown canopy across the driveway and porch. It wasn’t hard to see why the property wasn’t as expensive as I first thought. The driveway, the garage, and the porch definitely needed work, and I expected the ‘large garden’ to be more of a ‘large, overgrown wilderness’ as well. The house itself could have used some fresh paint, but other than that, it was in fairly good shape.

After a brief exchange of pleasantries, the realtor unlocked the front door and I followed her inside. The strangest feeling washed over me as soon as I set foot in the hallway. A sense of nostalgia, although it took me a moment to figure out that’s what it was. It felt like coming home to my parents’ house; far more familiar than any place on the other side of the country should have been. The hallway was almost identical to my childhood home. The same oakwood paneling, the same off-white carpet on the stairs and their small landing, the same layout with the long stretch to the kitchen archway. The floorboards were more worn, and the wallpaper was different altogether. Patterns like this hadn’t been popular in decades, and yet it was still oddly familiar. When the realtor listed the ‘minor upgrades’ the house needed, the penny finally dropped. I did know this wallpaper. This was exactly how my parents’ hallway had looked before they had remodeled the stairs and replaced the old floors. I hadn’t even been in school at the time, but the memory was now clear as day.

“My parents used to have the same wallpaper,” I blurted out when I noticed the realtor had gone down the hallway and was waiting for me by the kitchen arch. I hadn’t listened to her, but she was probably wondering why I stood there like a statue and stared at the wall.

“Older clients. They rarely keep up with home design trends.” She smiled and invitingly gestured to the kitchen. “Nothing a fresh coat of paint can’t fix!”

The kitchen was identical to my mother’s. She had replaced the heavy wooden cabinets with modern ones years ago, but everything else was the same. A bulky island counter in the center, faux-mediterranean tiles, even lace curtains with a palm tree pattern just like my mom’s. Through the window, I spotted my old swing set in the garden. Same place, same colors, although the paint was cracking and peeling off, and the garden was just as overgrown as expected. My father would have had a heart attack and whipped out his shears, in that order. I just stared in disbelief.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the realtor’s voice jolted me out of my preoccupation. “I’ve been waiting for this call all day.” She waved a buzzing phone toward the archway. “I have to take this. Please, feel free to look around in the meantime. If you have any questions, I’ll be right outside on the porch.”

I tried the patio door behind the dining table, identical to the one I had done my homework on all through grade school. It was locked, but through the glass I saw a deflated kiddie pool in the unmown grass. The colors were faded and it was filled with rainwater and dead leaves, but other than that it looked identical to the one my brother had gotten for his 8th birthday.

Nothing was special about the layout or materials in the kitchen and hallway, other than being out of fashion. There were probably hundreds of houses with similar interiors, all across the country. The same could be said about the kiddie pool. I’m sure at least two or three of my classmates had the same one back then. But seeing all these things gathered in one place was a little uncanny.

For a while I stood there, stared through the patio door, and tried to remember if my parents had renovated the hallway before or after my brother’s 8th birthday. If the pool was already or not yet supposed to be there. I couldn’t figure it out, but what difference did it make? This was strange either way – and oddly intriguing.

Instead of pondering the garden any longer, I took the realtor up on her offer to look around by myself. I headed back to the hallway and went upstairs. If this house really had the exact same layout as my parents’ home, their bedroom should be to the left, facing the garden. To the right, facing the street, should be the two smaller rooms – my brother’s and mine. I expected to find exactly that upstairs, but I was still bewildered when I actually did. The same floorboards, the same paneling, the same doors. The small window across from the stairs even had the crochet curtain my mother had never liked. The only reason she had never taken it down was to keep the peace with my grandmother, who had made the kitschy thing and would have thrown a fit if it disappeared.

Even if I had brushed off everything else as a series of strange coincidences, this would have been the end of it. Was it unlikely that the previous homeowner had the same taste as my parents and therefore bought the same things? Yes. Unlikely, but not impossible. Wallpapers, tiles, and pools were sold in stores. My grandmother’s crochet curtain certainly wasn’t. It was her own uniquely awful design with ladybugs and – for some unfathomable reason – monkeys, and she took great pride in its originality. My parents surely hadn’t taken the dreadful thing to Hawaii, but what were the odds that it had ended up here after they sold the house?

Now I had to know. I had to see ‘my’ room. Looking back, it seems odd that the uncanny resemblance didn’t creep me out more; that I was eager to delve deeper into it. Maybe a part of me thought that I had been given a second chance to say farewell. My parents’ decision to sell their house had been sudden, at least to me. There hadn’t really been an opportunity to visit my old room, wallow in memories for a while, and come to terms with my childhood home being gone for good.

There wasn’t much to see in ‘my’ room since it was empty, but other than that I looked exactly the way I remembered. Blueish-grey carpet, the kind parents put in kids’ rooms because it’s easy to clean. The faded outline of a poster on the wall where my bed had been. Double windows facing the street. When I went closer, I noticed that the frame had a stain just where seven years old me had put a sticker from a cornflakes box. I peered outside and saw the realtor in the driveway. She was still talking on the phone, wedged between her ear and her shoulder, and flipped through a folder in a briefcase on top of her car.

For a while, I absently let my gaze drift across the street outside. The view was different from my real room, but not so different that it broke the momentary illusion of being there. I thought back to neighbors I hadn’t seen in years, tried to picture their cars and front yards and Mrs. Ottman’s annoying little Yorkshire terrier that had yapped at me from the window every day when I came back from school.

Once I had my fill of reminiscences, I decided to check out my brother’s room. There would probably not be any more furniture than in mine, but the realtor was still busy, so I could as well take a peek. When I turned to leave, however, something strange caught my eye: a door. Not the door I had entered through. No, there was a second, narrower door next to it, just across from where my bed used to be. This door had definitely not been in my real room. It couldn’t have been because behind that wall was the staircase. I’d have noticed an oddity like a door that opened midway in the air when I went upstairs.

Maybe the layout wasn’t identical to my childhood home, after all. Maybe my perception was skewed because I expected everything to be the same. Would I really have noticed a few steps more from the stairs to ‘my’ room? Maybe there was enough space for a closet. The narrow door didn’t look like a closet door, but that explanation made the most sense.

I was prepared to be disappointed when I turned the knob. There’d be just a closet. The illusion of visiting my old room one last time would be broken. But I had already said my goodbyes, so what did it matter? I opened the door, looked inside, looked again, blinked once, blinked twice, then stepped back in confusion. There was no closet. No dangling old coat hangers, no rail, no dusty shelving. And what was there instead didn’t make any sense at all.

The room was enormous. It couldn’t possibly have fit there. Not between the stairs and my room, not inside this house as a whole. If anything, the opposite was true. The house – complete with garden, garage, and driveway – could comfortably have fit inside this space. Twice if stacked on top of each other. The walls were impossibly tall. On the bottom, they were lined with the same paneling as the hallway, but the upper part didn’t have my parents’ old wallpaper. Instead, it was painted in a pale pistachio green. No pattern or stains, no windows, nothing to break the monotony. The floor reminded me of the hallways in my old high school; speckled grey vinyl, worn out by decades worth of harried crowds. However, the few doors – haphazardly placed and branching off in different directions – looked neither like the other doors in the house nor like classroom doors. They were all the same though. Off-white industrial doors with black safety handles, the kind often used in basements.

Once my initial confusion had worn off, I briefly thought about checking the other side of the wall again. But I didn’t. Even now, so many years later, I have no idea what possessed me to go through the door instead.

My steps didn’t echo when I made my way toward the center. At first, I didn’t notice. I thought the floor felt weird under my feet, but that only blended into the general weirdness of this place. Nothing about it made sense and it became more puzzling the longer I looked around. The dimensions and doors said ‘warehouse’, but if that’s what it was, why had somebody bothered to panel and paint it? What would anyone want to store here anyway? And how? Wouldn’t the basement or garage be a more obvious choice than a room only accessible through a narrow door in a second floor bedroom? But then, who knew what was behind all the industrial doors?

The air felt stale and stuffy, more the closer I moved toward the far wall. It made me cough, and that’s when I noticed the echo was missing. I paid more attention to my steps now and figured out what was so weird about the floor. It looked like a school hallway, but it felt like walking on hard stone tiles. Something one might find in a church or a museum – and should have amplified the sound of my steps, not silenced it altogether. The awareness of this dichotomy further added to the strangeness, but it didn’t stop me from approaching the two doors straight ahead. They were right next to each other, not quite centered, and I don’t know what drew me to them. To my left, there were three perfectly centered doors, but for some reason, they struck me as vastly less interesting.

I figured my excursion would be cut short here, but to my surprise, the first door I reached was not locked. It was heavy, but opened easily, albeit with a slight creak; one that spoke to rare use, not a lack of maintenance. The simple act of opening a door felt weirdly normal. In a place that defied all logic, I had braced myself for another unusual discovery. And yet there was none. Not about the door itself nor the whitewashed hallway it revealed. It was narrower than the enormous hall; perfectly normal hallway dimensions. The fluorescent lights on the ceiling cast a perfectly normal light. At the end of the hallway, a perfectly normal distance away, was another perfectly normal industrial door. My steps sounded perfectly normal on the bare concrete floor when I headed there, and I expected to find a perfectly normal stairwell behind it. What else could there be?

The overwhelming normalcy of my new surroundings momentarily made me forget that none of this could possibly be here, be real. Although the hallway by itself might have fit into a single-family home, there was no way it could be attached to the huge room. Still, in my mind, it only made sense that there’d be another way to access it from the ground floor. Whether it was really a storage space or something else, a narrow door in a child’s bedroom couldn’t be the only way in and out.

There were no stairs behind the door. The room I found – was it even a room? – was vast, empty, and dark. It reminded me of a parking garage. More precisely, it reminded me of the garage underneath the office building I had worked in for the past eight years. I almost expected to see my car somewhere in the murky nothingness between the thick, square concrete columns. Unlike a real garage, this space didn’t feel like it was underground though. The air was just as stuffy and stale as before, the temperature was no different either. No drafts, no lingering scent of gasoline and fumes, no puddles on the floor. However, there was a faint mechanical humming coming from somewhere. Not that I ever consciously paid attention to the ambient noise of a parking garage, but this sound felt right, like it belonged here.

Perplexed, I looked around the vast, empty decks. It was too dark to see the far walls. For all I knew, the space extended endlessly to both sides. What did stand out was the lack of distinguishing features. In a normal garage, the columns would have prominently displayed numbers to show which level I was on. There’d have been markers to indicate handicapped spots and long-term parking, and signs pointing to the nearest emergency exit. Here, everything looked alike – with one faint, green-glowing exception straight ahead. The halo of a sign I hoped would say ‘EXIT’ when I walked toward it.

I don’t know why I did. Instinct, perhaps. Rationally, I should have turned around and gone back to the whitewashed hallway. Back through the oversized, overdecorated pistachio-green hall, back to what looked like my old room. I could have asked the realtor about the narrow door and the space behind it right then and there. But the thought that she was probably done with her phone call by now, that she’d be waiting or looking for me in the house, didn’t even cross my mind.

The faint green glow did emanate from an EXIT sign, but the door beneath it didn’t fit in a parking garage. It was a wooden door; functional, plain, with signs of wear, but not dirty or damaged. When I opened it, I immediately knew where I had seen such doors before. The fifth floor of the community college in my hometown. The exact hallway where the classes for my degree had taken place. I had spent two evenings out of every week here for several months. Naturally, I hadn’t given any thought to the doors – who does that? – but the memory was fresh enough to know that every detail matched. Brown carpet tiles meant to muffle the sound of a thousand footsteps, plain doors spaced evenly along nondescript walls, and those square white lamps every public building seems to have.

Now, parking garages are rarely noisy or crowded. Even when they are busy in the morning or at the end of the work day, people are spaced out and preoccupied with their own business. You get the jingling of car keys, sounds of starting engines, thuds from car doors, maybe a beep here and there when the ticket machine won’t accept somebody’s coins. For the most part, it’s just not a lively place and it barely registers if you’re alone. College hallways are the opposite. There’s always something to let you know there are other people. Chatter from around a corner, muffled voices behind classroom doors, latecomers rushing down hallways in search of the right room. Not here.

This eerily accurate copy of the college hallway was silent. Even the mechanical humming from the garage didn’t resonate here. It was still there, but considering I was still standing by the door, it should have been louder. And yet the sound seemed to end right at the threshold, as if it hit an invisible soundproof wall.

Puzzled, I entered the hallway and slowly went from door to door. None looked like an exit, but I tried the knobs anyway. Again, I don’t know why. Obviously, this wasn’t the way out. Turning around would have made a lot more sense. But apparently I wasn’t in the mindset to take a hint. Neither knowing that I was in a place that shouldn’t exist nor the bizarre soundproof quality of it made me reconsider my actions. I turned knob after knob, none of which made the slightest sound, and simply moved on to the next when the door didn’t open. At the same time, I also felt suffocated by the silence. I never thought the absence of something could be so overwhelming. Every time I tried a doorknob, I was hoping for a click and got none. The urgent need to hear something, anything, took over and my attempts to get a sound out of these doors became more frantic. I rattled the knobs, pushed, pulled, even tried to kick one, but the silence persisted. And yet at no point did I think about simply abandoning my quest and going back through the still open door behind me.

All my hopes rested on the door straight ahead. In the real college hallway it led to the elevators and a stairwell. I had no reason to believe the same applied here – after all, the real hallway was nowhere near a parking garage either – but it was my best shot. For some unfathomable reason, I slowly worked my way toward it instead of skipping the other doors. When I finally reached my goal, I found it locked just like every door I had tried before. And all I felt was frustration. Not panic, anger, or even despair. Frustration. It didn’t deter me from continuing my inspection on the other side of the hallway though.

The second door on the left opened. I don’t recall whether it made a sound or not. As soon as I felt the knob move, nothing else mattered. I stumbled forward before I could even see what lay ahead.

After being in the fairly well-illuminated hallway for what felt like hours, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dimness in here. The room was oblong and narrow, but smaller than the one I had come from. A generic hallway, the kind one could find in countless basements. It didn’t remind me of any place in particular, and thinking back, that was easily the oddest aspect of it. I didn’t ponder it though. Standing there, I only felt a deep sense of accomplishment for having solved the puzzle of the college hallway. I didn’t even try if I could open the door again when it fell shut behind me. It should have worried me, considering I was now cut off from the light source and my escape route, but it just didn’t. In fact, I gave it no thought at all.

There were no other doors here, nor was there anything else. Just plain plaster walls forming a long L-shape. I had made it halfway to the far corner – surely, something of note was waiting just around it – when I picked up the faint mechanical humming again. After being in what had felt like a sensory deprivation chamber before, hearing it again was a relief. What could it be? It had to come from some sort of machine, yes, but what did it do? It sounded huge, and I mean huge. Something one might find in a maintenance hangar for military aircraft or at a shipyard – a freight elevator, perhaps. I don’t know why my mind went there. I’ve never been to either and don’t know what the machines there sound like. It just seemed to fit the excruciatingly slow intervals of the humming, as much as something I had no point of reference for could seem ‘fitting’.

I stopped when I reached the end of the hallway to gather my thoughts. There was a door in the short dead end, it was slightly open, and there was a light source – albeit a faint one – behind it. I should have been relieved at the sight, but since I had never thought about the possibility of being trapped in this dark hallway, I barely acknowledged it. What I found far more important was the machine. The mechanism. Whatever it was that made the sound. Maybe it was a maintenance system for this whole place. Maybe there’d be workers, at least a supervisor, nearby. Somebody who could explain what this place was, how it fit between my room and the stairs, what purpose it served. I had to know. There was no way I’d leave without an explanation. Knowing what all of this was, how it came to be, meant everything to me.

I have no idea what triggered my sudden obsession. I didn’t own the house that contained this inexplicable space, nor did I plan to buy it. My thoughts didn’t revolve around the possible benefits of having an extradimensional maze at my disposal. I didn’t care what one could do with it. All that mattered to me was uncovering the reason it had been built in the first place. Its true purpose.

I was disappointed when I entered the room around the corner and didn’t find any kind of machinery. The room wasn’t as oversized as the others, but still too large for the few items in it; old furniture, including an old sofa and a wooden TV stand with a TV that showed only static. It was the light source I had seen from outside, but definitely not the source of the humming. Looking around, I also spotted a rickety garden table in a corner, covered with a red-white wax cloth, surrounded by four mismatched folding chairs. The sight momentarily jolted me out of my preoccupation. It was oddly familiar, but it took me a moment to figure out why.

This was the basement where Sam, my best friend in grade school, had celebrated an improvised birthday party once. The original plan had been to go to a waterpark, but due to a heavy storm, the park was closed that day. Sam’s parents had moved heaven and hell to set up an adequate party in the basement instead; pizza, boardgames, cartoons on the old TV. The sight of the red-white wax cloth brought back memories that hadn’t resurfaced in years. Me winning a game of UNO, and Sam’s little cousin throwing a tantrum about it. The faint scent of stale cigarette smoke in the air – the basement was the one room in the house where Sam’s dad was allowed to smoke. High-pitched voices of excited cartoon characters echoed in the back of my head, and I could almost taste the oily, soggy, delicious pizza we had eaten. Although everyone would have preferred the waterpark, we still had a good time.

I wasn’t in the mood to reminisce though. In fact, I was getting more upset the longer I took in my surroundings. There were no doors here. Sam’s basement was a dead end. Thinking back, I should have been really worried at this point. After all, I didn’t know if the door to the college hallway would open again. I should have rushed back there, should have tried to get out, but I didn’t. I stepped behind the sofa – hands on the backrest, eyes on the flickering TV screen – and took a deep, smoke-flavored breath to compose myself.

The curtain! There was a dark-red curtain in the far corner, obscured by shadows in the murky void behind the TV. In the real basement, it had covered a shelf where Sam’s dad kept his collection of science magazines. We had discovered them during the party and dismissed the stacked crates as ‘boring’, in no small part because we had hoped for a secret stash of candy and chips. Although it felt like I had explored the strange space for hours and should probably have been hungry by now, my only thought was that this might be a way through. A way to get closer to the source of the humming.

I rushed to the curtain, pulled it open, and immediately felt relief wash over me. Before me lay a long, brightly lit hallway that seemed to stretch on forever in both directions. Grey rubber flooring, white walls, interspersed with light-blue door frames and lacquered white doors. It reminded me of the hospital where my brother had spent a week after his appendectomy, but that didn’t mean much. Hospitals very much look alike, and nothing in this hallway pointed to a specific one – or even identified it as a hospital to begin with. It didn’t really smell like one either. The scent in the air was strong and chemical, a potpourri of cleaners with names like ‘Lemon Fresh’ or ‘Ocean Breeze’, but the distinct undertones of disinfectant were missing. Still, I mentally filed it as a ‘hospital hallway’ although it could as well have been some kind of laboratory or research facility.

What consumed most of my attention was the fact that the humming was louder here. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but I thought I could feel the floor vibrate in its slow, steady rhythm under my feet. I had to be close to the source. Not so close that I’d find my answer right behind a door, but I had no doubt that one of them would lead me there eventually. But which one? There were so many and they all looked the same. No signs, no room numbers, nothing that made any of them a better choice than the others. Stumped, I let my gaze drift down the hallway, tried to count the doors, but lost track between the swirling images of impossibly large machinery and unidentifiable industrial complexes in my mind.

It didn’t matter how many doors there were, I then told myself. I’d try them all anyway. And so I just stepped forward and pressed down the handle of the nearest door, right across from where I had entered the hallway.

I was almost certain that at least some of the doors would be locked, but my first attempt was crowned with success. The door opened easily, as if it had no weight at all, and I rushed through without hesitation. Before my inner eye, I could already see the machine – a vast mechanism that filled out an inconceivably large space; majestic cogs and gears toiling away in their slow, steady rhythm, glistening oil dripping on steel floors, steam and smoke, a web of cables and conveyor belts woven all through the unfathomable mechanical glory. The living, beating heart of the machine, burning to reveal its magnificent truth to me!

What I found was nothing like my imagination. Blueish-grey carpet, the kind parents put in kids’ rooms because it’s easy to clean. The faded outline of a poster on the wall where my bed had been. Double windows facing the street. It took me a moment to realize that I was back in the house that resembled my childhood home, back in the room that looked just like mine. Up to this point, the thought of turning around hadn’t occurred to me. Now it consumed me, but I was too perplexed to act upon it.

“I’m so sorry!” The realtor’s voice sounded like it came from far away, but when I finally managed to turn my head, I saw that she had just entered the room. “I didn’t expect it to take this long.” She looked at her watch. I glanced to the corner next to her, fearful the narrow door would be gone. It was still there. Closed although I hadn’t shut it. “I have another appointment at 4… Hm, no, I can’t reschedule, but if you’re interested in this property, we can…”

I shook my head, baffled at her words. How could so little time have passed? I was certain that I had been in the maze for hours, but apparently it wasn’t even 4 pm yet. “No, it’s fine,” I heard myself say. I proceeded to tell her that I had made up my mind and thought the apartment I had seen a week prior was right for me. She smiled, nodded, and said she had a feeling I’d go for something ‘more contemporary’. The conversation felt unreal and to the day, I still don’t know why I said what I said.

I closed the deal on the apartment shortly after and tried not to think about the house on Gossamer Street. The move and the new job I started during it kept me occupied with more important, more tangible matters, so it wasn’t difficult to put something that barely felt real aside. Months later, when I had settled in and my life calmed down a bit, I began to think back to the house more often. Some nights, when I was lying in bed after a long work day, I could hear the humming in the back of my head. Questions came creeping back into my mind in that half-conscious state just before falling asleep. Had I imagined the maze behind the narrow door? What in the world was its purpose? I usually dozed off before my ruminations yielded any answers, but in my dreams I often wandered those strange, humming hallways.

Sometimes I caught myself driving by the house on the way home. More often than not, it was completely out of the way, but I kept telling myself that it wasn’t that much of a detour and I could as well satisfy my curiosity. The house never changed through the years. Nobody repaired the roof or fixed the driveway. There was never a car parked outside nor were there lights behind the windows even though I often drove by late in the evening. A few times, when I turned off the car and listened closely, I heard the mechanical humming, felt the faint vibrations of the machine’s slow, steady rhythm from afar.

During this time, I remarried and moved out of the apartment. We had been talking about children for a while, and when I was offered a promotion that came with a transfer to my company’s main office in another city, we used that as an opportunity to upsize. I caught myself wondering if the house on Gossamer Street was still on the market, but ultimately didn’t look it up. A shorter commute was part of the reason for our move, after all. We ended up buying a townhouse about an hour away, but the distance didn’t stop me from visiting Gossamer Street every now and then. The visits became less frequent, of course, but I just couldn’t stay away altogether. As if something compelled me to check if the house was still there. If there was still a chance to find answers.

Six years ago, after I hadn’t visited in several months, I found the house gone. The old tree with its knobby roots was the only thing left on the lot. At first, I was paralyzed. I sat in my car and stared in disbelief, pricked my ears for the humming – to no avail. The house couldn’t be gone. It had always been here. Unchanged, ever waiting. Was this really the right address? Maybe I had taken a wrong turn – there had been roadwork a few blocks back – and ended up on the wrong street. When the first shock had worn off, I got out of the car and crossed the street to take a closer look. Other than the tree, there was nothing to look at though. Orange-brown mud, scattered weeds, here and there some debris from broken, faux-mediterranean tiles that blended into the ground. I still didn’t hear the humming, still didn’t feel it in the ground. I don’t know how long I stood there and stared, trying to grasp that this was real, that the house was gone, that I would never find any answers.

It was the yapping of a small dog that woke me from this trance-like state. I whirled around and saw an older woman on the porch of the house across the street. She was fumbling with her purse and held a Yorkshire terrier with a red bow on her arm.

“Excuse me!” I shouted as I darted toward her. “Please, wait! I just have a question!”

She stopped rifling through her purse and turned around, then regarded me with a puzzled expression. “Yes? How can I help you?”

“What happened to the house?” I frantically pointed across the street as if it wasn’t obvious which house I meant. “It was here last time I drove by…”

I trailed off and she shrugged. “It was torn down about two, maybe three months ago.” The tiny dog growled at me. “About time, if you ask me. I heard somebody bought it a few years back, but they never moved in or fixed a thing. There was probably mold on every wall, and it attracted rats, raccoons, all sorts of vermin.” She reached into her purse again and this time, she found the keys. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“Thank you,” I muttered. There was no point in asking more questions. It didn’t matter who had bought or demolished it. It was gone, truly gone, and the finality of that deeply disturbed me.

I went back to my car, drove home, tried to process the profound sense of loss I felt, but to the day, it never left me. Even though I have everything I could want – a good career, a loving spouse, two beautiful children – I just can’t let go. Every single night, I’m walking the strange hallways in my dreams. Every single night, I come close to finding the source of the humming. The truth, the heart of the machine. And every single night, I wake up just when I step through the white lacquered door.