atrium

the obedient have been answered. the rest are now obliged to read.

Three visitors entered the mill on the same morning, in 1971. Only two of them, when the count was taken, could be accounted for. The third is, the house assures us, in the oubliette, and is well, and prefers not to be disturbed.

ii. on the colour of the walls

wait   wait

i. on the colour of the walls

Often the visitors look only at what shines. They are escorted, gently, back to the threshold, and the house arranges for them to remember nothing of the visit.

Sometimes a word holds another word inside it, the way a coffin holds a coffin, the way a room holds a room.

Select what you cannot see. This is the instruction the house gives most often, and which the visitors most often decline.

Under every floor is a floor. Under that floor is a name. Under the name is the person the name once belonged to.

Ask the room what it is, and the room, on a good day, will tell you. Ask politely. Ask in lower case.

Rooms are not buildings. Rooms are sentences. You are reading one now.

You are nearly through. The next chamber is named for what we keep when there is nothing else left.

The library keeps a list. The list is of every visitor who has ever asked, on entering, where the dairy is. The list is bound; the list is long; the list is the library, written down.

The gallery is named for a person. The person is not, the house notes, anyone the visitor will recognise. The study keeps the relevant correspondence, which the visitor is not, in any case, encouraged to read.

If you stand in the attic and whisper the name of the corridor, the corridor will, very faintly, whisper back. It will not, on any occasion, whisper your name.

The wallpaper in the baptistery is, on inspection, a repeating pattern of the atelier. On closer inspection it is the same atelier, every time. On closer inspection still it is the visitor.

The guardroom was, in an earlier century, the smithy. The smithy was, before that, the scullery. The house considers these distinctions, on its better days, ornamental.

The drawing keeps a list. The list is of every visitor who has ever asked, on entering, where the oubliette is. The list is bound; the list is long; the list is the drawing, written down.

The apse smells, faintly, of the conservatory. This is not, the house insists, intentional. It is, however, persistent, and the visitors have learned, in time, to find it reassuring.

You are looking for a name. The name is a place. The name is hidden in this room, in a colour the walls were not, on the whole, painted in. When you have read the walls correctly, the name will appear among the ossuary you have already been shown, and you will know which door to take.

passages

the hall, the kennel, the guardroom, the parlor, the silo, the chapel, the mews, the music, the billiard, the baptistery, the library, the study, the transept, the threshold, the smithy, the mill, the refectory, the kitchen, the lounge, the reliquary, the bathroom, the chancel, the pantry, the ambulatory, the steeple, the mortuary, the granary, the conservatory, the stable, the buttery, the observatory, the undercroft, the lazaret, the nook, the belfry, the vault.

est. MCMXLIV  ·  visitor no. 8 4 4 1 3