The Lesson

The Second Visit

Just at the strike of nine, the boy arrived. Loring had left a note on the door. It said,

LET YOURSELF IN. I AM UPSTAIRS.

The boy came into the house. Two shoes faced him in the narrow passage, two shoes in the very middle. As many things seem hostile when arrayed in strangeness, so one might imagine the dark hall of this house with its shuttered windows to frighten him, but he was not frightened. He stepped over the shoes, went straight through and found the stair and climbed. These were steep steps, of the sort in old colonial houses. He was by no means assured of an easy time, and stopped halfway up at a little window carved in a half-moon. The glass was warped and the street below was bent into an impossible shape. He sat looking through for quite a while until the voice came from above.

— Stan?

— Here on the stairs.

He went up the rest of the way.

Loring was sitting in a room off to the left. At the top of the stairs were three rooms. One was the bedroom, one a workroom, and the third, well, she was in it. That room was for nothing at all, and never had been. Loring and Ezra had never liked the room. There was something wrong with it, but they couldn’t say what. They would occasionally put things in there because they felt something would happen. The things that happened were never anything that one could really know about.

The room was at this time empty save for one chair, and a little table by the window. On that table, sat a box. It was shut, closed with a tiny clasp over which wax had been dripped. The wax was unbroken.

— Hello, said the boy.

Loring looked at him and thought, If you are listening, when I ask you this question, you will respond to something else I have said.

— Did you finish the problems I left you with?

— Is this the room you were talking about?

— What did I say about it? asked Loring.

— You said that it was almost like the room was in this house and in another house, and that was why it didn’t really work to put anything in it, unless you felt like the things in it would also be elsewhere.

It took him a little while to say this and he got it wrong the first time, but the second time said it straight through with a very serious expression.

— That’s right, she said. That’s what I said.

— But why would you sit in a room like that?

She didn’t reply.

— Anyway, I can’t feel it. It just feels like a room.

— The…

— What is in that box?