Terminal 8
Greetings, old friend. I hope this letter finds you well—which is to assume that it finds you at all given the unpredictability of your travels and the difficulties you suffer as a result of your relentless curiosity.
Similarly, best wishes to your most splendid travelling companion, Miss Constance-Bay.
Caladon has changed much since you left, indeed it feels as though a sort of madness has lifted. The Apollonions and Pythonites have gone to ground, moving to those hidden areas of the city and dwelling there at the very edges of one’s vision, where one should hope they’ll stay.
But now I wish to tell you of an adventure of my own, if you will first remove from yourself all scepticism surrounding my ability to have an adventure—which is, though greatly diminished from your own—possible, if not probable.
And so my story begins in the university archives, for you know how I love to explore those old dungeons full of books and miscellanea. On this occasion I was searching for mirrors of that tarnished style favoured in Bessamé.
The mirrors were for my latest invention, consisting of a series of polished mirrors that are fixed to poles. The poles and the mirrors rotate around each other in just such a manner that none of the pieces collide with the other.
In itself this is quite the spectacle—but that is nothing compared to what occurs when lights are placed around the thing and directed at those spinning pieces as they rotate…
Nonetheless, I have digressed.
I was in the archives seeking out mirrors that might alter the trajectory of the lights that I found myself surrounded by the dismantled remains of once kingly furniture. It was here that I saw the shape of a rectangular frame, the shape covered with a grubby sheet.
Upon flinging the sheet away I was greeted with nothing more than a shower of dust and yet another empty frame, flecks of gold still glinting in the recesses of it’s engraved embellishments.
Turning from the frame I stepped onto a broom that had been resting against a nearby chair and that chair upon another and that chair upon another, such that the entire thing began to tremble.
I tell you, Richard. I might have been crushed to death there and then, like you in one of your far-flung caves! Yet due to an unlikely feat of acrobatics and no small share of luck I avoided serious injury except to my nerves, which could quickly be quieted with brandy at a later opportunity.
As I extricated myself from the destruction I had wrought, I saw a door had been uncovered by the collapsed furniture. It was a simple door of panelled wood and had a tarnished metal knob that would not turn. Still in need of that brandy, I resolved to investigate further on the very next day.
Here is the part where my story becomes stranger, though I think by and large our history will be enough to assure you that I would not lie about such a thing as a disappearing door.
The next day I found no evidence that the door had ever existed, although the jumble of fallen chairs and long shadows cast by that once-kingly furniture left no doubt as to the fact I was in the same place.
I was troubled and yet did my best to convince myself that I had been mistaken and there was no door at all, because I know that was an infinitely more likely conclusion than any other.
Perhaps I could have forgotten about it, had the door not reappeared. The only way it seemed for me to prove both the existence of the door—and retain my own sanity—was to open it.
Yet as I already mentioned, the doorknob would not turn. The empty keyhole goaded me. It seemed that I would need a key, and I should hardly have been surprised. For what is an adventure, Richard, without a MacGuffin?
Thankfully, my workshop is full of them.
The keyhole was of the simple sort you’d expect to see on any door, or at least that is how it appeared. I could see nothing through it but darkness, but resolved to return with what some might call a mechanical lockpick, but I call a winder-upper because I am not of the inclination to go around picking locks, you understand.
I hurried back to my workshop, filled with anxious anticipation I could not explain. And yet this was masked by the fear that I should return only to find the door had disappeared again.
It had not. Sweating from my journey I connected the winder-upper to the door and set about winder-uppering. The lock refused to comply. I turned the crank of the device ever faster, listening to the clicks that it made as it worked the lock. The winder-upper trembled in my hands, then shook violently, then collapsed to pieces that clanged and clattered as they hit the floor.
Is it too strange, Richard, to say that in that moment it felt as though the door was attempting to unlock me?
That night I could not sleep and so began sorting through the sizeable collection of keys I have obtained after a great many years at the university. Keys for almost every door as well as those for a great many places unknown.
The next day I made my way back to the archives jangling loudly with each step. And I tried key after key, Richard. And then each key a second time. And then—although not with every key this time—a third.
I had spent the entire day and as my eyelids began to droop I became suddenly convinced that if the door were to disappear again that it would take me with it. As such I hurried back to my quarters.
At this point I would have preferred for the door to vanish so I would no longer have to think about it, but in becoming so determined to open it I unwittingly convinced the door fully of it’s own existence, such that it now awaited me each day without fail.
And so I built a new winder-upper. I tried more keys. I struck a dagger into the very heart of the keyhole. I fell upon the door and beat my fists against it and shook the knob with such blusterous ferocity that the entire archives ought to have been shaken apart.
The door did not yield to even my most furious attempts. Which leads me to the next part of my story, of which I am less proud. I left the university and ventured into the city proper. There I caught a cab and asked the driver to take me beyond the sixth street, where the cobblestones turn to labyrinths.
There, amongst the famished and the petty criminals who feed them, there is purported to be a thief who can open any lock.
Already my letter is becoming overlong, so I shall not detail the many regrettable nights spent in undesirable establishments asking entirely without tact where I might procure the services of such a thief.
For all my foppishness—perhaps because of it—I found him, Richard. There in a dark alley that I would never be able to find my way back to, I met the greatest thief in Caladon and they agreed to help me.
I agreed upon a binding pact whereupon my life would be forfeit should I reveal anything of his identity, so I can tell you nothing about the greatest thief in Caladon.
Any difficulties I anticipated in getting the thief into the university were quickly put to rest when it turned out that the greatest thief in Caladon was quite capable of finding himself into my own quarters without invitation.
We descended into the archives together and I lead him to the door. Thankfully, he could see it.
First the thief investigated the lock by means of a tiny mirror that was affixed to an eyeglass. The process reminded me briefly of the machine of revolving mirrors which lead me to this section of the archives to begin with.
The thief set upon the lock with all manner of hooks and pins, revolving and rotating them and then peering back through the eyeglass. I waited, impatiently. Then something loud popped and awoke me from a dream I was having where I was waiting impatiently for a thief to open a door.
The thief was standing above me, shaking his head. The lock was like none he had ever seen. The lock was fake. No key would open it, for no key could open it, was what the thief told me.
I found this answer unacceptable, but the thief was resolute. I do not even remember him leaving. All I saw was the door. That night I flailed in my bedcovers for I could not rid myself of the sight of it. I had become infected with it. Not by the door itself, but by the mystery of it. And the only cure was to open it.
But how, Richard? How does one open a door that accepts no key?
Sweat dripped off me as I rose from bed and dressed. I stomped into my workshop. I remember how the stars looked that night, Richard.
In one drawer, wrapped in waxy paper, I kept a small block of explosive gum. I did not stop to think, else I would have realised the foolishness of my idea. I gathered up the other things I would need: string, wires, pliers.
I do not remember setting up the experiment, but I remember the moment before I lit the fuse. It was in that moment alone that I reconsidered my actions. And then, Richard, I exploded a door.
For a time I thought I had died. But as the smoked cleared I realised that I could see the arched ceiling and I could smell dust and I could cough. I wiped my face with my handkerchief and sneezed and choked and looked out through tear-filled eyes at a black door set into a red brick wall.
There was no sinking feeling this time, only the resolution of defeat. Or that would have been so had the following not occurred.
Even as I coughed into my handkerchiefs lines of glowing light began to trace their way across the dark surface of the door, as cracks might gradually appear in a pane of glass. I gawped as the lines grew brighter and then the door fell apart into neat, straight-edged pieces.
I mopped my bleary eyes.
Beyond the doorway was a short corridor cast in strange, pale light. I approached on shaky legs. I could hear the sound of bricks settling after the explosion. I stepped through.
It’s easiest to say, Richard, that I found myself somewhere else. I was in a small corridor with an indentation in the far wall. I touched the smooth stone walls and they felt very cold. The strange light came from two parallel glowing bars set into the ceiling. They buzzed incessantly.
I approached the indentation in the wall. Coming closer I could see that a surface of dark glass had been set there, above a series of small switches as one might see on an accordion or other such instrument.
There was a strange feeling. I looked over my shoulder and could see the university archives, shadow-draped and blurry (perhaps for my own tears). It looked like a painting, Richard. Our entire world a painting.
I looked back into the alcove at the strange instrument and the dark panel of glass. Here, shall I play a tune? I thought. Hands above the switches I paused and allowed a tune to come into my head.
I struck the keys in no particular order, for even if this were a musical instrument I would have no idea how to play it. And yet the sounds made by my fingers on the keys matched those of the tune in my head. And the machine came alive.
The dark glass began to glow. Strange whirring and clunking sounds issued from behind it. Letters began to appear:
TERMINAL 8 ACTIVE
The words gave rise in me to a strange feeling, or rather, not the words themselves but in the very act of seeing them. For as stagnant as this chamber, and as dark as the glass in which those letters glowed, there seemed to be in them the essence of hope itself, an awakening. A reawakening.
Perhaps a younger version of myself would have sought to unseat those panels from the wall, or attempted to reach the buzzing lights in the ceiling. But it simply felt unnecessary for me to be there any longer, I know of no other way to say it.
I went to step back and then was moved so by the full weight of reality itself. I found myself thrust back into the archives, where there was no longer any sign that the door had ever existed. Black scorch marks were visible on the floor and against the wall, but nothing had been damaged in the explosion save for one or two chairs that had already been beyond repair.
And it is here that my story makes it’s rather unsatisfying conclusion. I have continued to work on my mirror machine and have begun designs for an improved winder-upper (new variables, it would seem, will need to be accounted for).
I think of the door less, though the strangeness of the entire circumstance left a strong enough impression on me that I felt the need to confess it, if only to you, Richard.
And it should seem strange to me that I feel no fear, nor dread, in relation to what I saw and did that day.
Somewhere, something has changed.
That excepting my love for you, old friend.
Wilhelm Marriot
Caladon University