Where the Black Sun Keeps Its Secrets

More about Where the Black Sun Keeps Its Secrets

The woman in the black dress had been standing on the balcony for twenty-three minutes, although the clocks inside the house insisted it was Tuesday.

That was the first indication something had gone wrong.

The second was the ocean.

There hadn’t been an ocean behind the house yesterday.

Now it stretched from the plaster wall clear to eternity, chopped into blue geometric teeth, with a yellow moon sitting on the horizon like somebody had dropped a gold coin into the machinery of creation and jammed the works.

She leaned against the concrete railing.

Above her hung the Black Sun.

Not the regular sun. This one had planets inside it—little white worlds traveling their appointed circles—and a red crescent biting into its side. Around it somebody had drawn triangles, trajectories, constellations, architectural measurements and what appeared to be the flight plan of a drunken angel.

A black bird came flapping out of the mathematics.

“You’re late,” it said.

“For what?”

But the bird was already headed toward the mountain.

The mountain had a face.

Naturally.

Everything around here had started growing faces since breakfast.

Across the courtyard, a naked woman stood inside a painted doorway with an orange sphere balanced mysteriously between her thighs. Downstairs, a man sat at a desk beneath a yellow lamp, writing furiously, apparently attempting to record events before they occurred. Beyond him another staircase descended into darkness, while the staircase on the opposite side climbed toward precisely the same darkness.

That was the trick of the house.

Up and down had signed a secret agreement.

Then the red triangle opened.

It did not swing like a door. It simply became deeper.

A man came running through it.

Not toward the woman.

Not away from anything either.

Sideways.

He ran sideways across the wall as casually as a fellow crossing Main Street for cigarettes.

“HEY!” she shouted.

He kept running.

On the other side of the house three old men had appeared. Their long faces leaned out of the darkness as though they’d been waiting fifty years for somebody to ask the correct question.

One raised a finger.

“Don’t follow him.”

“Why?”

“He already followed you.”

That was when the white crane flew through the upstairs room.

Its wings passed straight through the constellation lines without disturbing them.

The woman looked into the bedroom behind her. Bed. Lamp. Yellow floor. Everything perfectly ordinary.

That frightened her more than anything else.

Because ordinary things were obviously in on it.

The lamp knew.

The bed knew.

Even the little table beside the bed sat there pretending innocence while the universe rearranged itself six feet away.

She turned back.

The checkerboard floor across the courtyard had begun climbing the staircase. Faces were emerging from the walls—painted faces, unfinished faces, one enormous eye divided into red, yellow and blue. Black circles drifted overhead like holes punched through reality.

And suddenly she understood.

The house wasn’t haunted.

It wasn’t dreaming.

It wasn’t even a house.

It was the moment between one thought and the next, enlarged until somebody could walk around inside it.

The running man vanished into the red triangle.

The bird returned and landed on the railing.

“Well?” it asked.

“Well what?”

“Are you coming?”

She looked once at the warm bedroom.

Then at the impossible ocean.

Then at the Black Sun turning silently above everything.

She stepped over the railing.

And discovered there was no falling here.

Only another room.