Pandemonium

doors along it all closed. There was one door opposite me that was ajar, the room dark. Had it been open when Meg showed us to our rooms? I couldn’t remember if I’d looked down that way. I stepped onto the balcony. I could hear no one on the stairs, no one on the floors above or below. I glanced down at the empty foyer, then at the open door. “Summoned or not, here I come,” I said to myself. The circular window, hanging level with the balcony, glinted like a waking eye.

I trailed one hand along the polished banister until I reached the open door. “Hello?” I said, and rapped lightly on the door frame. I didn’t expect an answer, but I felt it was good to go through the motions, just in case I was cross-examined later: Did you knock before you went in? Yes, Your Honor, I even announced my presence. I glanced behind me once more, then reached inside to the lefthand wall. I found a light switch, flicked it on. Directly in front of me, the Black Well.

“Shit!” I said aloud.

It was only a painting, but it still took me a moment to calm down. I stepped inside the room, put a hand against the wall. I was in some kind of cathedral-ceilinged library. The walls cut in and out, creating dozens of nooks and multiplying the wall space. Towering bookshelves alternated with narrow, green-draped windows, and the remaining spaces were filled by paintings and tapestries and glass frames of every size. In the center of the room were several fat leather chairs surrounded by long tables that held stacks of books, small glass cases, Tiffany-style desk lamps. The centerpiece seemed to be a podium holding an open book the size of my mom’s family Bible. The Black Well painting hung on the wall opposite the door, in a dark frame maybe three feet wide and four feet tall. I walked around the crenellated edge of the room, distracted by all the exotics hanging on the walls: African masks; pen-and-ink drawings of mythological animals and armored knights; tapestries of unicorns and demons and lines of pilgrims; plaques and awards in German and French and English; black-and-white photographs of bespectacled men with pipes and dark-eyed women in large hats; honorary degrees; framed prints from old books, some illustrated with arcane symbols. Most striking were the dozens of paintings, many of them multicolored mandalas but others art-nouveau-style renderings of fantastic characters: a winged man with a devil-horned forehead; a bearded man in robes; a long-haired woman naked except for a black snake draped over her shoulders.

But my attention kept returning to the Black Well painting. I approached it obliquely like a swimmer fighting the current, and stopped a few feet away.

The well wasn’t rendered exactly as it had appeared to me under the lake, but the painting caught the essence. Bands of black and red and purple spiraled and twisted away from the eye, promising an infinite regress. I put a hand out, hovering above the canvas. I pictured my hand plunging into it, the well sucking in my arm, my body. I stepped back, feeling nauseous.

Behind me, the chirp of rusty hinges. I whipped my head toward the door.

An old man pushed an antique wooden wheelchair into the room.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”

He held up a hand—to silence or reassure me, I wasn’t sure which—and rolled the chair toward me. It was an ungainly, slatbacked thing like a steamship deck chair mounted on rusting bicycle wheels. The man pushing looked as old as the chair. He was thin, all forehead and white hair, dressed in a loose white shirt and blue pants that could have been pajamas or hospital scrubs. His hair started at ear level and dropped to his shoulders, clouding into a white beard that fanned his chest.

“December of 1912,” he said. His voice was quiet but penetrating.

“Dr. Jung experienced what some people call a breakdown, and what others call a breakthrough.”

He pushed the empty wheelchair to a spot between a chair and couch. “The doctor referred to it as his Nekyia, his Ulysses-like descent into the underworld.”