House Of Leaves - House of Leaves Part 5
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House of Leaves Part 5

For all its merits, Hollander's book only devotes five pages to the actual physics of sound. While this is not the place to dwell on the beautiful and complex properties of reflection, in order to even dimly comprehend the shape of the Navidson house it is still critical to recognize how the laws of physics in tandem with echo's mythic inheritance serve to enhance echo's interpretive strength.

The descriptive ability of the audible is easily designated with the following formula: Sound + Time = Acoustic Light As most people know who are versed in this century's technological effects, exact distances can be determined by timing the duration of a sound's round trip between the deflecting object and its point of origin. This principle serves as the basis for all the radar, sonar and ultrasonics used every day around the world by air traffic controllers, fishermen, and obstetricians. By using sound or electromagnetic waves, visible blips may be produced on a screen, indicating either a 747, a school of salmon, or the barely pumping heart of a fetus.

Of course echolocation has never belonged exclusively to technology. Microchiroptera (bats), Cetacean (porpoises and toothed whales), Deiphinis deiphis (dolphins) as well as certain mammals (flying foxes) and birds (oilbirds) all use sound to create extremely accurate acoustic images. However, unlike their human counterparts, neither bats nor dolphins require an intermediary screen to interpret the echoes. They simply "see" the shape of sound.

Bats, for example, create frequency modulated [FMJ images by producing constant-frequency signals [0.5 to 100+ ms] and FM signals [0.5 to 10 msj in their larynx. The respondent echoes are then translated into nerve discharges in the auditory cortex, enabling the bat not only to determine an insect's velocity and direction (through synaptic interpretation of Doppler shifts) but pinpoint its location to within a fraction of a millimeter. [60-See D. R. Griffin, Listening in the Dark (1986).]

As Michael J. Buckingham noted in the mid-80s, imaging performed by the human eye is neither active nor passive. The eye does not need to produce a signal to see nor does an object have to produce a signal in order to be seen. An object merely needs to be illuminated. Based on these observations, the afready mentioned formula reflects a more accurate understanding of vision with the following refinement: Sound + Time = Acoustic Touch As Gloucester murmured, "I see it feelingly." [61-King Lear, IV, vi, 147.]

Unfortunately, humans lack the sophisticated neural hardware present in bats and whales. The blind must rely on the feeble light of fingertips and the painful shape of a cracked shin. Echolocation comes down to the crude assessment of simple sound modulations, whether in the dull reply of a tapping cane or the low, eerie flutter in one simple word-perhaps your word-flung down empty hallways long past midnight.

[62-You don't need me to point out the intensely personal nature of this passage. Frankly I'd of rec'd a quick skip past the whole echo ramble were it not for those six lines, especially the last bit "- perhaps your word -" conjuring up, at least for me, one of those deep piercing reactions, the kind that just misses a ventricle, the old man making his way-feeling his way-around the walls of another evening, a slow and tedious progress but one which begins to yield, somehow, the story of his own creature darkness, taking me completely by surprise, a sudden charge from out of the dullest moment, jaws lunging open, claws protracting, and just so you understand where I'm coming from, I consider "... long past midnight" one claw and "empty hallways" another.

Don't worry Lude didn't buy it either but at least he bought a couple of rounds.

Two nights ago, we were checking out the Sky Bar, hemorrhaging dough on drinks, but Lude could only cough hard and then laugh real coronary like: "Hoss, a claw's made of bone just like a stilt's made of steel."

"Sure" I said.

But it was loud there and the crowd kept both of us from hearing correctly. And while I wanted to believe Lude's basics, I couldn't. There was something just so awful in the old man's utterance. I felt a terrible empathy for him then, living in that tiny place, permeated with the odor of age, useless blinks against the darkness. His word-my word, maybe even your word-added to this, and ringing inside me like some awful dream, over and over again, modulating slightly, slowly pitching my own defenses into something entirely different, until the music of that recurrence drew into relief my own scars drawn long ago, over two decades ago, and with more than a claw, a stiletto or even an ancient Samuel O'Reilly @ 1891, and these scars torn, ripped, bleeding and stuttering-for they are first of all his scars-the kind only bars of an EKG can accurately remember, a more precise if incomplete history, Q waves deflecting downward at what must be considered the commencement of the QRS complex, telling the story of a past infarction, that awful endurance and eventual letting go, the failure which began it all in the first place, probably right after one burning maze but still years ahead of the Other loss, a horrible violence, before the coming of that great Whale, before the final drift, nod, macking skid, twist and topple-his own burning-years before the long rest, coming along in its own way, its own nightmare, perhaps even in the folds of another unprotected sleep (so I like to imagine), silvering wings fragmenting then scattering like fish scales flung on the jet stream, above the clouds and every epic venture still suggested in those delicate, light-cradled borders-Other Lands-sweeping the world like a whisper, a hand, even if salmon scales still slip through words as easily as palmed prisms of salt will always slip through fingers, shimmering, raining, confused, and no matter how spectacular forever unable to prevent his fall, down through the silver, the salmon, away from the gold and the myriad of games held in just that word, suggesting it might have even been Spanish gold, though this makes no differance, still tumbling in rem-, dying and -embered, even? or never, in a different light, and not waking this time, before the hit, but sleeping right through it, the slamming into the ground, at terminal velocity too, the pound, the bounce, What kind of ground-air emergency code would that mark mean? the opposition of L's? Not understood? Probably just X marks the spot: Unable To Proceed- then in the awful second arc and second descent, after the sound, the realization of what Sleep has just now delivered, that bloody handmaiden, this time her toiling fingers wet with boiling deformation, oozing in the mutilations of birth, heartless & unholy, black with afterbirth, miscreated changeling and foul, what no one beside him could prevent, but rather might have even caused, and mine too, this unread trauma, driving him to consciousness with a scream, not even a word, a scream, and even that never heard, so not a scream but the clutch of life held by will alone, no 911, no call at all, just his own misunderstanding of the reality that had broken into the Hall, the silence then of a woman and an only son, describing in an agonizing hour all it takes to let go, broken, bleeding, ragged, twisted, savaged, torn and dying too, so permanently wronged, though for how many years gone untold, unseen, reminiscent of another silver shape, so removed and yet so dear, kept on a cold gold chain, years on, this fistful of twitching injured life, finally recovering on its own until eventually like a seed conceived, born and grown, the story of its injured beat survives long enough to destroy and devour by the simple telling of its fall, all his hope, his home, his only love, the very color of his flesh and the dark marrow of his bone.

"You okay Truant?" Lude asked.

But I saw a strange glimmer everywhere, confined to the sharp oscillations of yellow & blue, as if my retinal view suddenly included along with the reflective blessings of light, an unearthly collusion with scent & sound, registering all possibilities of harm, every threat, every move, even with all that grinning and meeting and din.

A thousand and one possible claws.

Of course, Lude didn't see it. He was blind. Maybe even right. We drove down Sunset and soon veered south into the flats. A party somewhere. An important gathering of B heads and coke heads. Lude would never feel how "empty hallways long past midnight" could slice inside of you, though I'm not so sure he wasn't sliced up just the same. Not seeing the rip doesn't mean you automatically get to keep clear of the Hey-I'm-Bleeding part. To feel though, you have to care and as we walked out onto the blue-lit patio and discovered a motorcycle sputtering up oil and bubbles from the bottom of the pool while on the diving board two men shoved flakes of ice up a woman's bleeding nostrils, her shirt off, her bra nearly transparent, I knew Lude would never care much about the dead. And maybe he was right. Maybe some things are best left untouched. Of course he didn't know the dead like I did. And so when he absconded with a bottle of Jack from the kitchen, I did my best to join him. Obliterate my own cavities and graves.

But come morning, despite my headache and the vomit on my shirt, I knew I'd failed.

Inside me, a long dark hallway already caressed the other music of a single word, and what's worse, despite the amazements of chemicals, continued to grow.]

The study of architectural acoustics focuses on the rich interplay between sound and interior design. Consider, for example, how an enclosed space will naturally increase sound pressure and raise the frequency. Even though they are usually difficult to calculate, resonance frequencies, also known as eigenfrequencies or natural frequencies, can be easily determined for a perfectly rectangular room with hard smooth walls. The following formula describes the resonance frequencies [f] in a room with a length of L, width of W, and height of H, where the velocity of sound equals c: f = C/2 [(flIL)2 + (m/W)2 + (P/H)21 1/2 Hz Notice that if L, W, and H all equal oo, f will equal 0.

Along with resonance frequencies, the study of sound also takes into account wave acoustics, ray acoustics, diffusion, and steady-state pressure level, as well as sound absorption and transmission through walls. A careful examination of the dynamics involved in sound absorption reveals how incident sound waves are converted to energy. (In the case of porous material, the subsurface lattice of interstices translates sound waves into heat.) Nevertheless, above and beyond the details of frequency shifts and volume fluctuations-the physics of 'otherness' -what matters most is a sound's delay. [63-Further attention should probably be given to sabins and Transmission Loss as described by TL = 10 log 1/ r dB, where r= a transmission coefficient and a high TL indicates a high sound insulation. Unfortunately, one could write several lengthy books on sound alone in The Navidson Record. Oddly enough, with the sole exception of Kellog Pequity's article on acoustic impedance in Navidson's house (Science, April 1995, p. 43), nothing else has been rendered on this particularly resonant topic. On the subject of acoustic coefficience, however, see Ned Noi's "Echo's Verse" in Science News, v. 143, February 6, 1993, p. 85.]

Point of fact, the human ear cannot distinguish one sound wave from the same sound wave if it returns in less than 50 milliseconds. Therefore for anyone to hear a reverberation requires a certain amount of space. At 68 degrees Fahrenheit sound travels at approximately 1,130 ft per second. A reflective surface must stand at least 56 ft away in order for a person to detect the doubling of her voice. [64-Parallel surfaces will create a flutter echo, though frequently a splay of as little as 16mm (5/8 inch) can prevent the multiple repetitions.]

In other words, to hear an echo, regardless of whether eyes are open or closed, is to have already "seen" a sizable space.

Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate.

And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence.

[65-There is something more at work here, some sort of antithetical reasoning and proof making, and what about light?, all of which actually made sense to me at a certain hour before midnight or at least came close to making sense. Problem was Lude interrupted my thoughts when he came over and after much discussion (not to mention shots of tequila and a nice haircut) convinced me to share a bag of mushrooms with him and in spite of getting violently ill in the aisle of a certain 7-Eleven (me; not him) led me to an after hours party where I soon became engrossed in a green-eyed brunette (Lucy) who had no intention of letting our dance end at the club, and yet even in our sheet twisting, lightless dance on my floor, her own features, those pale legs, soft arms, the fragile collar bone tracing a shadow of (-can't write the word-), invariably became entwined and permanently??? entangled, even entirely replaced??? by images of a completely different woman; relatively new, or not new at all, but for reasons unknown to me still continuing to endure as a center to my thoughts; her- -first encountered in the company of Lude and my boss at a place my boss likes to call The Ghost. The problem is that in his mind The Ghost actually refers to two places: The Garden of Eden on La Brea and The Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset. How or why this came about is impossible to trace. Private nomenclature seems to rapidly develop in tight set-upon circles, though truth be told we were only set-upon on a good day, and tight here should be taken pretty loosely.

How then, you ask, do you know what's being referred to when The Ghost gets mentioned?

You don't.

You just end up at one or the other. Often the Rainbow. Though not always the Rainbow. You see, how my boss defines The Ghost varies from day to day, depending mostly on his moods and appetites. Consequently, the previously mentioned "pretty loosely" should probably be struck and re-stated as "very, very loosely."

Anyway, what I'm about to tell you happened on one of those rare evenings when we actually all got together. My boss was chattering incessantly about his junk days in London and how he'd contemplated sobriety and what those contemplations had been like. Eventually he detoured into long winded non-stories about his Art School experiences in Detroit,-lots of "Hey, my thing for that whole time thing was really a kinda art thing or something"-which was about when I hauled out my pad of sketches, because no matter what you made of his BS you still couldn't fault him for his work. He was one of best, and every tatted local knew it.

Truth be known, I'd been waiting for this chance for a while, keen on getting his out-of-the-Shop perspective on my efforts, and what efforts they were-diligent designs sketched over the months, intended someday to live in skin, each image carefully wrapped and coiled in colors of cinnabar, lemon, celadon and indigo, incarnated in the scales of dragons, the bark of ancient roods, shields welded by generations cast aside in the oily umber of shadow & blood not to speak of lifeless trees prevailing against indifferent skies or colossal vessels asleep in prehistoric sediment, miles beneath even the faintest suggestion of light-at least that's how I would describe them-every one meticulously rendered on tracing paper, cracking like fire whenever touched, a multitude of pages, which my boss briefly examined before handing them back to me.

"Take up typing," he grunted.

Well that's nice, I thought.

At least the next step was clear.

Some act of violence would be necessary.

And so it was that before another synapse could fire within my bad-off labyrinthine brain, he was already lying on the floor. Or I should say his mangled body was lying on the floor. His head remained in my hands. Twisted off like a cap. Not as difficult as I'd imagined. The first turn definitely the toughest, necessitating the breaking of cervical vertebrae and the snapping of the spinal cord, but after that, another six or so turns, and voila-the head was off. Nothing could be easier. Time to go bowling.

My boss smiled. Said hello.

But he wasn't smiling or saying hello to me.

Somehow she was already standing there, right in front of him, right in front of me, talking to him, reminiscing, touching his shoulder, even winking at me and Lude.

Wow. Out of nowhere. Out of the blue.

Where had she come from? Or for that matter, when?

Of course my boss didn't introduce her. He just left me to gape. I couldn't even imagine twisting off his head for a second time as that would of meant losing sight of her. Which I found myself quite unwilling to do.

Fortunately, after that evening, she began dropping by the Shop alot, always wearing these daisy sunglasses and each time taking me completely offguard.

She still drives me nuts. Just thinking of her now and I'm lost, lost in the smell of her, the way of her and everything she conjures up inside me, a mad rush of folly & oddly muted lusts, sensations sublimated faster than I can follow, into- oh hell I don't know what into, I probably shouldn't even be using a word like sublimate, but that's beside the point, her hair reminding me of a shiny gold desert wind brazed in a hot August sun, hips curving like coastal norths, tits rising and falling beneath her blue sweatshirt the way an ocean will do long after the storm has passed. (She's always a little out of breath when she climbs the flight of stairs leading up to the Shop.) One glance at her, even now in the glass of my mind, and I want to take off, travel with her, who knows where either, somewhere, my desire suddenly informed by something deeper, even unknown, pouring into me, drawn off some peculiar reserve, tracing thoughts of the drive she and I would take, lungs full of that pine rasping air, outracing something unpleasant, something burning, in fact the entire coast along with tens of thousands of acres of inland forest is burning but we're leaving, we're getting away, we're free, our hands battered by the clutch of holding on-I don't know what to, but holding just the same-and cheeks streaked with wind tears; and now that I think of it I guess we are on a motorcycle, a Triumph?, isn't that what Lude always talks about buying?, ascending into colder but brighter climes, and I don't know anything about bikes let alone how to drive one. And there I go again. She does that to me. Like I already said, drives me nuts.

"Hello?"

That was the first word she ever said to me in the Shop. Not like "Hi" either. More like "Hello, is anyone home?" hence the question mark. I wasn't even looking at her when she said it, just staring blankly down at my equally blank pad of tracing paper, probably thinking something similar to all those ridiculous, sappy thoughts I just now recounted, about road trips and forest fires and motorcycles, remembering her, even though she was right there in front of me, only a few feet away.

"Hey asshole," my boss shouted. "Hang up her fucking pants. What's the matter with you?"

Something would have to be done about him.

But before I could hurl him through the plate glass window into the traffic below, she smiled and handed me her bright pink flip-flops & white Adidas sweats. My boss was lucky. This magnificent creature had just saved his life.

Gratefully I received her clothes, lifting them from her Lingers tips like they were some sacred vesture bestowed upon me by the Virgin Mary herself. The hard part, I found, was trying not to stare too long at her legs. Very tricky to do. Next to impossible, especially with her just standing there in a black G-string, her bare feet sweating on the naked floor.

I did my best to smile in a way that would conceal my awe.

"Thank you," I said, thinking I should kneel.

"Thank you," she insisted.

Those were the next two words she ever said to me, and wow, I don't know why but her voice went off in my head like a symphony. A great symphony. A sweet symphony. A great-fucking-sweet symphony. I don't know what I'm saying. I know absolutely shit about symphonies.

"What's your name?" The total suddenly climbing to an impossible six words.

"Johnny," I mumbled, promptly earning four more words. And just like that.

"Nice to meet you," she said in a way that almost sounded like a psalm. And then even though she clearly enjoyed the effect she was having on me, she turned away with a wink, leaving me to ponder and perhaps pray.

At least I had her ten words: "hello thank you what's your name nice to meet you." Ten whole fucking words. Wow. Wow. Wow. And hard as this may be for you to believe, I really was reeling. Even after she left the Shop an hour or so later, I was still giving serious thought to petitioning all major religions in order to have her deified.

In fact I was so caught up in the thought of her, there was even a moment where I failed to recognize my boss. I had absolutely no clue who he was. I just stared at him thinking to myself, "Who's this dumb mutant and how the hell did he get up here?" which it turns out I didn't think at all but accidentally said aloud, causing all sorts of mayhem to ensue, not worth delving into now.

Quick note here: if this crush-slash-swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach; if you've never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you've got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.

Quick second note: if that last paragraph didn't apply to you, you may skip it and proceed to this next part.

As for her real name, I still don't know it. She's a stripper at some place near the airport. She has a dozen names. The first time she came into the Shop, she wanted one of her tattoos retouched. "Just an inch away from my perfectly shaved pussy," she announced very matter-a-factly, only to add somewhat coyly, slipping two fingers beneath her G-string and pulling it aside; no need to wink now: "The Happiest Place On Earth."

Suffice it to say, the second I saw that rabbit the second I started calling her Thumper.

I do admit it seems a little strange, even to me, to realize that even after four months I'm still swept up in her. Lude sure as hell doesn't understand it. One- because I've fallen for a stripper: "fuck a' and 'fall for' have very different meanings, Hoss. The first one you do as much as you can. The second one you never ever, ever do."; and two- because she's older than me: "If you're gonna reel for a stripper," he advises. "You should at least reel for a young one. They're sexier and not as bent." Which is true, she does have a good six years on me, but what can I say? I'm taken; I love how enthralled she remains by this festival of living, nothing reserved or even remotely ashamed about who she is or what she does, always talking blue streak to my boss about her three year old child, her boyfriend, her boyfriends, the hand jobs she gets extra for, eleven years of sobriety, her words always winding up the way it feels to wake up wide awake, everything about her awakening at every moment, alive to the world and its quirky opportunities, a sudden rite of spring, Thumper's spring, though spring's already sprung, rabbit rabbit, and now April's ruling April's looming April's fooling, around, in yet another round, for this year's ruling April fool.

Yeah I know, I know. This shit's getting ridiculous.

Even worse, I feel like I could continue in that vein for years, maybe even decades.

And yet, listen to this, to date I've hardly said a word to her. Don't have a decent explanation for my silence either. Maybe it's my boss and his guard dog glare. Maybe it's her. I suspect it's her. Every time she visits (though I admit there haven't been that many visits), she overwhelms me. It doesn't matter that she always gives me a wink and sometimes even a full throated laugh when I call her "Thumper", "Hi Thumper" "Bye Thumper" the only words I can really muster, she still really only exists for me as a strange mixture of daydream and present day edge, by which I mean something without a past or a future, an icon or idyll of sorts, for some reason forbidden to me, but seductive beyond belief and probably relief, her image feeling permanently fixed within me, but not new, more like it's been there all along, even if I know that's not true, and come last night going so far as to entwine, entangle and finally completely replace her with the (-can't write the word-) of- -Thumper's flashing eyes, her aching lips, her heart-ending moans, those I had imagined, an ongoing list, so minute and distracting that long after, when the sheets were gathered, wet with sex, cold with rest, I did not know who lay beside me (-) and seeing this stranger, the vessel of my dreams, I withdrew to the toilet, to the shower, to my table, enough racket and detachment to communicate an unfair request, but poor her she heard it and without a word dressed, and without a smile requested a brush, and without a kiss left, leaving me alone to return to this passage where I discovered the beginnings of a sense long since taken and strewn, leading me away on what I guess amounts to another hopeless digression.

Perhaps when I'm finished I'll remember what I'd hoped to say in the first place. [66-Mr. Truant declined to comment further on this particular passage. - Ed.]

As tape and film reveal, in the month following the expansion of the walls bracketing the book shelves, Billy Reston made several trips to the house where despite all efforts to the contrary, he continued to confirm the confounding impossibility of an interior dimension greater than an exterior one.

Navidson skillfully captures Reston's mental frustration by focusing on the physical impediments his friend must face within a house not designed with the disabled in mind. Since the area in question is in the master bedroom, Reston must make his way upstairs each time he wishes to inspect the area.

On the first visit, Tom volunteers to try and carry him.

"That won't be necessary" Reston grunts, effortlessly swinging out of his chair and dragging himself up to the second story using only his arms.

"You got a pair of guns there, don't you partner."

The engineer is only slightly winded.

"Too bad you forgot your chair," Tom adds dryly.

Reston looks up in disbelief, a little surprised, maybe even a bit shocked, and then bursts out laughing.

"Well, and fuck you."

In the end, Navidson is the one who hauls up the wheelchair.

[67-Yesterday I managed to get Maus Fife-Harris on the phone. She's a UC Irvine PhD candidate in Comp Lit who apparently always objected to the large chunks of narrative Zampano kept asking her to write down. "I told him all those passages were inappropriate for a critical work, and if he were in my class I'd mark him down for it. But he'd just chuckle and continue. It bothered me a little but the guy wasn't my student and he was blind and old, so why should I care? Still, I did care, so I'd always protest when he asked me to write down a new bit of narrative. 'Why won't you listen to me?' I demanded one time. 'You're writing like a freshman.' And he replied-I remember this very distinctly 'We always look for doctors but sometimes we're lucky to find a frosh.' And then he chuckled again and pressed on." Not a bad way to respond to this whole fucking book, if you ask me.]

Still, no matter how many times Reston wheels from the children's bedroom to the master bedroom or how carefully he examines the strange closet space, the bookshelves, or the various tools Tom and Will have been measuring the house with, he can provide no reasonable explanation for what he keeps referring to as "a goddamn spatial rape."

By June-as the date on the Hi 8 tape indicates-the problem still remains unsolved. Tom, however, realizes he cannot afford to stay any longer and asks Reston to give him a lift to Charlottesville where he can catch a ride up to Dulles.

It is a bright summer morning when we watch Tom emerge from the house. He gives Karen a quick kiss good-bye and then kneels down to present Chad and Daisy with a set of neon yellow dart guns.

"Remember kids," he tells them sternly. "Don't shoot each other. Aim at the fragile, expensive stuff."

Navidson gives his brother a lasting hug.

"I'll miss you, man."

"You got a phone," Tom grins.

"It even rings," Navidson adds without missing a beat.

While there is no question the tone of this exchange is jocular and perhaps even slightly combative, what matters most here is unspoken. The way Tom's cheeks burn with a sudden flush of color. Or the way Navidson quickly tries to wipe something from his eyes. Certainly the long, lingering shot of Tom as he tosses his duffel bag in the back of Reston's van, waving the camera good-bye, reveals to us just how much affection Navidson feels for his brother.

Strangely enough, following Tom's departure, communication between Navidson and Karen begins to radically deteriorate.

An unusual quiet descends on the house.

Karen refuses to speak about the anomaly. She brews coffee, calls her mother in New York, brews more coffee, and keeps track of the real estate market in the classifieds.

Frustrated by her unwillingness to discuss the implications of their strange living quarters, Navidson retreats to the downstairs study, reviewing photographs, tapes, even-as a few stills reveal-compiling a list of possible experts, government agencies, newspapers, periodicals, and television shows they might want to approach.

At least both he and Karen agree on one thing: they want the children to stay out of the house. Unfortunately, since neither Chad nor Daisy has had a real opportunity to make any new friends in Virginia, they keep to themselves, romping around the backyard, shouting, screaming, stinging each other with darts until eventually they drift farther and farther out into the neighborhood for increasingly longer spates of time.

Neither Karen nor Navidson seems to notice.

The alienation of their children finally becomes apparent to both of them one evening in the middle of July.

Karen is upstairs, sitting on the bed playing with a deck of Tarot cards. Navidson is downstairs in his study examining several slides returned from the lab. News of Oliver North's annulled conviction plays on the TV. In the background, we can hear Chad and Daisy squealing about something, their voices peeling through the house, the strained music of their play threatening at any instant to turn into a brawl.

With superb cross-cutting, Navidson depicts how both he and Karen react to the next moment. Karen has drawn another card from the deck but instead of adding it to the cross slowly forming before her crossed legs, the occult image hangs unseen in the air, frozen between her two fingers, Karen's eyes already diverted, concentrating on a sound, a new sound, almost out of reach, but reaching her just the same. Navidson is much closer. His children's cries immediately tell him that they are way out of bounds.

Karen has only just started to head downstairs, calling out for Chad and Daisy, her agitation and panic increasing with every step, when Navidson bolts out of the study and races for the living room.

The terrifying implication of their children's shouts is now impossible to miss. No room in the house exceeds a length of twenty-five feet, let alone fifty feet, let alone fifty-six and a half feet, and yet Chad and Daisy's voices are echoing, each call responding with an entirely separate answer.

In the living room, Navidson discovers the echoes emanating from a dark doorless hallway which has appeared out of nowhere in the west wall. [68-There's a problem here concerning the location of "The Five and a Half Minute Hallway." Initially the doorway was supposed to be on the north wall of the living room (page 4), but now, as you can see for yourself. that position has changed. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe there's some underlying logic to the shift. Fuck if I know. Your guess is as good as mine.]Without hesitating, Navidson plunges in after them. Unfortunately the living room Hi 8 cannot follow him nor for that matter can Karen. She freezes on the threshold, unable to push herself into the darkness toward the faint flicker of light within. Fortunately, she does not have to wait too long. Navidson soon reappears with Chad and Daisy in each arm, both of them still clutching a homemade candle, their faces lit like sprites on a winter's eve.

This is the first sign of Karen's chronic disability. Up until now there has never been even the slightest indication that she suffers from crippling claustrophobia. By the time Navidson and the two children are safe and sound in the living room, Karen is drenched in sweat. She hugs and holds them as if they had just narrowly avoided some terrible fate, even though neither Chad nor Daisy seems particularly disturbed by their little adventure. In fact, they want to go back. Perhaps because of Karen's evident distress, Navidson agrees to at least temporarily make this new addition to their house off limits.

For the rest of the night, Karen keeps a tight grip on Navidson. Even when they finally slip into bed, she is still holding his hand.