Near the front of the house I found the stairway that I’d taken, years before, when I’d come there with Karla to save Lisa Carter. The Compton wallpaper, once so rich in colour and texture, was scorched and peeling from the blistered walls. The stairway itself was carbonised, its carpet scorched to stringy clumps of ash. I climbed up slowly, testing each step before pressing down with my full weight. One step collapsed beneath me when I was halfway to the top, and I scrambled upward more quickly to the landing on the first floor.
On the upper level I had to pause while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. After a few moments I could make out the gaps in the floor, and I began to inch my way around them. The fire had incinerated some parts of the house, leaving holes and blackened stumps, while sparing other parts of the house altogether. Those pristine sections were so clean, and so precisely as I remembered them, that they heightened the eerie strangeness of the place. I felt as if I was moving between the past, before the fire, and the ruined present: as if my own memories were creating those grandiose, unconsumed zones in the house.
Some way along that wide passage on the upper level my foot plunged through a papery section of floor, and in my hard reaction I drove backward into the wall behind me. The wall itself collapsed and I found myself falling, in a clumsy stumble, flaying out with my hands to find something solid to cling to amid the crumbling rubble. I landed with a thump, much more quickly than I expected, and realised at once that I was inside one of Madame Zhou’s secret corridors. The wall I’d fallen through appeared to be as solid as all the others, but it was merely a plywood screen papered over with her ubiquitous Compton pattern.
I stood up and brushed myself off in a very narrow, low corridor that snaked ahead, following the shapes and corners of the rooms it circumscribed. Metal grates were set into the walls of the rooms that the secret corridor passed. Some of them were low, near the floor, and others were higher. Beneath the higher metal grates were boxed steps. From the lowest of those steps I looked into a room through the heart-shaped gaps in the metal grille. I could see the whole room beyond: the cracked mirror on the wall, the burned and collapsed bed, and the rusted metal nightstand beside it. There were several steps above the one on which I stood, and I imagined her, Madame Zhou, crouched there on the topmost step and breathing silently while she watched, and watched.
The corridor wound through several turns, and I lost my bearings, unsure in the enshrouding darkness if I faced the front of the house or the rear. At one point the secret corridor inclined sharply. I climbed upward until the higher metal grilles disappeared, and I stumbled in the dark upon a flight of steps. Feeling my way upward, I encountered a door. It was a small, paneled wooden door-so small and perfectly proportioned that it might’ve been furnished for a child’s playhouse. I tried the doorknob. It turned easily in my hand. I pushed it open, and shrank back immediately at the inward rush of light from beyond.
I stepped into an attic room lit by a row of four stained-glass dormer windows that peaked like little chapels and reached out over the external roof of the house. The fire had reached the room, but it had failed to destroy it. The walls were darkened, splashed with streaky burn-shadows, and the floor was holed in places to reveal a deep sandwich layer between it and the ceiling of the room below. Parts of the long room, however, were quite solid and untouched by the flames. In those islands of exotically carpeted floor and unblemished wall-space, furniture still stood intact and unmarked. And in the stiff, enwrapping arms of a throne-like chair, her face twisted in a manic stare, was Madame Zhou.
