Chapter 1: The Seventh Day

The fog had been at the glass for seven days. It came in slow gray folds, thick enough that whatever lay past it might have been taken away, and the light that got through was flat and undecided, no brighter at noon than at three in the morning. That light reached the walls of the single room and stopped there.

Dean Mercer had cleared the desk with his forearm and left the mess where it landed — mail, a cold mug, a stack of papers he was never going to get to. He sat in the middle of it with his shoulders hunched, writing as fast as his hand would go.

Day seven. Nothing has changed.

The fog is still there. The window still won’t open. The sash lifts about an inch and then my hand stops. Not the glass. My hand. It won’t go past.

The room feels cast. I keep coming back to that word. Not sealed. Not locked. Cast, like something was poured into a mold around the outside of it and set hard.

The taps are dry. The outlets are dead. The lamp is on anyway, and the laptop boots, and on the second day I pulled the cord out of the wall to see what that would do. Nothing. It kept running.

A thin sound came from the window. Wind dragging at the frame, maybe, or something pushed along the outside of the glass, and his head came up before he had decided to lift it. For a second and a half he had it: a hand on the other side, a voice saying his name through the fog.

Then it was fog again, gray and closed, doing nothing at all. The radiator under the window had not knocked once in seven days.

His eyes went to the sill. The adjustable wrench and the hammer lay there where he had dropped them, one across the other. Neither of them had so much as marked the paint.

He looked at them a moment longer than they deserved. Then his face went flat, the way it did now, and he bent back over the page.

I have tried the ceiling, the walls, and the floor. Two days of it. There is not a mark anywhere. It’s a box cast together with the space around it and there is no way out of it.

Except the door.

But the other side of the door is worse.

He stopped and read the last two lines back. Then he thumbed through the pages behind them without really reading. Seven days of handwriting, the early ones pressed hard into the paper. Complaints that went nowhere. Tangents that went nowhere. A sketch of the room that had started as a sketch and turned into boxes and arrows. And here and there, in a rounder and more careful hand, a joke he had written at three in the morning to talk himself down off a ledge.

He didn’t know what any of it was for. He had never kept a journal in his life. A high school teacher with a stack of papers to grade and a car that needed brakes did not have the evenings for it.

He had the evenings now.

The first three days he spent proving he wasn’t asleep. If this was a dream, the dream was going to have to account for the taste of the water in the last jug, for seven days without a shower, for the fact that he could read the same panel on the back of a cereal box twice and get the same eight ingredients in the same order both times. He had worked at it seriously. It had held up. What he had instead was a room exactly as real as it had always been, sitting in the middle of a world that had stopped bothering.

He had set the smoke detector off twice. Nobody came. On the second night he shouted himself hoarse at the window, and he hammered on the wall behind the closet where the plaster sounded thin, and the building gave nothing back. Not a footstep. Not a door closing. Not a television through a floor.

Then, and more briefly, the door at the far end of the room.

Cheap white hollow-core, the kind a landlord buys because it costs forty dollars and comes in a slab. Last year’s calendar still tacked to it, the one he had never gotten around to taking down. The handle polished bright by a decade of other people’s hands. The mat in front of it sat crooked.

It was not locked.

Of all the ways the room had been made wrong, the cruelty was this: the cage had left him a door, the door opened at any hour of the day or night, and it was always inviting him out. It just didn’t go where a door was supposed to go.

There was no hallway on the other side of it. No neighbors, no street, nobody. There was a ship — a deck of boards scrubbed pale, a cabin, the parts of her that had doors, and past the rail a black sea under a black sky with no land anywhere on it. He had been over before. Several times. He had come back every time, or he would not have been sitting at that desk with a pen in his hand.

The going over was easy. What came after was not. Nothing went with him. He had tried a knife first, held in his fist the whole way through, and come out the far side with an empty fist and the fog not even stirred; after that he had stopped wasting good things on the experiment. So there was no camera on that deck and no way to put one there, and no test he could run that would give him the thing he actually wanted, which was proof.

What he had was the room, the fog, and the door.

He turned to a clean page and wrote:

…but the only thing left now is to go across. There is food on that ship. I know the deck and I know the cabin and I know where a man can sleep and what he can stand to drink. It isn’t much of a preparation. It’s what I have.

To whoever finds this — if I don’t come back, and someday somebody gets this door open and finds this notebook: don’t read it as a story. It happened. There was a man named Dean Mercer and he got shut into this room for seven days, and I have written down everything I saw as well as I could and everything I tried. If that’s all that’s left of me, at least get the name right.

He closed the journal, dropped the pen into the cup, and stood up.

Then he didn’t go to the door. He went to the bed.

Whatever was on the other side of that door, he was going to meet it with a clear head, and his head had not been clear in days. He didn’t know whether he could sleep. Lying still in the dark with his eyes shut and his hands flat on the blanket would do nearly as well as sleeping, and it would be better than walking through that door stupid with exhaustion and making a mistake he wouldn’t get to make twice.

He set himself to it like a task. Somewhere in the middle of it he slept.

Eight hours later he opened his eyes. The fog was where he had left it. The light had not changed at all, and he didn’t look at it.

He got up, tilted the last jug to check the line — a quarter left — drank what he allowed himself, and ate from the stores until he was nearly full, then stopped, because nearly full was the plan. The rest of it stayed in the cabinet. He didn’t take any of it with him. He knew better than that by now.

The mirror hung on the wall in the corner, over the dresser, a cheap thing with a chip out of the bottom edge. The man in it had hair going in six directions and a jaw that hadn’t seen a razor in a week, and he looked like what he was: somebody who had been locked in a room for seven days and had run out of ways to be impressive about it.

He stood in front of it for several minutes. He turned his head one way, then the other. He looked at the man the way you look at a photograph to see whether you remember the day it was taken.

Then he said, low, to the man in the glass:

“Your name is Dean Mercer. At least on this side.”

He turned away and went to the door.

His hand went to the handle. He knew the way this went — the floor going out from under him, the smell arriving half a second before anything else did, the roll coming up through his knees and settling. What he carried now was a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a pair of boots, and no food, and nothing to defend himself with.

He wasn’t even sure about the part he could carry. About the him.

He turned the handle and pulled.

The fog stood in the doorway, gray-black, swelling and shrinking like a curtain in a draft, and somewhere inside that shifting he could hear surf. He stepped into it.

Salt hit him first, wet and cold and real. The surf stopped being a sound and became a thing happening. The floor went out from under him — a long slow roll, up and over and back — and the dizziness took him for a second. He put his feet apart and waited it out, the way he had waited it out the other times.

Then he opened his eyes on a wide empty deck, wood scrubbed pale and gritty with salt, masts going up into a low dark ceiling of cloud, and past the rail the sea, with no edge to it, no land, no light on the water anywhere.

He looked down.

The body was heavier in the shoulders than his own had ever been. It wore a coat with a high collar and heavy brass buttons, dark wool, cut in a way he had never seen on a uniform or in a picture, and worth more than his rent. He put his free hand to his chest and found wool, and a linen shirt under the wool, and nothing of his own at all.

His right hand was closed around a pistol. Black, long-barreled, a plate of brass let into the side of it and cut into scrollwork, the grip worn smooth where a thumb had rested for years. The hand holding it had thick knuckles and a rope burn across the base of the thumb, and a callus under the third finger that his own hand had never grown.

He turned the hand over. He looked at the burn, and the callus, and the smooth worn place in the grip, and they came out the same as they had the other times. Nothing added. Nothing gone.

He shifted his grip on the pistol and looked up at the masts.