A Theory of Gravity

by Wycroft Taylor

  The fact that all of the doors were round and set into the bottom half of the wall reminded him of the sides of ships and the way portholes are cut into portions of the sides of cruise ships.

  Unlike portholes however, these doors, of course, were metal plates—not glass with metal frames. The plates had holes in them on either the left or right edges—one hole on each. Each hole was about three inches in diameter. And there were indentations there but no light shone through.

  He now paid attention to that tin plate that seemed to be screwed into the wall above the doors. He pulled out of his shirt the pencil and out of his pants’ pocket the notebook and began copying what he saw.

  The outer symbols were egg shapes, some with the narrow end down while others had the narrow end up. The inner symbols included crosses, circles, circles with smaller circles inside of them, circles with circles nearly the same size that overlapped, and circles with from one to three points set into them. He copied everything and, when he was satisfied he had not taken any liberties out of sloppiness or weariness, he closed his notebook and put it away. He also put his pencil back into his shirt pocket.

  Then he got an idea. He would write a note to his keepers or watchers not so much to communicate with them as to provoke them. So he pulled out his notebook and pencil again, opened the notebook to a blank page, tore the blank page from the notebook, and wrote this in very large letters: “A spider, after all, who has spun a web in a place so tightly sealed that no insects can enter, has to consider abandoning the web, no matter how exquisite it is, in order to go somewhere else and build another. Do you get enough insects to make keeping this web going worth your while?”

  He signed his note: “From a moth beating endlessly upon a window pane simply because there is a light on the other side.” He had another idea about how to identify himself and did it with a second signature: “From a worm crawling upon a concrete slab that seems to go on endlessly.”

  When he was finished, he set his note in the middle of the floor of the room, printed side up. Then he put his notebook and pencil back in their respective pockets.

  He doubted if the creatures that ran the place knew the English language but supposed it was possible that they did. He didn’t care. He just wanted to annoy or puzzle them or maybe make them laugh. Or maybe make them cry.

  After putting the note he wrote down on the floor, he walked over to the doors. He had, once again, to figure out which door to enter. Once again, he decided that, having no reason to choose one door over another, his best bet was just to choose a door at random. He was closest to the third door from his left so he went to that door.

  As noted before, all of these doors had holes somewhere along their edges, and he assumed these had something to do with opening them. So, acting on that assumption, he put his hand in the hole of the third door on his left and, feeling no latch or anything else that could be pulled or poked or lifted, he just wrapped his hand around to the other side of the door. First he pushed the door but there was no give in that direction. So he pulled, and the door just came back, fell out of its seating, and fell down onto the floor of the room where he was.

  The door was exceedingly heavy. It hit the floor with a great clanging sound. It must have been made of a solid chunk of metal, like a manhole cover. He realized he could have been badly hurt if it had fallen on him. Just the thought of something like that happening terrified him. He realized how very dangerous the situation was in which he found himself.

  He pushed the door against the wall to get it out of the way. Then he jumped around, grimaced, and made awful noises. He acted as if the door actually had fallen on him. He curled his hand up to make a fist which he raised up in the air and swung from side to side to show whoever might be watching how angry he was by their failure to secure the door to the wall by hinges.

  Being almost hurt brought home to him (once again) how alone he was. With no one around, who would be able to come to his aid if he really did suffer an accident? There was no one.

  He peered through the opening he had exposed. It was dark in there. It was so dark that he could not see by peering inside how far the floor on the other side of the opening was from the bottom of the round hole. But he felt he had no choice except to enter the opening.

  To get into it, he just bent over and stuck his head and shoulders and arms in and groped around the edges of the opening on the other side for a place to grab onto. The wall was about a foot thick. He scooted through the opening until he got his elbows to the other side of the wall and then, by pushing with his elbows, got his waist through the opening. He then began bending his upper torso downwards and, with his arms outstretched, reached for the floor on the other side of the wall.

  He found it. It was only a couple of feet below the bottom edge of the doorway. He then scooted a little farther forward with the aid of his hands walking across the floor and finally shifted his center of gravity enough to be able to fall onto the floor on the other side of the wall.

  He got up and looked around. Though the space was dark, it wasn’t pitch black. There was a little light. It came through the opening. It came from the ‘other’ side (the side where he had just been). It came through as a round shaft of light. It fell at an angle across the floor.

  The new corridor was about 6 feet wide and 14 feet high. Like the last corridor, this one seemed to be made entirely of something that looked very much like wood. He walked on planks. He saw planks up above. The walls too were made of planks nailed onto some kind of underlying framework. All the planks ran perpendicular to the line of orientation of the corridor.

  This corridor was fairly short. He got to the end of it after having gone only about 10 feet from the wall he had come through. Where the corridor ended, there was a huge paneled door which was attached to the wall to the left of it by means of huge cast iron hinges. There were also a number of knobs on the door made, he supposed, either of copper or brass.

  The knobs on the door were in different places on the door’s surface. One—the biggest one—was about halfway up on the right side of the door which is where doorknobs usually were placed. The other knobs were on the right-side of each panel and about halfway down. There were a total of 9 knobs, one for each of the eight panels plus the knob that seemed to belong to the huge door that contained the panels that might also be doors.

  He walked up to the big door first and wondered how he might possibly open it. The largest knob (the one halfway up the 12 foot high door) was at least 6 feet from the floor. He had to get up on his tiptoes just to reach it. He couldn’t put his hands around it let alone attempt to turn it.

  Maybe, he thought, he might be able to get enough leverage to be able to turn it if only he could get up higher but, after looking around the room and not seeing any stools or ladders or anything else on which he could stand, he didn’t see how he could do it.

  It was a door made for a giant. He remembered stories he had heard of normal-sized creatures waiting for giants to open and close doors or roll away rocks before going in or out of their lairs. Didn’t Jack of Jack-and-the-Beanstalk fame have to do something like that? Didn’t Ulysses have to wait for the Cyclops to roll a stone away from its lair before sneaking in and then out?

  He knocked on the door but heard only a quiet thud and deduced that the door was very solid and thick. He doubted if the sound of his knocking would carry over to the other side.

  He found inscriptions, the lines of which were highlighted in gold, on each of the eight panels as well as at the top of the big door.

  He admired the quality of the work and figured that whoever did the carving had to be quite an expert woodcarver and sign-maker because the V-notches that had been cut into the wood to make letters that were very straight, even, and generally (as far as he could tell) flawless. He supposed that, after the notches had been cut but before the door was raised upright, gold paint had been poured into the depressions and had been allowed to flow through them as water flows through va
lleys. Then, after the gold paint had dried, the huge door was raised upright and put in place.

  He pulled his notebook and pencil out of their respective pockets and carefully copied the inscriptions. Because there were just a few symbols at each place, it did not take him very long to do the copying. Despite his eagerness to get through the door, he forced himself to double-check his copying—he did not want to make any mistakes.

  He began to take more seriously the possibility that the panels were actually doors that if opened would give access to different places. They were doors within a main door. Maybe they were the only door. Maybe the big door was just a prop and an illusion.

  It occurred to him that, if the panels were doors and possibly the only real doors in this room, then he might be able to open some or all of them. He was sure that he was tall enough to reach the bottom four doors. It occurred to him that he also might use the bottom doors and the panels above and below them to climb up high enough to be able to try to open the top four doors.

  He grabbed hold of the knob of one of the bottom panels, turned it, tried pulling the door and, when that didn’t work, pushed it. It opened outwards. Because the space was not large, he pushed his hands and arms through first and then his head and upper torso. Then he bent over, touched the ground on the other side, and slithered through the opening. To do it, he had to lie down on the floor on the other side. And, no sooner had he squirmed through the opening then the door he came through, which must have been attached to some kind spring mechanism, snapped shut.

  Chapter 28: Two Dreams

  After getting to the other side of the panel that was also a door and part of a door, he tried to stand up but hit his head on a ceiling that must have been no more than 5 feet high. He reached sideways and discovered the space was also quite narrow, barely wider than his shoulders.

  He opened his eyes and saw nothing. He tried rapidly opening and closing his eyes, thinking that maybe something had temporarily gotten into his eyes. He was thinking he might get his eyes clear by blinking rapidly, but he still couldn’t see anything. This, of course, bothered him very much. He wondered what was wrong.

  Either he was suddenly blind or it was utterly black in there. Hunched over in the cramped space, he kept opening and closing his eyes but discovered that whether his eyes were open or closed made no difference at all.

  With his back scrunched over and his hands touching the two close walls, he duck-walked forward. He was terrified. Despair slipped in through some crevice in a wall and sat on his shoulder and, excited, hopped up and down. It acted like a child sometimes acts when sitting on the shoulders of an adult. It played at riding a horse. It dug its heels into the sides of his chest. It put its hands around his neck. While he didn’t have enough room to stand, Despair had plenty of room in which to run about and carry on.

  Despite the darkness, the cramped space, and the presence of Despair, he managed to creep through the low and narrow corridor. He tried to feel with his hands and feet as much of the walls, floor, and ceiling as he could while moving along because he didn’t want to overlook any possible means of escape. He thought there might be an opening, possibly covered by a door. He wondered too if he might find a light switch. He was also worried about the possibility of falling down into a hole. He was also worried that he might encounter creatures in this place like the rats, snakes, spiders, bats or scorpions of Earth.

  On the one hand he looked for an escape hatch or light switch. On the other hand he was trying to detect a hole. And on a third hand he worried about touching some vile creature. All in all, he found the situation awful and wished he could get out of it.

  It occurred to him he might be dreaming. It occurred to him that, instead of crawling through a corridor, he had fallen into a deep sleep instead and dreamed about crawling through a corridor. What he was going through just seemed to him too bizarre to be true.

  And, if he was, in fact, dreaming, then he supposed that what he was now experiencing might come to a sudden end at any time.

  Yet everything seemed so real. When he walked, he got really tired. When he fell, he really felt like he was falling. When he hit his head on the ceiling of this place a few moments before, his head really hurt. People sometimes perform a test to determine whether or not they are dreaming: they pinch themselves to see if the pinching hurts. They suppose that if the pinching hurts they are awake and that if it doesn’t they are dreaming. Yet isn’t it possible that the dream includes both the pinching and the feeling of being hurt? He pinched himself. It hurt.

  Perhaps what people call reality is a dream in which case dreams might be one of two things: they might be a dream within a dream or alternatively they might be an awakening to a reality hitherto inaccessible. Perhaps, he thought, I am now inside of an alternative reality and not inside of a dream. He dwelled on the implications of that thought he just had for a while; then he looked around and decided he better concentrate more on his surroundings, regardless of whether what surrounded him was dream or reality.

  After going a few dozen yards, he reached a place where there was a step going downwards. After going down the step, he realized that he could stand upright and had room to spare. It seems that the ceiling went up a step in the same place where the floor went down a step. Also, at this same place, the walls went outwards a step. He now felt very much relieved. Still, he went slowly, reaching out and around and above him and testing the floor with his foot in order not to miss a door and in order to avoid falling down a hole.

  After a few more yards, there was another step all around and the space through which he walked became still more spacious. The darkness remained, however. Now, he had to zigzag to touch both walls. He had to examine one wall at a time with his hands. He had to grope forward with his feet as well as with his hands. He had no way of knowing what the ceiling was like or, really, how far away from him it was.

  He was very tired. It had been a long time since he slept. He decided to lie down on the floor of this now wide and high corridor and try to take a nap. He did that. He put his hands under his head, using them as a pillow. He turned sideways and brought his knees up against his chest. He did manage to fall asleep but sleeping did him no good because the entire time he slept was taken up with a horrible dream that left him, when he woke up, more tired than he was before he slept.

  This was that dream: Despair came to him. It carried a lantern. It walked very slowly up to him from very far away in the darkness. When it reached him, it brought the lantern up close to his face.

  The lantern gave off a reddish glow. It made the face of Despair look devilish with those reds where the light was and that black in the shadows. Sometimes the red parts grew. Other times the black parts did. It seemed as if the two colors were competing for control of the being he called Despair. And Despair, looking at him, seemed to read what was on his mind and laughed and jiggled the lantern so that, first, red and then black had the upper hand.

  Then Despair lowered the lantern and began to walk away. “Why are you doing this to me?” he asked. And he thought he heard Despair say, “Because.” And, if that is what Despair actually said, it said it time and again while getting farther and farther away and then turned a corner or went through a door. Then blackness returned with a vengeance.

  He was frightened. He opened his eyes and decided that groping farther down in the darkness of this corridor would be preferable to subjecting himself to another one of those dreams.

  He kept groping and feeling the floor with his feet. He came to a place where the corridor made a right turn. He managed that turn and then shortly thereafter came to a place where the corridor made a left turn. Shortly thereafter, he came to a place where the corridor ended. He touched the wall that marked the end of the corridor. He felt the sides and felt something like a doorframe projecting at a certain point on one side and at the very edge of the wall on the other side.

  He got down on his knees and felt the doorway on his left meet a horizontal sect
ion of what seemed like a doorway just above the floor. The same thing was true of the doorframe on his right. He stood up and, sliding his hand up along the doorframe on his left, he reached as high as he could but found no upper edge to the doorframe. He got up on his toes but still found no upper edge which meant the door that he faced was taller than he could reach. He next groped all over the surface that what he took to be a doorframe surrounded. He found a large round bulb attached to a cylindrical pedestal.

  Chapter 29: Two Monsters

  After feeling all over what he took to be the doorknob and trying to turn it and finding that it turned, he decided to explore other parts of the surface that he took to be the door. He was curious to know if inscriptions might be found there though how he could make copies of inscriptions in the dark he did not know.

  He found no grooves or cuts that might be inscriptions. He found the door’s hinges. He concluded that the door was a little narrower than the section of the corridor he now was in. How high the door was or, for that matter, how high the ceiling of the corridor was he could not say. Nor could he tell what the door might be made of. The sole exception to the flatness was a section high up on the door. There he felt a recessed area and, in that recessed area, something smooth and slippery, something that might be glass.

  He wondered how he might break that glass and was really bothered by the difficulty and danger involved in doing that. Then he had to laugh at himself and wonder at his sanity when he realized he had not even tried to open the door the normal way yet.

  He tried once again to turn the knob. Once again, it turned. Clutching the knob, he now hesitated to push the door open because, for some reason, he got the idea that something dangerous waited to pounce on him on the other side. And, sensing that danger, he sensed another one—that something dangerous crouched somewhere in the dark corridor behind him and, having caught his scent, was slowly approaching. He imagined it drooling. He pictured in his mind its sharp teeth and glowing eyes. He listened for its breathing and seemed to hear a pulsing sound that might actually be breathing.