You take the flashlight from the kitchen drawer, switch it on and then off. As you finish a small bowl of the trifle, you try not to wonder about the note or its author or its purpose. You try to pretend that you didn’t see it, that you are merely doing something that needs to be done just as you might go about reading a story while trying to pretend that you weren’t aware that nobody cared about reading stories anymore.

Quietly, you step out onto the porch and sit down in one of the chairs—watching, listening, slowly eating another bowl of trifle. Your memory of being in the house stretches back less than 24 hours, but what a delight it is to be outside! You had been so focused on the house and its contents, you had forgotten the world, the earth, the stars, the lovely Moon: an outer context for your place in the world somewhat less nebulous than the inner one you seem to be cobbling together. And anyway, isn’t all that inner cobbling merely a tangle that you get yourself into in attempting to deal with the outer? Is it?

Well, why fuss when you still have delicious trifle to finish on such a pleasant evening where you seem to be an audience of one to a symphony by an orchestra of crickets and where such a pedestrian, unpoetic metaphor is unable to shake the enjoyment from you at this moment? But not only is the metaphor unpoetic, the crickets are invisible to you and cannot quite be heard and the trifle is tasteless—not tasteless exactly, it has a distinct flavor but without taste memories to compare it to, you cannot quite place it nor form an opinion about it. Still, you feel as though you should enjoy the trifle that you cannot quite taste and the crickets that you cannot quite hear. And isn’t indirect enjoyment better than none at all? But now that your bowl is empty again and you feel undeservedly certain that you are alone here, you step outside and turn on the flashlight to do a bit more investigating.

The bright moonlight allows you to see much of what is out in the open, but the flashlight comes in handy for obscured spots and for details. That is not to say that there is much detail worth mentioning! There are flowers, shrubs, hedges, trees, areas of lawn. There are shutters for the windows. There are some stone steps leading down from the kitchen/dining area entrance. As inside, the outside is inconspicuous, anonymous despite the fact that you keep expecting there to be something special about it. You realize that this must be some sort of extension of your belief in yourself as being to some degree special, the necessary belief that what you do matters to some extent, the impetus for you to continue to do anything at all despite an indifferent world full of countless individuals with their heads turned away—and, when a handful do take a glance your way, it is for the briefest of moments and probably never again—and, in light of this, the further necessity of invoking or creating something special or, at the very least, pretending to see something special where there seems to be nothing, a darkness. A great lot of hoo-ha over you and a house! It is reasonable that you would like to find something special about the house, for it to shed light on your situation. For now, it is nothing, not what you are looking for. It just sits there obstinate in its uselessness hardly even resembling a house at all but rather like a factory waiting for morning and the arrival of workers to bring it back to what passes for life. But what could such determinedly decisive people focus their industrious activity upon in such a place as this? How should they be able to find this location that is likely not represented on any of their maps? And how they should in vain try to gain entrance by, for instance, merely turning the knob, opening the door and walking right in!

For a moment you even wonder if you will be able to get back into the house yourself until you realize that you have been standing for some time in the same place. Looking up with your hands on your hips, you can see the peak of the roof in the moonlight, and while you do not have any foolish thoughts about climbing up there presently, you can see windows to what appears to be a second story room! You wonder why you didn’t find stairs or some sort of entrance to the room from inside. Of course, you weren’t looking for such a thing—you merely looked at what was immediately before your eyes. Perhaps there is an attic access door that you hadn’t noticed in the ceiling of one of the rooms? You continue your search, invigorated by this discovery cum conjuring. Another room to investigate, another beyond, an absence to eventually be filled, a mysterious tear in the mundane material. Likely nothing more than another boring something. But something! A possibility . . .

You have nearly finished your circumnavigation of the house, feverishly searching for some other entrance, some other undiscovered region of the house when you hear again that whirring – now incessant, penetrating. And this time you very clearly hear the pilot of that impossibly low-flying airplane shouting down to you (who else, after all?) through a megaphone: “Murderer! Murderer! We can see what you are doing!”

A part of you wishes to confront this entire situation head-on: to see if this man in the airplane has any answers for your being here. But perhaps you will not like what else he has to tell you. It is also possible that he might purposely mislead you or else be unknowingly misled himself. Better to wait until you have more fully assessed the situation. As things stand, you might currently be in danger as it could be argued that you are disobeying the note left at the front door.

The pilot continues shouting accusations veering the airplane all around in a controlled chaos of zigs and zags and swoops, and, as if by chance, you now notice under your gaze, heavy and wooden and weathered: a cellar door.