Chapter 6 Maria

Chapter 6

?Maria

The door, now open, reveals what lies beyond it: the room is very large, white, with smooth walls that are ambiently lit as if by daylight, though being beneath ground, there are no windows.

It is completely empty.

The lights change slightly in tone as Maria peers into the space, as if sensing her.

Maria steps back from the threshold quickly, instinctively, and the lighting returns to normal. She takes in the cavernous room from the safety of the hallway. A small metal plate just inside the hydraulic doorway reads: The Atrium. But the room doesn't look like one, at least not to Maria. She searches her mind for atriums and finds only remembered images from coffee-table books: old European courtyards, Italian vestibules, open-air cobbled sun-traps. But the space in front of her now is internal, a sealed room. Then Maria's mind finds something else, the other meaning of the word: a word she recalls vividly from her days at Cornell. The atrium of a human heart. An anatomical cavity, or passage. The chamber of the human heart that receives blood from the veins and forces it on into ventricles and then on and on around the body. She shivers, the memory of cutting open a human cadaver suddenly flashing through her mind. Strange, it didn't bother her at the time. And though she shelved medical school after the second year, it wasn't for squeamish reasons. She wasn't a delicate person; God knows she wouldn't have lasted long in her life if she were. She worked her way up to Cornell the hard way, from nothing and nowhere.

There is nothing in the room before her at all.

Except, she suddenly makes out, something on the far wall.

On the farthest wall from the door, at chest height, a green button begins to glow. It pulses as if willing her to walk across the vast, empty space and push it. Maria watches it intently for a full minute, her expression tight with suspicion.

"Hm, okay," she says finally, appraisingly.

Then Maria shakes her head, definitively steps away from the room, and lets the door automatically close in front of her—the room, button and all, safely out of sight again.

Probably best not to get involved in any of that, Maria reasons.

And then her thoughts go again to her absent client and his two children, and whether they will ever arrive, whether they even exist. The room's strangeness breeding stranger thoughts: What is it for, and why had it been locked?

Back upstairs, Maria considers her options. She could call the woman with the too-tight chignon again and request an end to this job.

Or she could ignore the room downstairs completely until the electrician she was promised arrives, resets the fault, and restores the locked room to its former secured setting.

Or, of course, she could march straight into the white room and smash her hand onto that pulsing green button. What could it possibly do?

She stifles a giggle. Imagine if she was that fucking stupid.

Instead Maria makes her way across the living room to phone the woman. Best to cancel the job; it's getting a little too weird. Canceling now could secure her at least a percentage of her fee as a goodwill gesture.

But then again, that would rely heavily on the client's sense of fairness. She stops just short of lifting the telephone receiver. Fairness isn't a common trait at this level—at any client level. Fairness, if it ever exists, is only optics. And there are almost never optics in dealing with hired help.

Her hand pulls back slightly from the receiver at the thought of losing her fee, of losing what should rightfully be hers.

And just as Maria decides she will stay a little longer, the sound of the front doorbell cuts through the empty house.

Maria turns to the chime, momentarily baffled, her thoughts caught short. Then, remembering the electrician, she heads toward the hall.

Through the front entrance's floor-to-ceiling glass, she sees a man in his fifties with a kind face wearing a chain electrical company uniform. He gives her a hopeful smile, morning sunlight blinding him so he has to squint to see her through the glass. Clearly uncertain that he is in the right place, he gives her a hesitant wave.

Maria studies him a moment before deciding to smile back, return his wave.

He raises a security lanyard looped around his neck, the same as the one the gatehouse guards gave Maria the day she arrived.

Maria remembers that the property is surrounded by security. If this man was a threat, he wouldn't have gotten this far.

His voice is muffled, reedy, through the glass. "Hi, it's Joon-gi. They sent me up from the gatehouse. I've got to check the electrics." The statement is half question.

The man misconstrues Maria's curious gaze and adds, "I'll be quick. Thirty minutes max?"

Maria remains silent for a moment then raises a finger and says, clearly, so he can hear her through the glass, "Just one minute."

She disappears back into the living room to call the woman with the too-tight chignon.

Three minutes later, Maria lets the man in.

Twenty minutes later, he is packing away his tools and folding up his dust blanket. "Just a loose connection," he tells her when she pops her head around the doorway of the master bedroom. "Happens sometimes with new builds. Things need to settle."

For some reason Maria finds herself looking up at the ceiling as if it might be something other than a ceiling, knowledge of the strange room beneath them weighing on her mind.

A thought occurs to her. She watches the electrician as he fills out a service docket with a small red pencil. She is considering what she is about to say very carefully.

When the man looks up, he finds Maria staring at him. Misconstruing her look again, he reassures her, "Oh, you don't need to sign anything. I'll just leave the docket with you."

Maria's question solidifies in her mind. She raises herself up to her full height and gives him a winning smile. Then, seemingly as an afterthought, she adds, "Actually, I don't suppose you could take a look at something else, for me, could you? Downstairs?"

—

The electrics in the master bedroom may have been successfully reset but down on the lower floor the locked door's panel still glows green.

Maria explains that the door should be locked. The two tilt their heads in unison as they consider the problem.

"So, it was locked. And it just unlocked itself?" he asks.

Maria nods.

"And you want it locked again?" he says, aware something strange is going on here but also that he is not yet able to grasp its extent.

"Yes, if you can that would be good," she answers simply.

The man raises his eyes to meet hers. "Why do you need it locked? What's in there?"

Maria gives a noncommittal shrug. "Nothing."

"There's nothing in there? Then why do you need—"

Patience wearing thin, Maria leans past the diminutive man, and presses her palm to the lock panel.

The hydraulic door slides smoothly open to reveal the empty room.

The two stare in.

"Empty, see?" she comments.

"What's that?" the little man asks.

"A green button," Maria replies.

"What does it do?"

"I don't know," she answers. Then with absolutely no intention of entering the room herself she asks, "Do you think we should press it?"

The man turns to Maria, studying her face: her beautiful, feminine features, her thin frame, her soft immaculate uniform—and he finds whatever reassurance he was looking for there. He looks down at the room's threshold and after a moment's hesitation steps across it into the wide-open space of the white room.

Once inside, he looks up, taking in the size of it. He spreads his arms like Christ the Redeemer and spins surprisingly unselfconsciously then lets out a chuckle. "It's big. Big room. Must have cost a fortune to dig out of the cliff rock. Is it a gallery?" He points to the pulsing green button. "Rich-guy art?"

Maria lets out a grunt of appreciation at the logic. It hadn't occurred to her that this could just be a piece of ludicrous overpriced contemporary art. And now that he is in the room, even he takes on a relevance, a specificity that perhaps he did not necessarily possess before. Living art. Everything he does is somehow brought into focus by the clarity of the room, so that when he suddenly pulls up short it is almost as if he has shouted back across the space to her. She stares at his unmoving back—he is transfixed by something on the wall surrounding the green button. He walks over and leans in to take a closer look.

"What's wrong?" Maria asks.

"It's weird," he calls back. "There's no access panel for the button." He turns back to her, his face suddenly a little ashen.

"Oh, okay. What does that mean?"

He gives a strange shake of the head. "Well, we're underground here. This whole basement level is carved out of the rock. They dug down. The walls should back directly onto more bedrock, so it follows that all the building's electrics should be accessible from inside the house. I mean, you can't get outside the building down here. But this button doesn't have an internal access panel. There has to be a way to get to the wiring—" He breaks off, touching the smooth white walls in broad, wide strokes either side of the button.

He steps back from the button, suddenly a little fearful.

"If there's no access to the wiring in this room then that means there is access on the other side," he says, carefully, pointing beyond the wall.

"So what you're saying is there's more house? Beyond this room?"

"Yeah." The man swallows and nods. "Must be."

Maria thinks she follows the man's line of thought and why it might surprise or even concern him. The proportions of this room alone are enough to pose the questions: who would build a room like this and why?

He turns his head slowly back to the green button as if it had spoken. "Have you tried it?" he asks Maria, gesturing to its green glow.

"No way," Maria answers. "I haven't even been inside the room. To tell you the truth, I thought the door might lock behind you, and trap you, as soon as you walked in." She smiles, hoping he might place her honesty in higher esteem than her blatant disregard for his safety. "But that didn't happen," she reminds him. "And to be honest, I think I've just been freaking myself out about it."

The man weighs her words, then his posture softens. "Yeah, it's just a room," he says, as much to himself as to her. And with a sudden reassurance and confidence that the world is ultimately a known quantity, he lifts his hand and pushes the green button.