The World House Read Online Free PDF Page A

around her. "We're looking at it."
      Miles did his best to bite down on his irritation. "You know what I mean." The corridor had no shortage of rooms. Every fifteen feet or so they passed a heavy wooden door. Miles moved to the closest. "We need to start checking the rooms," he said, turning the handle. "Maybe there'll be a window or something, somebody we can ask."
      "Ask about the impossible corridor, yes, let's do that." Penelope's voice was quiet and flat. Miles was worried that she was going into shock.
      He reached for the door handle.
     
    Penelope freely admitted her lack of knowledge of the city's geography. She experienced New York internally: from club to fashion store to gallery to restaurant, shuttled between them by a succession of taxicabs. When you loved designer shoes as much as she did, you understood they were not for walking in. It therefore took her a few minutes to suspect that Chester's driver was following a strange route to Dolores' house. The dark brownstones of Harlem were long behind them, replaced by an industrial landscape, chimneys and pipes, soot-covered brick and high fencing.
      "Where are we?" she asked Chester as the car pulled into a warehousing area for one of the factories.
      "My father's plant," he answered, rubbing his palms dry on the legs of his trousers.
      "What for?" Dolores asked, her words slurred. She peered through the window at the dark building outside. "All you big families blend into one, steelworks to chicken plants, I can never remember who's who. What do you guys do?'
      "Whatever we want," Chester replied, leaning past Penelope to slam Dolores' face into the window. The shove was hard enough to make her friend's nose pop, spitting a spray of blood on the glass.
     
    For a moment, as the door handle turned smoothly on its bolt, Miles had an almost overwhelming urge to remove his hand and run. It was irrational, of course – at least that's what he told himself. He had just spooked himself before: taxidermy wasn't predatory and one simply couldn't get eaten by a rug. No.
       (But why is the corridor so damned long?)
      He hadn't the first idea how to explain his circumstances but at least he was better off here than in the company of Fry and his impromptu surgeons.
       (Don't be so sure of that, this place… bristles… there's something so, so wrong with it.)
      Penelope was at his shoulder, forgetting for the moment that she didn't trust him. He could see from her face that she felt it too. Like excess ozone before a storm, there was an atmosphere that didn't sit right.
    He opened the door…
      …to find a bedroom of moderate size, a little ostentatious but not life-threatening. There was a wood-framed bed with lace drapes, a solid-looking dresser whose mirror showed him his own nervous face, and a large set of French windows that must lead to a balcony (unless the architect liked to encourage guests to walk out into thin air).
      "Anticlimax," he muttered, stepping into the room.
      Penelope crossed to the wardrobe, hoping to find spare clothes. She opened the doors and sighed at the emptiness they revealed.
      Miles went straight to the window, wanting an idea of the outside geography. He stood in front of the dark glass, seeing nothing but his own reflection. "Too dark," he said, though Penelope wasn't listening; she was hunting through drawers. Miles took hold of the handle of the French windows and then snatched his hand back with a small yelp as a shock ran up his arm. "Static or something," he said, reaching for it again more tentatively. He touched the handle carefully but it was fine this time. He opened the door and stepped outside into complete darkness. No stars, no lights, nothing. Leaning over the stone balustrade he saw no sign of the ground. It was if the world stopped the minute you reached the house's edge.
     
    The events in the back of the car wouldn't sit clearly in Penelope's mind. Chester had hit her, she knew