It was in the new wing, they said. I had to come quickly.
    The way there passed through a lot of underused rooms I had added to
the house at a time when I took my role as matriarch more seriously. No
children had come back to raise families in them and no cousins turned up
to freeload in them, so empty they stayed. And yet, when I had needed
space to put certain large items into, I expanded the house farther still.
Optimistic, I suppose.
    On this occasion it also meant that I could hear our visitor long
before I could see it, and long before anyone would tell me what they had
seen. I couldn't even tell if the servants were eager or afraid.
    I was both.

    The visitor lay in the second large chamber, the one with a thousand-
step staircase. Inside the stairs' spiral was now a cube, roughly my
height, whose surface looked like concrete. I could hear it singing: not a
tune I recognized, but far from unearthly. Walking around it once did not
reveal how it was able to make sound.
    I had clearly succeeded at sending an invitation. Whatever else I
thought I was doing, I had failed at. I spoke to the visitor briefly,
telling it my name and where it was; it looked and sounded just the same
when I was done.
    At that point the chef informed me that a luscious dessert awaited in
one of his kitchens, having begun to bake just before the "interruption".
I coughed and asked him to lead the way.

    I made two concessions to prudence before trying to forget my visitor:
first, asking the watchman to visit the chamber several times an hour, and
second, reminding all of my staff not to touch the staircase. Then I
scoured the mundane corners of my life for unfinished tasks, and took them
on with irrelevant relish.
    Financially, I suppose, the visitor was thus a great help. But I can-
not recommend the technique, in general.
    Over the next two months, my diligence faded back to lugubriousness. I
stayed out of the new wing entirely, which quickly became as reflexive as
not scratching a sunburn or staying off a bad knee. If I thought about
the visitor at all, it was to congratulate myself for not thinking about
it very much.

    One night, finally, I woke with a start. Pinkish lights played silent-
ly on the ceiling; it took me a moment to realize they came from alarm
beacons going off in the hallway.
    The security system told me where the apparent intrusion was. I ran
to the new wing, the halls echoing with the visitor singing (still?
again?) the same tune as before. When I got there, the visitor was lying
outside the embrace of the spiral stairs; it appeared to have been tipped
over twice, in order to get it upside-down.
    Not thinking, I ran up the stairs to get a better view of the top of
the visitor. It had a capital G carved into it, my first initial. Where
its exterior had been stripped away, a softer surface rippled underneath.
    At the top of the stairs, high above my head, part of the roof opened
and something began its descent.

written for Carrie Rosenbaum on two couches 10/22/08

This one is full of errors in continuity/coherence. Most annoying to me, how could you tell that a cube with (apparently) blank sides was upside-down?

It used to be the case that if I wrote something like this, I probably had several chunks of backstory in my head that I thought I was being clever or at least efficient by not spelling out. This time, no-- which is to say, I don't know what's in the other chambers of the new wing (I guess other very large things meant to summon 'visitors') or why the narrator wanted to summon anything (I had some vague idea about tying in the lonely materfamilias and the empty rooms, but it got dropped) or what's coming out of the ceiling.

Why I didn't take three seconds to estimate just how tall a 1000-step staircase would be, I cannot say. I was envisioning something about five or six stories tall.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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