House of Leaves (61 page)

XX

No one should brave the underworld alone.

—Poe

[
-
> “
The walls are endlessly bare. Nothing hangs on them, nothing defines them. They are without texture. Even to the keenest eye or most sentient fingertip, they remain unreadable. You will never find a mark there. No trace survives. The walls obliterate everything. They are permanently absolved of all record. Oblique, forever obscure and unwritten. Behold the perfect pantheon of absence.”
—
[Illegible]
—
Ed.]

On
the first day of April, Navidson set out on the last exploration of those strange hallways and rooms. The card introduces this sequence as nothing more than
Exploration #5
.

For recording the adventure, Navidson brought with him a 1962 H16 hand crank Bolex 16mm camera along with 16mm, 25mm, 75mm Kern-Paillard lenses and a Bogen tripod. He also carried a Sony microcassette recorder, Panasonic Hi 8, ample batteries, at least a dozen 120 minute Metal Evaporated (DLC) tapes, as well as a 35mm Nikon, flashes, and a USA Bobby Lee camera strap. For film, he packed 3000 feet of 7298 16mm Kodak in one hundred foot loads, 20 rolls of
35mm,
including some 36 frame Konica 3200 speed, plus 10 rolls of assorted black and white film. Unfortunately the thermal video camera he had arranged to rent fell through in the last minute.

For survival gear, Navidson took with him a rated sleeping bag, a one man tent, rations for two weeks, 2 five-gallon containers of water, chemical heat packs, flares, high intensity as well as regular intensity lightsticks, plenty of neon markers, fishing line, three flashlights, one small pumper light, extra batteries, a carbide lamp, matches, toothbrush, stove, change of clothes, an extra sweater, extra socks, toilet paper, a small medical kit, and one book. All of which he carefully loaded into a two wheel trailer which he secured to an aluminum-frame mountain bike.

For light, he mounted a lamp on the bike’s handlebars powered by a rechargeable battery connected to a small optional rear-wheel generator. He also installed an odometer.

As we can see, when Navidson first starts down the hallway he does not head for the Spiral Staircase. This time he chooses to explore the corridors.

Due to the weight of the trailer, he moves very slowly,

but as we hear him note on his microcassette recorder: “I’m in

no hurry.”

Frequently, he stops to take stills and shoot a

little film.

After two hours he has only managed to go

seven miles. He stops for a sip of water, puts up a neon

marker, and then after checking his watch begins pedaling

again. Little does he understand the significance

of his offhand remark: “It seems to be getting easier.”

Soon, however, he realizes there is a definite

decrease in resistance. After an hour, he no longer

needs to pedal: “This hallway seems to be on a

decline. In fact all I do now is brake.” When

he finally stops for the night, the odometer

reads an incredible 163 miles.

As he sets up camp in a small room, Navidson already knows his trip is over: “After going downhill for eight hours at nearly 20 mph, it will probably take me six to seven days, maybe more, to get back to where I started from.”

When Navidson wakes up the next morning, he eats a quick breakfast, points the bike

home, and begins what he expects will be an appalling, perhaps impossible, effort.

However within a few minutes, he finds he no longer needs to pedal.

Once again he is heading downhill.

Assuming he has become disoriented,

he turns around and begins pedaling in the opposite direction, which

should be uphill. But within fifteen seconds, he is again

coasting down a slope.

Confused, he pulls into a large room and tries to gather his

thoughts: “It’s as if I’m moving along a surface that always tilts

downward no matter which direction I face.”

Resigned to his fate, Navidson climbs back on

the bike and soon enough finds

himself clipping along at almost

thirty miles an hour.

For the next five

days Navidson

covers anywhere

from 240 to 300

miles at a time,

though on the

fifth day, in what

amounts to an

absurd fourteen

hour marathon,

Navidson logs 428

miles.

Nor does this endless corridor he travels

remain the same size.

Sometimes the ceiling drops in on him,

getting

progressively

lower

and

lower

until it begins to graze his head,

only to shift a few minutes later,

rising higher and higher until

it disappears altogether.

Sometimes the hallway

widens, until at one

point Navidson

wears he is moving

down some

enormous plateau:

“An infinitely large billiard table or the smooth face of some incredible mountain,” he tells us hours later while preparing a modest meal. “One time I stopped and set out to the right on what I thought would be a traverse. Within seconds I was heading downhill again.”

And then the walls reappear, along with the ceiling

and numerous doorways; the shifts always

accompanied by that inimitable, and by now very

familiar, growl.

As the days pass, Navidson becomes more and

more aware that he is running precariously low on

water and food. Even worse, the sense of inevitable

doom this causes him is compounded by the sense

of immediate doom he feels whenever he begins

riding his bike: “1 can’t help thinking I’m going to

reach an edge to this thing. I’ll be going too fast to

stop and just fly off into darkness.”

Which is almost what happens.

On the twelfth or thirteenth day (it is very
difficult
to tell which)
, after sleeping for what Navids
on estimates must have been well over 18 hours, he again sets off down the hallway.

Soon the walls and doorways recede and

v a n i s h,

then the ceilings lifts completely out of sight

until it too is completely out of sight

“direction no longer matters.”

Navidson stops and lights four magnesium flares which he throws as far as

he can to the

right and left.

Then he bikes down a hundred yards and lights four more flares.

After the third time, he turns around

and

relying on a timed exposure

photographs

the twelve

flares.

The first image captures twelve holes of light.

In the second image, however, the flares seem much farther away.

By the third image, they appear only as streaks,

indicating that either

Navidson

or

the

flares

are

m

o

v

i

n

g

.

However,

Navidson’s comments on the microcassette

recorder indicate his camera was firmly

fixed on the tripod.

Having little choice, Navidson continues on. The hours sweep by. He tries to drink as little water as possible. The odometer breaks. Navidson does not care. It no longer seems relevant to him how many thousands of miles he has traveled. He just continues to ride, lost in a trance born out of motion and darkness, the lamp on his bike never casting light more than a few yards ahead, barely describing the ash floor in front of him before it is already behind him, until all of a sudden, although nothing appears to have changed, one moment differs from the rest, warning Navidson to stop. “As if all along, during the last week, I had sensed something out there” Navidson stutters into the Hi 8 an hour later. “And then all at once it was gone, replaced by — [Navidson is not the only one to have intuitively sensed the abyss. During the tragic May assault on Everest where eleven people died, Neal Biedelman, lost at night in a blinding blizzard, described how he stumbled to the edge of the 7,000 foot Kangshung face: “Finally, probably around ten o’clock, I walked over this little rise, and it felt like I was standing on the edge of the earth. I could sense a huge void just beyond.” See Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” in
Outside,
v.
xxi,
n. 9, September 1996, p. 64.]

Navidson tries to stop, hammering down on the brakes, rubber pads failing to hold the wheels, shrieking, even though he is still seconds before the pale light thrown by the bike lamp will finally catch sight of the end. “At that point I just yanked my bike to the ground,” he says, pointing the video camera at his left thigh. “My leg’s pretty torn up. Still bleeding a little. The trailer’s completely wrecked. I think that’s what finally stopped me. I slid right to the edge. My legs were hanging over. And I could feel it too. I don’t know how. There was no wind, no sound, no change of temperature. There was just this terrible emptiness reaching up for me.”

Flush with the brink stands a structure reminiscent of a bartizan. It is no more than seven feet high and has only one door. Inside Navidson discovers a winding staircase, which instead of leading up somewhere, or down somewhere, lies on its side, penetrating through the wall facing the abyss. Still badly shaken, Navidson does not investigate. Instead, he decides to spend the night, or whatever time of day it is—for some reason the time stamp on the Hi 8 is no longer functioning—within the confines of that unanticipated shelter. [While it would have offered Navidson some comfort, these walls still find Hermann Broch’s inscription insupportable:
In der Mitte aller Ferne steht dies Haus drum hab es gern
. “In the middle of all distance stands this house, therefore be fond of it.” —Ed.]

The first thing Navidson notices when he wakes up is that the only door out of there has vanished. Furthermore the stairs which were horizontal before he had gone to sleep are now directly above him, rising through the ceiling, suggesting that the tiny house within a house has rotated onto its side. After changing the bandages on his leg and devouring a small snack, Navidson transfers the sleeping bag, tent, Bolex, the Nikon, the Hi 8, the film, all the video tapes, the microcassette recorder, two containers of water, three flares, chemical heaters, and the remaining PowerBars into his pack, which he then tosses up through the hole……