Chapter 5
The Roof and the Mirror
The narrator drives to the windowless building, climbs to the roof, and uses the skeleton key to open the hatch. Inside a dark room, they find a mirror on the ceiling and a box containing a final clue from Juokas: 'Undone to make. Return to the tree at the hour when the sun and moon share the sky.' The narrator leaves, feeling watched, and drives back toward the field.
The road was empty, the dark pressing in from both sides. I drove with the photograph on the passenger seat, the key in my pocket, and the compass on the dash. The needle still pointed east, steady and unflinching. I had memorized the image of the building—the flat gray roof, the faint square of the hatch. I knew where it was. A few miles outside town, off a gravel lane I had passed a hundred times without noticing.
I turned onto the lane, the car bumping over ruts and stones. The headlights caught a chain-link fence, rusted and sagging, and beyond it the building rose out of the weeds. It was exactly as the photograph had shown—windowless, featureless, a concrete box squatting in the field. No windows. No doors on this side. I stopped the car and killed the engine.
The silence was immediate and complete. I sat for a moment, listening to my own breathing. Then I opened the door and stepped out. The air was cool, smelling of dust and dry grass. I walked around the building, the gravel crunching under my boots. The walls were blank, seamless, save for a single metal door on the far side—padlocked, rusted, clearly untouched for years. I didn't try it. The clue had said the door was not on the ground.
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