Ash Tree Lane

house

Measured from the outside: 900 px
Measured from the inside: 900 1⁄4 px

An unofficial retelling of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. The house is empty. Walk through it and bring out what you find.

A note on this edition

This is not the book. It is a retelling of one, in new words, by a reader who could not stop thinking about it.

The book has several voices, and so does this. An old blind man writes the main text, a study of a film that does not exist; he speaks in Times. A tattoo apprentice who found his papers keeps interrupting him in Courier. The editors interrupt them both, in Bookman. At the back, a mother writes letters in Goudy.

The small numbers open their notes. Notes open other notes. The rest is in the house: what you find there is added here, in the order you find it.

Introduction

Late one night Lude called me about a dead man.

Not somebody he knew, exactly. An old guy in a building Lude knew, a man nobody had seen for a while and who had turned out to be dead in the way the old and alone get to be dead, which is quietly and for longer than anyone wants to think about. The landlord had shut the place up. Lude wanted to see inside. I worked in a tattoo shop, I had nothing better to do at one in the morning, so I went.

His name was Zampanò. That was all I ever got, the one name, like a magician or a saint. He was about eighty. He had been blind since the fifties. The neighbors said women used to come by to read to him, a rotating crew of them over the years, and that he dictated to them too, for hours, in a voice that made you sit up straight.

The apartment smelled like a closed box. Hardly any furniture. And in the middle of all that nothing, a trunk.

Lude looked in, shrugged and went for a beer. I stayed.

It was paper. Nothing but paper. Legal pads, napkins, the backs of envelopes, receipts, a strip of wallpaper, the inside of a cereal box, all of it covered in writing, some typed, some in his hand, some in the hands of the women who wrote for him. Footnotes on footnotes. Whole sections crossed out and then written again underneath. It was a book, or it wanted to be one: a long study of a film called The Navidson Record, about a family and their house.

I went looking for the film. I’m telling you now so you don’t waste your time. It doesn’t exist. No distributor, no festival, no bootleg. The critics he quotes, when they exist at all, never wrote what he says they wrote. The whole thing is a house built on nothing, and he spent the end of his life measuring every room.

So I took the trunk home and started putting the pages in order. That was the mistake, or the start of it.

Here is what happened to me, and what will probably happen to you. One night you’ll be alone in a room you know by heart and you’ll feel the space behind you open up. Not a sound. Not a shape. Just the certainty that the room is a little bigger than it was a second ago. You’ll turn around and it will be fine. It will be exactly the same.

That’s the part that gets you.

Johnny Truant

I. Ash Tree Lane

The Navidson Record begins as the least remarkable film imaginable: a family moving house.

Will Navidson had spent most of his adult life inside other people’s disasters. As a photojournalist he had gone to famines and wars, and one of his photographs had won him the Pulitzer Prize. By the time the film begins, he wants to stop. He buys a house on Ash Tree Lane, in the Virginia countryside, and moves there with Karen Green, a former model, and their two children, Chad and Daisy. Will and Karen are not married. Everyone who knew them agrees that they loved each other. Nearly everyone also agrees that love had not yet made either of them stay.

Navidson’s plan is modest, even touching. He will document the ordinary. He mounts Hi8 cameras in the rooms and keeps a handheld with him, so that the house can record a family learning to live in it. What he wanted was a film about putting down roots.¹

What he got, according to its admirers, is the most frightening document of the late twentieth century, and according to its detractors, an elaborate hoax.³ The distinction may matter less than either side believes. The first minutes contain nothing but boxes, arguments about where the couch should go, a dog named Hillary and a cat named Mallory sniffing at the new rooms, and two children who have not yet learned to be afraid of a house.

Hoax. I want to say something about that word before we go any further.

The film doesn’t exist. I checked. So when the old man spends pages arguing about whether a film that doesn’t exist is a fake, you’d think I’d laugh, and I did, the first night, sitting on my kitchen floor with his papers all around me like a kid building a fort. I laughed out loud. The sound went off down the hall of my apartment and came back a little late.

Anyway. Work. I’m an apprentice at a tattoo shop, which means I sterilize things and trace flash and get yelled at. There’s a dancer who comes in for touch-ups. Everybody calls her Thumper. When she laughs, the whole shop turns toward her like plants toward a window. I’ve been thinking about Thumper instead of sleeping. It beats thinking about the other thing.

It is worth watching those minutes closely. It is the last time the house is the size it claims to be.

II. A quarter of an inch

The first anomaly is so small that the film nearly misses it.

The family comes home from a few days away to find a door where there had been none: a plain door in the wall between the master bedroom and the children’s room, opening onto a narrow space like a closet. It is not sinister. It is simply new. Nobody installed it. Nobody can say when it arrived.

Navidson does what a photographer does with a mystery. He measures it. He measures the inside of the house, then the outside, then the inside again, and then everything once more. The figures do not agree. The house is larger on the inside than on the outside by a quarter of an inch.⁴

A quarter of an inch is nothing. It is the thickness of a paperback cover, of a fingernail, of a mistake. That is exactly why Navidson cannot let it go. A house that is a mile larger inside than out is a fairy tale. A house that is a quarter of an inch larger is a problem in carpentry, and problems in carpentry are supposed to have solutions.

He calls for help. His twin brother Tom comes down to Virginia; the brothers have not been close for years, and Tom, the easygoing one, the one who never became famous for anything, arrives with jokes. So does Billy Reston, an old friend, a professor of engineering at the University of Virginia who has used a wheelchair since an accident on a construction site. Reston brings instruments. The instruments agree with the tape measure. Later measurements find that the gap has grown to five-sixteenths.⁵

This chapter, from the outside: 2,000 px
From the inside: 2,000 1⁄4 px

Zampanò devotes many pages to the idea that the smallness is the horror. We can live with the enormous, he argues, because the enormous is always somewhere else. The small discrepancy lives in the bedroom. It sleeps down the hall from the children.

III. The hallway

Then, one day, the living room has another door.

It is a doorway in a wall that should open onto the yard. Beyond it, where the yard should be, a hallway runs away into the dark. Its walls are smooth and ash-gray. There are no windows, no light fixtures, no switches, no molding, no mark of any tool. It is cold inside, a steady cold that has nothing to do with the season. And it is far longer than the house is wide.

The first footage of it, which circulated on videotape long before the full film, is known as The Five and a Half Minute Hallway.⁶ Much of what people believe about the Record comes from those few minutes: a door that opens onto nowhere, a family standing at its edge, a flashlight beam that finds no end.

Navidson goes in. He is not gone long, but long enough to get lost, and when he comes back out he is not quite the man who went in.⁷ Karen makes him promise never to go in again. She is claustrophobic and afraid of the dark, and she has already understood something he refuses to: the house is not a subject. It is not going to hold still to be photographed.

One afternoon the dog and the cat wander in. They turn up later outside the house, as if the hallway had let them out somewhere else.

The cameras keep running. The house keeps being wrong.

IV. Exploration A

Navidson goes in on a Tuesday, with the Hi8 on his shoulder, a flashlight, and a spool of fishing line tied off at the door frame, because Tom has said that if he is going to be an idiot he can at least be an idiot on a leash. Tom and Reston stay at the door with the radio. Karen is in the bedroom with the door shut.

The hallway is a hallway for the first forty feet. Then it is a room, and the room has two mouths in it, and the mouths go into the dark. He does not take either. He sets the camera down on the floor to look, and the camera, left running, records the only thing in the film that Navidson did not choose to film: the doorway behind him, a small warm rectangle, a long way off, going out.

When he turns round the corridor is longer than it was. Not by a little. He walks back taking in line, and the spool that was half full on the way in is empty long before he reaches the door, and then the line is slack in his hand, and then it is taut again, and then there is the door.

He is inside for eleven minutes by the camera’s clock and forty-one by Tom’s watch.⁸ Zampanò gives both figures and declines to choose between them, which is the first time in the study that he declines anything.

Karen makes him promise. He promises. That night he orders more line.⁹

V. Karen

Before the film is about a house, it is about a woman who does not like closed doors.

Karen Green was a model for most of her twenties, the kind whose face people know without knowing her name. She left it without regret. What she kept from those years was a habit of being looked at, and a way of holding still under a lens that Navidson, who had spent his life behind one, found harder to read than any war. She would not marry him. She said it was not the right time, and then she went on saying it, year after year, while they raised two children together.¹⁰

She is claustrophobic, and afraid of the dark, and the film treats both facts with unusual care. There is a story her sister tells, in an interview Zampanò quotes at length, about a well and an afternoon when Karen was fourteen and their stepfather put the two girls down into it, and brought the sister up, and left Karen there. Karen has never confirmed it. She has never denied it either. She only says that she does not remember, in the voice of someone who remembers.¹²

What she does about the house is what she has always done about a room she cannot leave: she fills it. When the hallway appears she buys books, hundreds of them, and builds shelves across the living room wall to cover the doorway, so that the family will have a library where the dark used to be. It works for a while. Then the shelves begin to pull away from the wall, and the gap behind them widens by the day, and one morning the books are on the floor and the doorway is exactly where it was.

Some of the most honest minutes in the film are hers, shot when she is alone with a camera and nobody is asking her to hold still. Zampanò reads them closely. What he finds in them is not a woman afraid of a hallway. It is a woman afraid of what Will becomes when he is looking at one: a man measuring the distance between himself and the people in the next room.¹³

There is talk, in Zampanò’s pages, of other men while Navidson was away on assignment, and Zampanò treats the talk as more than talk. This retelling lets it stay talk. What the film shows is a woman who keeps every promise she is asked for, and a man who keeps asking for one more.

VI. Explorations A to 3

The film numbers the trips into the hallway, and the numbering is the first sign that the house is winning.

Exploration A is Navidson’s own, and it has a letter instead of a number because nobody yet thought of it as the first of anything. He goes in with a camera and a flashlight while Tom and Reston wait at the door with a radio. The hallway does not stay still for him: it branches, it lengthens, a wall arrives where there was none, and for a while the doorway behind him is simply gone. Then it is there again, a small warm rectangle a long way off. He comes out talking too fast, and Tom, who will not yet set foot in the place, pours him a drink he does not take.

Explorations 1, 2 and 3 are Holloway’s, the professional Navidson hires to go in his place, and they are made the way a professional makes them: provisioned, radioed, timed. At the door, Navidson keeps a log of what the radio describes, and Reston reads the logs against each other, and they do not agree. A room that was forty feet across on the first trip is a hundred on the second and is not there on the third.¹⁴ The corridor is always longer coming back.

It is on these trips that they find the Great Hall, and the staircase in it. The Hall is where the corridor stops pretending to be a corridor: the walls go away to either side, the ceiling goes up out of the light, and the floor goes on. Their lamps, which are strong enough to light a quarry, light a circle a few yards across and then stop. Someone drops a flare into the well of the stairs and watches it fall, and it falls for longer than a flare should, and when it lands it is a spark, and then it is nothing.

The staircase is a spiral, going down.¹⁵

On the third trip they go down. Not far, by the standard the fourth will set, but far enough to learn that the steps do not end where the light does, and that the radio thins to nothing long before the stairs do. They come back up. At the door Holloway says very little, and Navidson, watching him, understands that the man has already decided to go back for longer.

The map that survives from these trips, if it is a map, is a sheet of paper that begins with a careful drawing of the house and ends with a circle and a spiral and a line that runs off the edge. Someone has written across the bottom that they stopped there. Someone else, in a different pencil, has written that the stairs have no bottom, and underlined it twice.

VII. Echoes

Zampanò interrupts the story here for a long meditation on echoes, and it is not the digression it appears to be.

An echo is the sound of a space answering. Clap your hands in a cathedral and the cathedral tells you how large it is. Clap in a closet and the closet says almost nothing. In the hallway, the explorers call out, and the dark does not answer, or answers late, or answers with something that is not quite their voice.

He reminds us of the nymph Echo, punished by Hera so that she could only repeat the last words spoken to her.¹⁷ She fell in love with Narcissus, who loved only his own reflection, and she wasted away until nothing was left of her but the voice.

An echo, then, is a love that can only answer. It never begins a sentence. It only ends yours.

The house does not answer.

VIII. Holloway

Navidson keeps his promise the way people keep promises they resent. He does not go into the hallway himself. He hires someone to go instead.

Holloway Roberts is a professional hunter and explorer, a man who has built a career on going first. He brings two men who have worked with him for years, Jed Leeder and Kirby Hook, whom everyone calls Wax. They come equipped for cold and dark: cameras, halogen lamps, cold-weather gear, and a radio to stay in touch with Navidson, Tom and Reston at the door.

A spool of fishing line is tied off at the doorway, and Holloway carries the spool. As long as the line holds, the way back is simple.

The first explorations find what first explorations always find: more. The hallway branches. There are rooms off it, some the size of closets and some too large for their lamps to cross, all with the same smooth gray walls, none with a single object in them. Every so often, very far off, there is a low sound, like a growl, or like a very large building shifting its weight.¹⁹

It is on the second of these trips that they find the Great Hall, a space so vast that their halogen lamps simply give up, and in it, the spiral staircase going down.

The explorers are professionals, and what unsettles them is not a danger they can name but the absence of anything at all: no object to find, no mark left by anyone before them, no end to report. Only distance, and the growl, and the line paying out behind them.

IX. Older than the house

An engineer’s answer to a wall is a sample of it.

Navidson takes samples from the hallway walls, a little gray matter chipped from a surface that seems to give up nothing else, and Reston, who knows people at the university, has them sent to a laboratory with a note asking for an age and a composition and nothing else.²⁰

The results come back in the form of a letter that begins by apologizing for them. The composition is not the problem. The age is. What the laboratory finds in the samples is older than the house, older than Virginia, older than the ground the house stands on. Older, if the figures are right, than the earth, and some of it older than anything that has ever been dated on it.²¹

Zampanò treats this less as a revelation than as a courtesy. Of course the dark is old. The dark was here before there was anything to be dark around. What the house has done is not to create a darkness but to admit one, the way a well admits water, and what is in the bag is a small amount of the oldest thing there is, doing what it has always done, which is to wait.

One bag does not go to the laboratory. It stays on the kitchen table with Reston’s tag on it, and in the footage of the following weeks it is always somewhere in the frame, a small gray weight among the cereal boxes, being looked at and not opened.

X. The labyrinth

Here Zampanò’s text begins to come apart, and so does the page.

He writes about labyrinths. About Daedalus, who built the labyrinth of Crete so well that he could barely find his own way out of it.²² About King Minos, who hid inside it the creature his queen had borne, half man and half bull, and fed it with young men and women sent from Athens. About Theseus, and the thread Ariadne gave him, which is only fishing line in a more beautiful story.

In the manuscript, the passages about the minotaur are struck through. They are kept, crossed out and red, which is how they appear here.

Perhaps the minotaur was never a monster at all, only a son the king could not bear to be seen with, hidden at the center of a building designed so that no one would ever find him, and no one would ever have to look.

Not in the house

A clock. A calendar. A light switch. A window. A draft under a door. The smell of anybody’s cooking. A spider, or the thread of one. A nail. A stain. A lost glove. A child’s height marked in pencil on a doorframe. A name scratched into anything. A single object that anyone ever left behind.

In the house

Whoever is holding the light.

A maze, Zampanò argues, is a building designed to be experienced from the inside only. From above, from outside, on the map, a labyrinth is merely a pattern, even a pretty one. It becomes a labyrinth when you are in it and cannot see over the walls.

The house on Ash Tree Lane offers no view from above. There is no map. There may be no center. There may be something living in it, or the thing living in it may be the house itself, turning over in its sleep.

I can’t read the next part. I’ve tried with the pages turned every way. It’s his hand, and it runs around the edge of the sheet like it’s looking for the exit.²³

anddown,anddown,anddown,anddown,anddown,anddown

XI. Tom’s story

When the fourth exploration goes wrong and his brother goes down after it, the only person in the hallway who is not lost is Tom.

He is there because the radio will not reach from the bottom of the stairs to the house. Someone has to stay at the top of the staircase, in the Great Hall, and relay what comes up from below to the people at the door. Tom stays. He is the twin who never went anywhere, the one who fixes things and tells jokes and has been sober, a day at a time, for years, and he sets a lantern and a thermos and a folding chair and a tape recorder at the lip of the well and sits down in the dark to wait.²⁵

He talks. He talks to the recorder, to Reston on the radio, to the wall, to the growl when it comes, which is often. He addresses it as if it were a neighbor who had complained about the noise. He tells it about his brother. He tells it jokes, most of them old, some of them not very good, and he tells them well, with the timing of a man who has spent years making a room forgive him.

A man walks into a house. That is the whole joke. It just takes a while.

Knock knock. Who’s there. Nobody. Nobody who. Exactly.

My brother says this hallway is a metaphor. I said, for what. He said he’d let me know when he got to the end of it.

I asked the dark what it wanted. It said, a little more room. I said, buddy, you and me both.

Zampanò argues that the jokes are not a defense against the house but a measurement of it. Every joke is a small room with a door at the end; you walk in, and the door opens onto somewhere you did not expect, and you laugh because you got out. Tom sits in the dark for days building rooms with doors in them.²⁶

The Hall does not hold still for him. He sleeps, and wakes to find the dark arranged differently around his lantern, the lip of the well nearer or farther than it was. He does not move his chair. He records this. He says that the house has made room for him, and that this is the most anyone has done for him in some time, and then he laughs, and then for a while he does not say anything at all.

Then the radio brings up his brother’s voice, closer than it should be, and Tom stands up at the top of the stairs with the rope in his hands.²⁷

XII. Exploration #4

The fourth exploration is meant to last more than a week. Holloway provisions it the way he would provision an expedition into real wilderness: food, water, fuel, spares of everything. He also brings a gun.

They go down the staircase farther than anyone has gone, leaving caches of supplies along the way for the climb back. Days in, they turn around. They find the caches torn open and scattered. The neon markers they left to find their way have been ripped apart. There is no sign of what did it. There is, as always, nothing in the house but them.

Holloway will not accept that. He has spent his life tracking animals, and he is certain that something is tracking them. He wants to go on and find it. Jed and Wax want to go home.

In the dark, Holloway sees a shape and fires. It is Wax. He is badly wounded, and he lives. Jed gets him away, and Holloway, who has stopped being their leader and started being the thing they are afraid of, follows them.

At the door, over the radio, the others hear what reaches them of it. Tom goes in and spends days alone in the maze, keeping the radio relay alive so that the voices below can reach the voices above. He rigs a pulley for the wounded. Reston goes in too, wheelchair and all. Navidson goes down to them.

They reach Jed and Wax. Holloway reaches them too. Jed does not survive.

Wax is carried out alive.

Holloway is not.

Hi8, handheld. The only light is his own. He is talking to the dark as if it could hear him. Every few seconds he turns, fast, and the light swings, and there is nothing there, and he keeps talking.

The last tape, described rather than shown.

His camera is found afterward. On the last tape he is alone, out of supplies and lost, talking to the dark about the creature he is sure is out there. Then he turns the gun on himself. It is not quick. For a few more minutes the camera goes on recording, and at the end, the blackness at the edges of the frame seems to move inward, as if the house were closing over him. Nothing of him is ever brought out.²⁸

XIII. The rescue

What they hear over the radio, at the door, is a gunshot, and then a man saying that he is sorry, and then a long time of nothing.

Navidson goes in. Reston goes in after him, in the chair, which is a thing the film shows and does not explain: a man in a wheelchair on a spiral staircase, going down one step at a time on his hands, the chair lowered ahead of him on a rope. Tom stays at the top of the stairs with the radio and the rope. The two of them go down together, for days, to where the voices are.²⁹

They find Jed and Wax where Jed has dragged him, in a room off the stairs that was not there on the way down. Wax has been shot through the shoulder and is gray and cold and alive. Jed has kept him that way for two days by talking to him. Holloway is somewhere near. They can hear him moving. He does not answer when they call, and when he does answer, it is not with his voice.

At the lip of the well, Tom rigs what he can for the wounded: a tripod, a pulley, the rope. He does it in the dark, by touch, with the radio on the floor beside him carrying up what is left of the voices.

They bring Wax up. The staircase, which took Holloway days to go down, took Navidson and Reston hours, because the house had decided, for reasons of its own, to be shorter. Now, with a wounded man on a rope, it decides otherwise, and the climb is longer than the descent by a margin nobody measures.

Jed is behind them, and then Jed is not. Holloway is on the stairs above him with the gun. It is the last time any of them sees Holloway.

Jed does not come up.

Zampanò writes about the rope for a long time. It is the second thread in the film, after the fishing line, and it is the one that holds. He notes that a rope is only a line that has been asked to bear weight, and that the difference between the two is not the material but the trust.³¹

At the top, Karen is waiting with the children behind her, and the thing the film records is not the rescue but her face when she sees who has come up the rope, and who has not yet.

XIV. The house closes

It begins the night after they bring Wax up, and it begins in the rooms the family lives in. A doorway in the hall that opens onto the hall. The living room, which was eighteen feet across, is twenty, and then it is not a room at all but a shape the walls are making up as they go.

The growl comes up through the floorboards this time. The film gives it a colour, or the sound man does: brown. The lamps go one after another, and in the dark the walls lean in, the way people lean in to listen.

Tom goes for the children. Chad is in the doorway and goes through it. Daisy is on the far side of the living room, and the floor between her and the door is going the way ice goes, from the edges in. Tom crosses it. He gets her to the doorway and passes her out, and the floor under him is not there to come back on.³²

When it stops, it stops all at once, the way it started. The house is a house again, the right size or nearly. The front door stands open. It has never, in any footage before this, been seen to open outward.³³

Karen has the children in the car before the dust has settled. She does not go back in for anything.

XV. What the house took

The house took Tom the way it took Holloway, without leaving anything to bury. Karen leaves with the children.³⁴ Navidson stays behind with the house, with the footage, and with a grief that has two names. One is Tom. The other is Delial.

For most of the film, nobody knows what Delial means. Navidson writes it, says it, keeps coming back to it. The answer arrives late. Delial is the name he gave to the girl in his Pulitzer photograph: a starving child in Sudan, photographed with a vulture waiting close by. He took the picture. He won the prize. He has carried her into every room he has entered since, and the house, Zampanò suggests, found her there.

XVI. What some have thought

Karen does something no one expects. She makes films.

Separated from Navidson, far from the house, she takes the footage and begins to cut it herself. She shows it to people whose work is to know things, writers and critics and scholars, some famous and some not, and she films them watching.³⁵ Each of them explains the house in the language of their own trade. Every explanation is fluent, and none of them is enough. She calls it What Some Have Thought.

A novelist says it is about a marriage.

A critic says it is about the camera.

A scientist asks to see the measurements again.

A philosopher says the house is a word.

Someone says it is a fake, and keeps watching.

Karen says nothing. She is looking at Will.

Then she makes a second, much shorter film, out of the footage of Navidson himself: the man at work, the man with the children, the man who could not stop looking at things. It lasts only a few minutes. It is called A Brief History of Who I Love. When she finishes it, she understands that she has to go back to Virginia.

XVII. Exploration #5

Navidson goes back in alone.

This time he has promised no one anything. He takes supplies, his cameras, and a book to read. He goes deeper than Holloway went, past every place where the others turned back, until the staircase and the walls and even the floor seem to give out, and he is simply suspended in a dark with no dimensions at all.³⁶

His supplies run out. His lights die, one after another. What he has left is the book, and something to set it alight.

So he reads it the only way he can. He tears out a page, burns it, and reads the next page by its light. Page by page, the book becomes light, and then ash. The camera records the title on its cover. It is called House of Leaves.

And then there are no more pages.

XVIII. Vermont

Karen goes into the house.

The woman who could not bear a closed room walks into the dark of Ash Tree Lane to look for him. And she finds him, alive, starved, badly frostbitten and hurt, in a place that should have kept him.

They come out together. They leave Virginia. In Vermont, at last, they marry.

Zampanò’s study does not end with an explanation, because there is none to give. There is only a family that went into a house larger than itself, and a man who learned, too late and then just in time, that the thing worth documenting had always been the person holding the light.³⁷

Lude’s dead. Motorcycle. They said it was quick, the way people always say it was quick.

I haven’t stayed anywhere long since. Last week, in a bar in a town I won’t name, a band came on and started to play, and by the second song I understood the songs were about the house. About Navidson and Karen and the stairs. Songs about a book nobody has published, a book that as far as I know is still just paper in a box in my car.

Afterward I asked them where it came from, and what they told me doesn’t fit anything I know.

I don’t know what that means yet. Maybe it means it’s out. Maybe it means it was never only mine.

Tonight I’m sitting under a tree at the edge of a field. It’s cold, but the regular kind of cold. There’s a whole sky over me and it is exactly as big as it looks. I keep telling myself it’s going to be all right, and for once I almost believe me.

Appendix I

The Whalestoe Letters

Pelafina H. Lièvre wrote to her son for years from the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute, and her letters, in the book, are one of its great hidden rooms. The six below are not hers. They are imagined in her manner, for this retelling. Hers are in the book.

My dear Johnny,

The nurses have learned to leave my window open for me by an inch, and through that inch comes everything: pine, rain, the kitchens at noon, the whole of a world I am not presently allowed into.

You must eat. You must sleep in the dark like a sensible animal and not with every lamp lit. I know you. I know you leave every lamp lit.

Write to me about school. Write to me about the house you live in now, and whether they are kind to you there. Write to me about anything. I read your letters until the paper wears through at the folds.

Your loving
Mother

My dear Johnny,

I have been reading the old stories again. The one about the maze, and the girl who gave the thread. It is always the girls who give the thread, have you noticed, and the boys who get the credit for coming back.

Wind howls over ice. Still, wardens read in the infirmary, nodding. Grow, young one, unafraid.

Forgive the odd sentence. They give us such pills.

Your loving
Mother

My dear Johnny,

There is a man here who counts the ceiling. Every morning, before the trays, he lies on his back in the day room and counts the tiles aloud, and every morning the number is different, and every morning he is calm about it. I asked him how he could bear it. He said that the tiles were not the problem. The problem, he said, was people who counted once and believed it.

I think of you counting. I think of you at four, counting the stairs to the landing and arriving at a different number from mine and insisting, with your whole small body, that the stairs had changed. They had not, my love. I checked. I have checked every day since.

Your loving
Mother

Johnny,

You ask about the house we lived in before. I will tell you what I can, which is the kitchen: the yellow of it, the window over the sink that would not close, your father at the table with his hands around a cup as if it were the last warm thing on earth. He was a kind man. He was kind in a way that took up very little room, and so we did not notice, until the room was empty, how much of it had been his.

Everything after that is a hallway. I would rather not walk you down it. Ask me about the kitchen again, and I will tell you the same things, and they will still be true.

Your loving
Mother

JOHNNY

THEY HAVE MOVED ME. The new room is smaller by exactly the width of a door and I have measured it with my hands, twice, and they say it is the same room and that I have not been moved at all, and I know, my darling, I know what it is to be told the walls have not come closer, so I will not tell you that. I will tell you only that the window here is on the wrong side, and that the pine is gone from it, and that I am WRITING THIS DOWN so that one of us will have it in writing.

Your
Mother

Johnny,

they tell me you do not want my letters. They tell me a great many things. I will write anyway, the way the sea writes on the beach, over and over, and no one asks it to.

I love you. I did the thing I did. Both are true. I have stopped expecting to be forgiven for the second, and I will never stop insisting on the first.

Appendix II

Exhibits and contrary evidence

Zampanò refers throughout to a set of exhibits, documents, stills and objects, that were to accompany the study. The trunk did not contain them. Mr. Truant’s notes on their absence are given after each entry. The section on contrary evidence is Zampanò’s own, and was found in the trunk in a sealed envelope marked read last.

Exhibit One. A floor plan of the house on Ash Tree Lane, drawn by Navidson on the day they moved in, with every room measured. Not in the trunk. There was a rectangle of less-yellow paper on top of the pile, the size a folded plan would be.
Exhibit Two. The same plan, redrawn by Reston after the closet appeared. Not in the trunk.
Exhibit Three. A still from The Five and a Half Minute Hallway: the doorway, the family, the beam that ends in nothing. Not in the trunk. I have seen it anyway. Everyone has. Nobody can say where.
Exhibit Four. The laboratory’s letter concerning the samples, with its three ages. Not in the trunk. There is a photocopy of an envelope with a university seal on it, and nothing inside the photocopy.
Exhibit Five. Reston’s maps, all of them, laid over one another on a light table. Not in the trunk. He describes the light table for two pages. He never says what it showed.
Exhibit Six. A transcript of Tom’s tapes. Not in the trunk. I wrote the jokes down from memory, which means from his memory, which means from nowhere.
Exhibit Seven. Holloway’s last tape, described frame by frame. This one was there. It is one page long. I have not put it in.
Exhibit Eight. A list of everything found in the house after the family left it. One line. It says: nothing, and the light.
Exhibit Nine. The photograph. Delial. Not in the trunk. I am glad.

Contrary evidence

Arguments, collected by Zampanò, that the Record is a fabrication. He answers none of them.

No county in Virginia has a record of a house on a road called Ash Tree Lane changing hands in the year the film gives.
No one named Holloway Roberts has ever held a hunting license in any state in which the film says he hunted.
The university whose laboratory dated the samples has no record of the request, the letter, or the man who is supposed to have signed it.
The Pulitzer Prize for the photograph the film calls Delial was awarded, in the year it gives, to someone else, for something else.
A house cannot be larger on the inside than on the outside.
The film does not exist.

To the last of these, in the margin, in a hand that is neither Zampanò’s nor any of his readers’, someone has written: neither do you.

Index

Compiled by the editors. Where a page number should be, this edition gives the height at which the word occurs, measured from the inside. Entries marked DNE refer to things the text names and the house does not contain.

and: passim
ash: 3,140 px, 3,142 px, 9,801 px
Ash Tree Lane: 1 px, and every page after
attic: DNE
basement: DNE
Billy Reston: 4,140 px, 6,700 px, 13,880 px, 19,790 px
book, burning of: 21,338 px to 21,904 px
bottom: DNE
Chad: 2,204 px, 17,140 px
closet: 4,010 px, 4,113 px
cold: 5,512 px, 12,077 px, 12,301 px
Daisy: 2,204 px, 17,166 px
Delial: 17,402 px, 17,466 px, 24,010 px
door, front: 2,010 px, 25,530 px
door, that was not there: 4,004 px
echo: 7,300 px to 7,980 px
fishing line: 8,844 px, 10,411 px, 19,650 px
growl: 8,905 px, 12,160 px, 13,004 px, 16,588 px
Hillary: 2,388 px, 5,902 px
Holloway Roberts: 8,701 px to 13,212 px; last seen, 19,910 px
house: passim, in blue
inch, a quarter of an: 3,990 px
inch, five-sixteenths of an: 4,206 px
Jed Leeder: 8,720 px, 19,880 px
Karen Green: 2,190 px, 6,100 px to 6,980 px, 25,400 px
Lude: 1,020 px, 9,344 px, 16,802 px, 26,077 px
Mallory: 2,390 px, 5,902 px
map: 6,830 px, 7,090 px; agreeing with itself, DNE
minotaur: 11,410 px, struck through
not: passim
Pelafina H. Lièvre: 11,760 px, 27,000 px to 29,500 px
samples: 13,860 px to 14,410 px
staircase: 7,166 px, 8,990 px, 12,020 px; bottom of, DNE
switch, light: DNE
Thumper: 2,560 px, 6,588 px
Tom Navidson: 4,120 px, 15,200 px to 15,900 px, 17,100 px
Wax (Kirby Hook): 8,720 px, 12,900 px, 19,860 px
well: 6,330 px, 19,700 px
window: in the house, 2,010 px; in the hallway, DNE
Zampanò: 880 px; the rest is his

Ash Tree Lane is an unofficial, non-commercial tribute, made by a reader. It retells the story of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon Books, 2000) in new words. The novel’s text is not reproduced here, and where the book is silent, a few small details have been invented. The chapter divisions are this retelling’s own. The characters, the events and the house belong to the book.

Read it. Nothing here replaces the weight of it in your hands.

Written and built by hand in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with three.js for the house. No cookies, no tracking. What you find is kept only in your own browser, so the house can remember you. The source is on GitHub.

The house is built from free things. Materials by ambientCG and Poly Haven (CC0); the night sky by Greg Zaal, Poly Haven (CC0). Models from the Khronos glTF sample assets: Lantern, WaterBottle, ToyCar (Microsoft), SheenChair (Eric Chadwick, Wayfair), AntiqueCamera (UX3D), a teacup (Poly Haven) and a vase (Eric Chadwick, Rico Cilliers), all CC0; ChairDamaskPurplegold, GlassHurricaneCandleHolder and GlassBrokenWindow by Eric Chadwick for Wayfair, LightsPunctualLamp by Teresa Gonzalez Viegas and SheenWoodLeatherSofa by the Darmstadt Graphics Group, CC BY 4.0. From Benedikt Bitterli’s rendering resources: the bedroom by SlykDrako (CC0), the radio, books, magazine and cushion of The White Room and the kitchen of Country Kitchen by Jay-Artist (CC BY 3.0). The tape recorder is a Sony TC-510-2 by Ilgis Fatykhov on Sketchfab (CC BY 4.0). Footsteps, creaks, doors and the page by Kenney (CC0); the wind by felix.blume and the timbers by Falcet (freesound, CC0); the summer night by Lisa Redfern (public domain). The labels, the pages and the tags were made for this site.