(An entrance to the House Of Stairs, location in the world of Megrim, mysterious, wondrous, and often frightening, composed entirely of stairs.)
New York was not the Promised Land my parents had dreamed of when they paid the Irishman to smuggle me from Slovakia. I had been working two jobs for three years now. McKinney the Boss-Man knew about the second job; he also knew I sent what money I could back home to Slovakia. If he had known that two of those extra evenings of "work" each week I was actually attending a night-school he might very well have killed me; McKinney did not take kindly to his serfs getting uppity.
I had a room in a cold-water flat owned by an associate of Boss-man McKinney. My room was on the top floor, in apartment 502. Each of the four bedrooms was let to a different tenant, as were walled-off former parlour and dining room. We shared in common the windowless lavatory and kitchen, not only among those in our apartment but also with the tenants in the other apartments of the building's uppermost floor; 501 had a lavatory but no kitchen and 504 a kitchen but no lavatory, while 503 had neither.
As you can imagine, I was a very tired young man. Bone-tired, and had been for far too many months. In truth, my studies had drifted a bit, and all too often I had let myself get distracted by extraneous writings in the library when I was supposed to be studying. My mind idled, and later I was never sure what part of the exotic tales I recalled were from the books I had dozed upon and what part were of my own imagination.
The New York Public Library reading hall closes at midnight, so it was considerably later when I finally got out of the November wind and into my apartment building. I trudged up the interminable stairs, sure I must have reached the fifth floor. No, I had only reached the third floor landing. Left, right, left right, one foot after the other, on I climbed. Surely I was there now; I raised my weary eyes - and stopped.
602. There was no apartment 602. There was no sixth floor to our building. More alert now, I noticed that the layer of grime, thick as paint throughout that decrepit building, was absent; the doors were not chipped, the paint not peeling. I looked down the stairwell. Sure enough, the fifth floor landing, filthy as ever, was there below me, just as I had known it - but never had I seen it from this vantage point. How could I, when the stairs rose no further than that fifth floor landing? Then I looked up. A seventh floor landing. An eighth. How high did these stairs go?
I am not an impulsive man, but something drew me up those stairs. It was cleanliness, a brightness, and more, a scent. I was not conscious of it at the time, but there was that scent, one of pinewoods, and the sweet earthiness of a cattle-shed. The scent of home.
There was a compulsion, something drew me upwards, not unwillingly but certainly heedlessly. By the time I reached the twelfth floor I had passed from wonder to simple acceptance. And when I opened the door to 1202, I was tired no more.