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covered in framed portraits of precisely nothing—empty
overstuffed chairs, abandoned dinner tables, forgotten
birthday parties. And at the end of the vacant, underground
gallery, a cargo elevator that only went down. Pressing a
single, glowing button affixed to the elevator, I proceeded
deeper into the earth. The equipment screeched for its efforts
to deliver me further into darkness, and yet I didn’t have the
sense of moving in any conventional sense. I might have
been back in a dream but for the definitive sense of solidity.
The next level consisted of a train of empty—or
emptied—rooms, all of them spanning ages of various
architectural attitudes, and all of them sporting the same
white blossom of frozen light that framed the shadow of the
Wolf. The solidified illumination was positioned anywhere
a person might have stood or sat or posed. I continued more
quickly now, eager for the end of the place. As might have
been expected, another elevator appeared.
Down again. The space of interlocking rooms continued,
but with ever-diminishing earthliness. The white-spotted
spaces were slowly partaking of a darker aesthetic,
altogether exterior to conventional styles. Black-stoned
flooring, each tile inlaid with strange symbols, wallpapers
made from skins and scalps, masts of bone and compressed,
smoking ash, balustrades worked from spinal columns. And
yet for all the organic trimmings, none of it formed even the
slightest connection to any creature I was remotely aware
of. The fad of emptied photos continued too, but having
evolved into unpeopled frescos and mosaics brimming with
absent subjects. Faceless statuary greeted me from every
widening, smoking threshold. In addition to the empty
sitting rooms, I began to encounter the large meandering
spaces for other kinds of art and artist. I found myself, at one
point, stumbling across an elaborate studio of high ceiling
and dusty shelving, packed tightly with taught, vellum
canvases. And as was now custom, each painting was
missing its focus, only a lingering, vague background was
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