One Door From Heaven

you have for me. When it conies to business matters between such as us, I don't believe it's my place to set a final price. More like it's your place to start the dealin' with a fair offer to which, with due consideration, I'll reply. But seein' as how you have been a gentleman to me, I will give you the special courtesy of sayin' that I know what's fair and that what's fair is somewhere north of a million dollars."
        The man was a complete lunatic.
        Preston said, "I'm sure it's fair, but I don't think I've got that much in my wallet."
        The choirboy voice produced a silvery, almost girlish laugh, and the Toad slapped his armchair with both hands. He seemed never to have heard a funnier quip.
        Leaning forward in his chair, clearly confident of his ability to be amusing in return, the Toad winked and said, "When the time comes, I'll accept your check, and no driver's license necessary."
        Preston smiled and nodded.
        In his quest for extraterrestrial contact, he had tolerated uncounted fools and frauds over the years. This was the price he had to pay for the hope of one day finding truth and transcendence.
        ETs were real. He badly wanted them to be real, though not for the same reasons that the Toad or average UFO buffs wanted them to be real. Preston needed them to be real in order to make sense of his life.
        The Toad grew serious. "Mr. Banks, you haven't told me your outfit yet."
        "Outfit?"
        "In a true spirit of fair dealin', I'm obliged to tell you that just earlier this very day, Miss Janet Hitchcock herself of Paramount Pictures paid me a visit. She'll be makin' an offer tomorrow. I told her straight out about your interest, though I couldn't tell her your outfit, bein' as I didn't know it."
        If Paramount Pictures ever sent an executive to Nun's Lake to buy the Toad's tale of being de-crippled by aliens, their purchase of screen rights could be reliably taken as an omen that the universe would at any moment suddenly implode, instantly compacting itself into a dense ball of matter the size of a pea.
        "I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding," said Preston.
        The Toad didn't want to hear about misunderstandings, only about seven-figure bank drafts. "I'm not pitchforkin' moo crap at you, sir. Our mutual respect is too large for moo crap. I can prove every word I'm sayin' just by showin' you one thing, one thing, and you'll know it's all real, every bit of it." He rolled up and out of the armchair as though he were a hog rising from its slough, and he waddled out of the hub of the maze by a route different from the one that they had followed here from the front hall. "Come on, you'll see, Mr. Banks!"
        Preston had no fear of the Toad, and he was pretty sure the man lived alone. Nevertheless, although additional members of this inbred clan might be lurking around and might prove ferociously psychotic, he wasn't put off by the prospect of meeting them, if they existed.
        The atmosphere of" decline and dissolution in this house was from Preston's perspective a romantic ambience. To a man so in love with death, this was the equivalent of a starlit beach in Hawaii. He wished to explore more of it.
        Besides, although the Toad had thus far seemed to be a flagrant fraud, his sweet clear voice had resonated with what had sounded like sincerity when he'd claimed that he could show Preston one thing to prove that his story was "all real, every bit of it."
        Into tunnels of paper and Indians and stacked furniture, Preston followed his host. Into a warren of glossy fashion, pulp fiction, and yellowing news compacted into building blocks.
        Out of angular and intersecting passageways as oddly scented as the deepest galleries of ancient Egyptian tombs, around a shadowy cochlear spiral where the Toad's open-mouthed breathing whispered off every surface with a sound like scarabs scuttling in the walls, they progressed through two more large rooms, identifiable as separate spaces only by the intervening doorways. The doors had been removed, evidently to facilitate movement through the labyrinth. The remaining jambs and headers were embedded like mine-shaft supports in the tightly packed materials that formed these funhouse corridors.
        All windows had been blocked off. Maze partitions often rose until the overhead plaster allowed no higher stacks; therefore, the ceiling transitions from