One Door From Heaven

chamber to chamber were difficult to detect. The oak floors remained consistent: worn to bare wood by shuffling traffic, darkened here and there by curious stains that resembled Rorschach patterns.
        "You'll see, Mr. Banks," the Toad wheezed while through his snaky warrens he hurried like a Hobbit gone to seed. "Oh, you'll see the proof, all right!"
        Just when Preston began half seriously to speculate that this bizarre house was a tesseract bridging dimensions, existing in many parallel worlds, and that it might go on forever, the Toad led him out of the labyrinth into a kitchen.
        Not an ordinary kitchen.
        The usual appliances were here. An old white-enameled range- yellowed and chipped-with side-by-side ovens under a cooktop. One humming and shuddering refrigerator that appeared to date from the days when people still called them iceboxes. Toaster, microwave. But with these appliances, the ordinary ended.
        Every countertop, from the Formica surface to the underside of the upper cabinets, was packed to capacity with empty beer and soda bottles stacked horizontally like the stock of a wine cellar. A few cabinet doors stood open; within were more empty bottles. A pyramid of bottles occupied the kitchen table. The window above the sink provided a view of an enclosed back porch that appeared to contain thousands of additional bottles.
        The Toad apparently prepared all his meals on the butcher-block top of the large center island. The condition of that work surface was unspeakable.
        A door opened on a set of back stairs too narrow for the storage of Indians. Here, with glue, empty beer bottles-most of them green, some clear-had been fixed to the flanking walls and to the ceiling, hundreds upon hundreds of them, like three-dimensional wallpaper.
        Although the malty residue in all the containers had years ago evaporated, the stairwell still smelled of stale beer.
        "Come along, Mr. Banks! Not much farther. You'll see why north of a million is a fair price."
        Preston followed the Toad to the top of the glass-lined stairs. The upper hall had been narrowed by an accumulation of junk similar to the collection on the lower floor.
        They passed rooms from which the doors had been removed. Annexes of the primary first-floor maze appeared to have been established in these spaces.
        The Toad's bedroom still featured a door. The chamber past this threshold had not been transformed into an anthill of tunnels as had so much of the house. Two nightstands with lamps flanked the large unmade bed. A dresser, a chiffonier, and a chifforobe provided the Toad with ample storage space for his bib overalls.
        The threat of normalcy was held at bay, however, by a collection of straw hats that hung on nails from every wall, ceiling to floor, Straw hats for men, women, and children. Straw hats in every known style, for every need from that of the working farmhand to that of a lady wanting a suitable chapeau to attend church on a hot summer Sunday. Straw hats in natural hues and in pastel tints, in various stages of deterioration, hung in overlapping layers, until Preston almost began to forget they were hats, to see the repetitive shapes of the crowns as a sort of wraparound upholstery like the acoustic-friendly walls of a recording studio or radio station.
        A second collection cluttered the room: scores upon scores of both plain and fancy walking sticks. Simple walnut canes with rubber tips and sleek curved handles. Hickory canes with straight shafts but with braided-wood handles. Oak, mahogany, maple, cherry, and stainless-steel models, some with plain handles, others graced by figured grips of cast brass or carved wood. Lacquered black canes with silvery tips, the perfect thing for a tuxedoed Fred Astaire, hung next to those white canes that were reserved for the blind.
        The canes were stored in groups in several umbrella stands, but they also hung from the sides of the dresser, the chiffonier, and the chifforobe. Instead of cloth panels, curtains of canes dangled from the drapery rods.
        At one window, the Toad had previously unhooked a dozen canes from the rod, revealing a portion of the pane. He'd also rubbed the glass half clean with his hand.
        He led Preston to this view and pointed northeast across a weedy field, toward the two-lane road. A little winded from the journey, he said, "Mr. Banks, you see the woods