Saturday in the Third Sublevel

It was raining hard enough

to make the basement windows look

subaqueous.

We had the card table out,

and on it: pencils bitten to the ferrule,

a two-liter bottle gone warm,

orange dust from chips stippling

the cleric’s character sheet.

Jeff had drawn the dungeon

on blue-lined graph paper,

each ten-foot square

numbered with sacerdotal care.

He kept his dice in a Crown Royal bag.

My fighter was called Aranth,

which seemed to me, at twelve,

both euphonious and severe.

I had written brown hair

and hates injustice

in the little blanks,

then bought rope, torches, spikes,

a mirror, oil, chalk,

and one silver bell

We had already lost Jim’s thief

to a needle in a lock.

His saving throw failed

with a modest plastic click.

Jim said bullshit,

then fell quiet,

and sorted the dead man’s coins

in denominations beside his knee.

Past the cistern room,

past the fresco of the seven hooded kings,

we found the door with no handle.

A greenish light seeped out

from under it,

and from the other side

came a sound like someone

turning pages underwater.

Nobody wanted to open it.

The furnace muttered

behind the laundry room door.

Upstairs, someone crossed the kitchen.

The rain kept pattering the glass.

We argued about oil,

about wedges,

about whether ghosts could see

a mirror angled sideways.

Jeff only watched us

with that oracular boredom

older boys acquire.

Finally I rang the bell.

A little gratuitous music

from the margin of my pack.

Jeff looked at me for a long time.

Then he rolled.

Behind it, the drowned librarian woke.

Behind him, shelves ascended

into a lawful darkness.

All the books were swollen.

He asked us each

for something we had forgotten.

Jim gave the name

of his first dead thief.

David gave a spell

he had never prepared correctly.

I gave the reason

Aranth carried the silver bell.

That seemed acceptable

to everyone.

The librarian let us pass.

We found no final throne,

no master key.

Only more corridors,

more wet stone,

the room where gravity

had been installed incorrectly,

the idol with ruby eyes

we never dared to touch.

At midnight my mother called down

that people had to go home.

The dungeon folded back into binders.

The dead stayed dead.

The treasure was divided badly.

Someone took my twenty-sider by mistake.

But all week I kept thinking

about the bell:

how I had bought it

for no reason I could name;

how, in the green light

under the unhandled door,

it had briefly become

the only possible thing.

Only that small, argent syllable

in the rain-dark basement,

answered by something

deep in the invented earth.