Work Text:
OCTOBER 20xx
The show opens with Kevin McCloud standing at the top of a street in what looks like an old New England town. Old and well-kept brick houses line either side of the residential street; it is picturesque, but misty.
KEVIN McCLOUD: Located in the American northeast, Essex County is one of the country's great seats of learning. Bitter, cold winters and hot, muggy summers have driven generations of Miskatonic University students to take refuge inside the cool brickwork buildings that line High Street.
KEVIN: Arkham, a town of forty thousand, is Miskatonic's home. Most know it for the university, which has been one of the nation's premiere research institutions for much of the last hundred and fifty years. But Arkham itself is much more than Miskatonic – there are houses here that date back over three centuries. At the time, the university had been a mere college known primarily for medieval metaphysics. There are still a surprising number of residents who can trace their family trees back beyond even the college's establishment, and some even still live within a stone's throw of where their great-great-great grandparents did. It's never quite modernised the way bustling neighbouring Boston has, and the locals like it that way. When you walk some of Arkham's oldest narrow alleyways, where the houses almost lean into one another, you get the sense that this city is a very old book, and one that doesn't necessarily want to be opened.
KEVIN: The tension between town and gown is an enduring theme throughout Arkham's history, with locals fiercely proud of their roots often butting heads with those they view as invading seekers of knowledge. In recent years, this fracas has been further exacerbated by the university's expansion. A generous donation by an alumnus has funded new research initiatives and an expanded undergraduate class, which has meant more Miskatonic-driven development and subsequent housing pressure. This is good news for the township, but bad news for longtime residents.
Kevin walks away down the street; mist closes behind him.
The film cuts to a different setting.The camera pans through a sumptuous library reading room. It is a split-level, with a balcony around the second floor to provide access to the full-length shelves that line the entire room. Seated at one of the reading desks is a middle-aged academic poring over a journal.
KEVIN McCLOUD: Walter is a professor of mathematics at Miskatonic University, and he's not from around these parts. This makes him one of a much-hated brigade of foreign interlopers looking to build in Arkham, and in the eyes of his neighbours the only saving grace will probably be that he isn't looking to knock up a cheap student rental unit. Walter only moved to Arkham a few years ago for a teaching position at the university, so it's somewhat astonishing that he was given tenure last year.
Cut to Walter exiting a drab looking brutalist apartment very near campus; when he shuts the door behind him, it has to be jiggled so that the lock actually engages.
KEVIN: Miskatonic faculty housing is famously atrocious, and as one of the maths department's new and fixed stars, Walter now wants to settle down in town. Like something out of a fairytale, a recent inheritance from an uncle is enabling him to do a lot better than rent. After several go-arounds attempting to buy a ready-to-live unit with no one wanting to sell, Walter's decided to use his inheritance to buy a plot and build something for himself.
Cut to Walter standing in front of a dilapidated old building with construction fencing in front of it. He has his hands tucked into his pockets against the chill and a beanie pulled down over his ears. One gets the impression that if the camera panned down he'd be wearing Birkenstocks with very thick socks.
WALTER: I've always loved really solid buildings, solid architecture. I don't get out much, but I've been in and around old campuses practically my whole life. My family is, uh, I think four? generations of academics on my dad's side, and I went to college pretty young, got my doctorate early. I don't really... Modern life is a bit much for me. I prefer libraries to people. So I've been in a lot of really old buildings, because university campuses have some of the oldest ones in America. I can't explain it but older buildings make me feel safe. They're solid, and I like the feeling of just being somewhere that's been standing for a long time. I really like it here at Miskatonic, obviously, hah –I wouldn't have accepted tenure otherwise – and I'm really looking forward to being properly in town. I know a lot of people here don't like Miskatonic, but there's such... there's such a tradition of learning in Arkham that predates it.
Walter motions with his thumb over his shoulder at the building behind him.
WALTER: This old house is the original site of, um, where probably one of the most imaginative mathematicians ever to live once stayed. Everyone knows, you know, Riemann and Euler and de Sitter, but actually there were great visionary thinkers in places like Arkham, which attracts all sorts of learning. We have one of the oldest medieval departments in the country and, well, one of the best rare book collections, and I've been reading up over the last few years about the history of Arkham itself, since, well, you don't get very far here if you don't know it. And this house was where Keziah Mason once lived.
KEVIN: Who's Keziah Mason?
WALTER: She was a mathematician– actually, let me start over. When I say "mathematician" I think people think I mean, like, someone who's a "professional mathematician," but really anyone who thinks and writes mathematically is a mathematician, and that's what Keziah was. She lived three hundred plus years ago and the town records, which still exist, mark her down as sort of a witch. I think her understanding of multi-dimensional mathematics looked, to people back then, something closer to magic. It's said she understood fourth dimensional–
Walter looks at Kevin and laughs self-consciously, cutting himself off.
WALTER: Well, I don't want to go into that, but basically she's an unknown genius. There are some writings of hers preserved at Miskatonic but the rest of it is lost, and if you ask people here they say that's a good thing. It's such a pity; I think it's just plain prejudice. But they, umm, don't like Keziah and they don't like this house. This whole block. People think it's haunted, so I got the parcel at a really steep discount – it's been on the market for a long time.
KEVIN: And what are you hoping to do with it? Tear it all down and start afresh, or...?
WALTER: No! No, no, I want to preserve it. Well. What I can. Anything that's wood is rotting away. But the whole thing has crazy angles, especially up on the top floor and where the attic is. I want to preserve that character, even though a lot of it will have to get knocked down, and rebuild it in the style of the brick houses on High Street. But the point is really keeping the design, based on the attic where Keziah lived.
The film cuts to a 3D rendering of the plans, with Kevin speaking in voiceover.
KEVIN: According to local legend, Keziah Mason lived in the infamous attic of what's known as the Witch House. The attic has crazy angles, more like something out of postmodern architecture than a New England lodging house that was cheap even when it was first built in the seventeenth century.
KEVIN: The site is larger than the humble outside gives it credit for. Before it was condemned nearly eighty years ago – it's a wonder any of it is still standing – it housed around eight lodgers in partitioned rooms across three floors.
The rendering shows a stripped down view of the house, without walls.
KEVIN: Walter has hired an architect to redesign the house. The original structure was mostly wood, but the remaining brickwork served as inspiration for the new building. Using locally-sourced original bricks wherever possible, the Witch House is getting rebuilt in handsome style. Brick exteriors will present a prim and Arkham-y outside to the world, while the inside gets transformed into an academic's dream retreat.
The rendering updates to show an unobjectionable ground floor. The only unusual feature is a room that takes up the entire north side.
KEVIN: Instead of three floors, Walter is opting for just two, which will give the downstairs dramatically tall ceilings recalling many of the libraries he's loved before. A self-professed bachelor, Walter's chosen to save costs by having a practical smallish kitchen and dining area, and used the money on a beautiful library which will span the length of the house. Floor-to-ceiling shelves and large windows will grace the cavernous space, evoking the sense of something between a church and a classroom. He'll install reclaimed stained glass from an old Polish church in additional picture windows to really make it feel like a temple of learning.
The rendering shows the second floor now, where the floorplan is very different. Rooms are not quite rectangular; everything is not quite square; angles don't seem to fully add up.
KEVIN: But it's the upstairs where Walter's designs turn grand. Inspired by the garret room's original design, the second floor is a tangle of torturous geometry. The roof slants down gently, but the north side of the house has walls which tilt in at peculiar angles. The rooms themselves are oddly shaped. All of this will be accessed by a staircase that wraps around itself in the centre of the house, a strange polygonal spiral which feeds you up this cathedral of mathematical conjecture. The overall effect, Walter hopes, is something Escheresque.
The film cuts to Walter reviewing the architectural blueprints with Kevin in his very lousy faculty housing flat.
WALTER: It's all a bit of a mathematical joke. I want it to look like it doesn't add up, make it seem nearly non-Euclidean. Like, can it look like there are curves when there are only straight lines. Mason's work suggests that there might have been a lot of mathematical significance to the odd angles of the original room – the sort of thing where she recorded things in plain sight without writing anything down, a very esoteric tradition. So I made sure that we've kept all the original angles, just expanded it to all the space in the top floor.
KEVIN: This is bonkers to look at, isn't it? I feel like if I were to walk up that staircase I'd fall off but then end up right-side up on a ceiling somewhere in Wonderland.
WALTER: (laughs) Yeah, it's a bit like that, going down a rabbit hole. Lewis Carroll was a mathematician too, you know.
KEVIN: Speaking of mathematics, how much is this going to cost you?
WALTER: Less than the inheritance, actually. So I'm fine – if anything goes wrong I can take out a mortgage and still be in good shape.
KEVIN: So it's entirely funded – that's rare. You're a lucky man. And how about the neighbours?
WALTER: They're not, uh, that happy. But you can see how abandoned this block is. The Witch House is the only thing standing on it, practically, so my next neighbour over doesn't even really, uh, have a say in planning.
KEVIN: But you want to keep the peace, presumably, which is why on the outside it looks so... normal. Well, normal for Arkham, anyway – everything here does... (Kevin rows back both of his arms in a large gesture) loom a little bit, doesn't it?
WALTER: Yeah. But I think my uncle would have been happy: he was an Arkham native, actually, and was one of the reasons I chose to teach at Miskatonic in the first place.
KEVIN: (raising his eyebrows) Oh, so you actually have a family connection?
WALTER: (nods) Yes, and like all Arkham families I think his side of the family goes way back. I should dig up those records, haha.
KEVIN: Well, good luck! When does the project break ground?
WALTER: Next month.
DECEMBER 20xx
The camera follows Kevin as he walks up the street to the project. The Witch House is no longer standing, but there's nothing else on the plot either. Walter is there wearing a bright yellow hard-hat.
KEVIN: When I last left you, you had a plan and you had the means, so how come it's been three months and only... this?
WALTER: Well, we got started on the demolition but then the local crew ran into some, um...
KEVIN: Uh oh.
WALTER: Yeah. There were some unexpected finds in the original attic.
KEVIN: I'm guessing it wasn't some really good old books.
WALTER: No. Remains, actually.
KEVIN: (leaning forward, eyes wide) Human remains?
WALTER: Yes, a lot of bones, a lot of them very old, and mixed up with animal bones too. A few hundred years old at least, so at least it wasn't recent. But what was really bad was that when the coroner examined everything she concluded that most of the remains were... children.
KEVIN: (pauses)
WALTER: (looks down) Yeah.
KEVIN: That's grim.
WALTER: Yeah. No one has a really good explanation. There's some crazy story going around that it was for a witch's ritual, but that's obviously just because of the name and lore...
KEVIN: How does this make you feel? Are you going to keep on with the project or...?
WALTER: I'm an analytic thinker, so I don't believe in ghosts or anything. I'm going to keep going, but I thought it was better to give it a bit of time before just... (waves a hand) Yeah. With the town council's help I had a priest from the Church of St. Stanislaus come do a ceremony. A lot of the lodgers who used to live here were Polish.
KEVIN: Right. And now you're going to carry on.
WALTER: Yeah.
KEVIN: Right.
APRIL 20x(x+1)
KEVIN: It's been over four months since I last visited the ill-named Witch House, but spring seems to have brought with it a spring to the project's step. After a grisly discovery, Walter was stalled for a while as local crews refused to do any work on the site. But he's since found a different set of out-of-town contractors, and work has been forging ahead.
Shot of the Witch House, site properly cleared and framing going in, dated a month prior.
KEVIN: In his quest to achieve a solid, old style, Walter's opted to have the house built in masonry style, meaning that the brickwork walls are load-bearing. This is obviously more expensive than if he were to have gone with brick veneer, where the house is first framed in wood or steel before non-structural brickwork is applied, because masonry brickwork requires two layers to veneer's one and is harder to bring up to code. That said, his lofty ceilings require some steel framing for support, which has now gone in.
Scene cuts to blockwork crews building up the brick walls on the second floor in the background as Kevin goes to shake Walter's hand in the foreground. Walter looks a little tired.
KEVIN: Hello, you. Great progress, huh? Look at that! The whole ground floor done, and now the first going in.
WALTER: (beaming, if a bit wan) You mean the second floor? Britain indexing building floors at zero is funny. But yeah, everything feels very real now. It's good to see it all happening so quickly after the, uh, delay.
KEVIN: You don't look totally pleased. In fact, you look a little bit tired.
WALTER: Oh, I am! I really am. But the discovery weighed on me more than I thought it would, I guess. It's been hard sleeping at night.
KEVIN: That's no good. Have your crews had any trouble?
WALTER: No, fortunately. They don't normally do work here in Arkham so they don't know any of the history, and since there's nothing to say I, er...
KEVIN: You didn't tell them.
WALTER: (quietly) No.
KEVIN: You're becoming more Arkham like as the months go on, aren't you? What happens here stays here, that sort of mentality.
WALTER: I guess if you had witch trials and awful things happen in places where people actually lived, I now see why you don't want to talk about it. The past is the past.
KEVIN: And you've sorted that out now, for the Witch House.
WALTER: I hope so, at least. I'm not... Money's not what I want to talk about for what happened and how it had to get cleaned up, because it should have been done right and so I made sure it was done right. But the cleanup did put me back a bit.
KEVIN: Right.
WALTER: And that was stressful, which probably didn't help with the sleep. The insomnia now is probably just, haha, finals.
KEVIN: Oh, it's busy season at the university?
WALTER: Yes, very busy.
KEVIN: Juggling teaching and research with building a house can't be a lot of fun.
WALTER: Not a lot of uninterrupted time, you're right. My cell's always ringing because the contractors need to make sure of something or ask me something or something's gone wrong.
KEVIN: Is maths easier?
WALTER: Math is a lot easier for me, anyway. Sometimes after everything calms down at, like, 1am when no one can disturb me I just dig out Keziah's old papers and read, and it helps me get away from the stress of reality.
KEVIN: Are you still having fun with the project?
WALTER: I'm excited for the second floor.
KEVIN: All those crazy angles.
WALTER: (laughs) They're not that crazy now that I've had some time to think about them. Sometimes I go to sleep at night and I see the schematics and it all seems to make sense to me how Keziah had such good intuitions about Riemannian space.
KEVIN: How's that, translating for a non-mathematician like me?
WALTER: (vague gesturing) It's... It's the angles. If you look at them long enough it's like they help you see how to make a space in space. (laughs nervously) I'm aware that doesn't make any sense but it's the only way I can describe it. I think it's a bit like staring at a Bruegel painting for too long, you start to get lost in the details, and then the details have details.
KEVIN: You're going to have to live in that! Your bedroom's going to be up there, isn't it?
WALTER: Yes, and honestly I'm really looking forward to it. I don't like leaving the house, but I think it'll be a way for me to... see the world without having to go anywhere.
KEVIN: Get stuck in contemplation?
WALTER: Something like that. But only if I can get the angles right, otherwise it'll be a bit risky.
KEVIN: Your structural engineer doesn't like it?
WALTER: Oh, he thinks I'm completely nuts.
AUGUST 20x(x+1)
KEVIN: It's been nearly nine months since Walter started this project to bring glorious geometry to the inside of a house in sleepy Arkham. Now the long days of summer have arrived, and while he's making good progress with the build, something's gone wrong again, hasn't it?
WALTER: (with bags under his eyes) Yeah, unbelievably. Rats.
KEVIN: Rats?
WALTER: Just an invasion of rats. Like, literally an invasion of them – they came out of what felt like nowhere and got all over the construction site when the roof got put on. The windows were starting to come in and we were worried about just, rats in the brand new sealed up house (huffs in frustration).
KEVIN: Do you have any idea where they came from? I've been hosting this show a long time and I've seen a lot of things go wrong, but I've got to say I've never seen this happen.
WALTER: The town's been doing work on the sewer systems, so the prevailing theory is that they got flushed out of somewhere and my house is a nice little nest.
KEVIN: I mean, brick keeps you warm in the winter and cool in the summer... If it's nice for humans it's probably pretty good for a rat, too.
WALTER: Unfortunately. Anyway, pest control got called and so that seems to have fixed the problem. And the staircase is in now, and the work on the tricky bits on the upstairs is starting.
KEVIN: (rubs hands together) Shall we go have a look, then?
WALTER: (nods, yawning) Yeah, I'll show you, come on.
Walter leads the way in through the front doors into the bare but beautiful brick interior.
KEVIN: (touches the walls as he enters) Now isn't that something. You really don't see pure masonry work done like this anymore.
WALTER: No, it's pretty unusual. I'm really lucky that Arkham's got a real heritage of still doing this type of building, and that I managed to get some specialists to agree to work on the site. I'm told not a lot of places in America do?
KEVIN: No indeed. You do a lot of wood framing in this country, for cost reasons, and this can't have been cheap. The brick's reclaimed, too?
WALTER: Not all of it, I couldn't find enough, but yeah, a lot of it is original Arkham brick from old houses. My builders must have hated me but I got them to put the original bricks from this house in at, um, significant intervals, so it took more time too.
KEVIN: (stops) Meaning what?
WALTER: (laughs a little) Another mathematical joke. You can tell which bricks are the old bricks, see – (points to one of them in the wall) They have this certain... quality? And there's damage in places, like – (points at marks) – almost like something chipped away at them over time. I had them put them in at certain intervals.
KEVIN: A mathematical joke in the walls. What kind of intervals? Like a Fibonacci sequence or...?
WALTER: (distantly) A sequence... It came to me in a dream, actually.
KEVIN: A bolt of inspiration?
WALTER: (wry) Yeah, I guess you could call it that. Anyway, the staircase – (points to the square, Escheresque staircase in the centre of the space, as if to change the subject)
Kevin walks up to it and does a circle around it. The staircase looks like it's going both up and down at the same time, inexplicably.
KEVIN: This is... wow. (touches the bare brick) It's hard to describe.
WALTER: Yeah, I wouldn't want to try to describe it.
KEVIN: It's like a möbius strip, except you've made it into a spiral staircase. The design looks a little different from what I remember.
WALTER: I redesigned it myself. The longer the project goes on the more time I have to get used to how it all works, and I got... inspired. (shifts a little, wincing at the sound of hammers going overhead)
KEVIN: By Mason's work? By Bruegel's staircase in the Tower of Babel? Escher himself?
WALTER: Mason, mostly. Should we go up?
Kevin nods and begins walking upwards. He pauses midway, unsteady even though the staircase has thin, steel bannisters and the exposed brick steps themselves have been smoothed and levelled.
KEVIN: This is somehow the most terrifying staircase I've ever gone up.
WALTER: (from below) It takes a bit of getting used to. I actually close my eyes when I go up.
KEVIN: It's like Gaudi's spiral staircases going up the Sagrada Familia; I feel like if I look down through this central hole I'll fall forever, somehow, even though a human can't possibly fit through.
Kevin points down the central gap in the spiral. The camera pans down it, but seems to go staticky for a moment.
WALTER: I wouldn't recommend looking down. "Fitting" is... You could fit.
KEVIN: No way.
WALTER: Depends on the dimension you're in, theoretically. You can step through certain angles and come out in an impossibly distant place...
KEVIN: (stares quietly at Walter) Normally people only talk like this when they've dug themselves into a really bad budgeting hole.
WALTER: (starting somewhat, as if waking up from a lucid dream) Oh, money, money's no problem.
KEVIN: (slowly) Good. Good, good. Let's go upstairs, yes?
WALTER: (gestures upwards again)
Kevin, not looking down anymore, heads all the way up. As he crests the landing onto the second floor, he lets out an audible gasp.
KEVIN: My gosh.
WALTER: (comes up behind him) It's not done yet; maybe half of Mason's design is in.
KEVIN: Did she build the original house? Is it her design, did you find that out?
WALTER: It doesn't matter whether she built it or not. It's her design.
KEVIN: (runs his hands along the tilted interior north wall) This doesn't feel like a straight wall. It feels almost as though it curves, meets the ceiling not at, what, this weird 120 degree angle but something more like... (stops talking)
WALTER: Doesn't it change the way you view reality?
KEVIN: I think you're building something incredible, Walter. I'm not sure if I would call it a nice place to live, but...
WALTER: I can't think of any nicer place to live. This is going to be a gateway to the whole universe, Kevin, if I can get it right. If I don't accidentally slip through space as well, if I make sure some safety measures are put in...
KEVIN: (eyes dart towards the spiral staircase, the only egress) What do you mean by that?
WALTER: Sometimes I look at the angles and I see how Mason could possibly have understood how to step through space, which is what they think she did. Went through walls. Through the angles between the angles, she probably went – physically – to places you and I can only dream of. But there are other ways to go places, Kevin – dreams, you know. The stuff this show is made of, right? Grand Designs is all about dreaming things into reality?
KEVIN: (softening) Dreams take a lot of hard work. The show's about that, the translation from dreams to hard work.
WALTER: (touching the wall as well) Would you think I was crazy if I said that you can translate real, hard work... into dreams?
KEVIN: (turning around in the space) Somehow, in here? You make me think it might just be possible.
WALTER: Wait until it's done.
OCTOBER 20x(x+1)
Kevin looks into the camera as he walks up the street towards the Witch House. This final visit is being done just after dusk, unlike most other episodes which are shot in the light of day. The sun is dipping definitively beneath the horizon, visible just along the long axis of the street. Orange street lamps at very distant intervals cast Kevin in an autumnal, ancient glow as he walks.
KEVIN: When I first met Walter, he was a young and very talented academic mind looking to settle into a town that didn't want to welcome him. Arkham is a strange and esoteric place: everyone you talk to here seems to have some sort of direct connection, some intuition about the past and the dangers of living there. Walter was the reverse: a modern man with olden sensibilities looking to put down roots that tapped into Arkham's ancient, elder ether.
Kevin fists a gloved hand as if to grasp the ungraspable.
KEVIN: Walter's Witch House design was a reflection of that ambition. Respectable and just like any other on the outside, the Witch House's true nature is something very internal. There's something deeply cerebral about the design, which borrows more from arcane mathematics than architecture. To be entirely honest, I find it pretty frightening.
The film cuts away to a pre-filmed piece, panning up against the sinuous, suggestive, concrete curves of the Boston Government Service Center's Lindemann Mental Health Center, designed by Paul Rudolph. The lack of any apparent straight edges on the inside of the building contrasts sharply with the stern, angular outside, and is vaguely disconcerting.
KEVIN: There are plenty of examples of architecture that intentionally drive men mad: institutional buildings, like Jeremy Bentham's panopticon prison, were made to make inmates feel like they were constantly watched by the omnipresent, all-seeing state. Brutalist buildings, like this one in Boston designed by Paul Rudolph, are so disorienting in the wide, empty spaces that are "left for the subconscious" to fill that, to quote Vincent Scully, "they put demands upon the individual [...] that not every psyche will be able to meet." Buildings can exert pressure on the human mind when the human body lives in them, and the Witch House is an astonishing modern example of this.
The film cuts back to Arkham. Kevin arrives at the front of the house. The building is now fully complete: handsome, warm brick walls are punctuated by modern glazed windows lit from the inside. A spectrum of mixed, nearly violet light pours out from the picture windows along the high wall of the library, where the stained glass is installed. The second floor seems darker; seems to recede almost in physical space. Walter is not waiting at the front door.
KEVIN: When we called Walter to inquire about filming this final visit, we were redirected to the mathematics department at Miskatonic University. The dean told us that Walter had taken a sabbatical after the end of last term, and that he'd been spending more and more time in this house.
Kevin puts a gloved hand on the doorknob.
KEVIN: We finally got a hand-written letter telling us to come visit whenever we liked; the door would be unlocked. And (turns the knob) so it is.
Kevin steps inside. The ground floor is now fully, if sparsely, furnished. The central staircase seems to make the whole house tilt inwards towards it, like a funnel.
KEVIN: Woah. I feel like a roulette ball, spinning and falling downwards. (blinks hard) I'd say we should have a look inside that glorious library, but I think... (looks up) I think we'd better climb that.
The film gets shaky and blurry as Kevin ascends the spiral staircase. He climbs up with his eyes closed and his hand firmly on the bannister. At the top, he opens his eyes and stops short: the angles of Keziah Mason's attic have been replicated, replicated and then repeated across the entire floor. What is – in one set of dimensions, anyway – a rectangular space seems to now be circular, infinite; the angles repeat and repeat like something kaleidoscopic. Every time Kevin turns, the room seems to turn and click silently along with him. The only non-repeating space seems to be the master bedroom, where there is what looks like a very normal door. Violet light shines out from under it. Kevin swallows.
KEVIN: (at nearly a whisper) This is the house that Walter wanted to build; the house that he built in his mind. Are we inside of his house, or inside of his mind?
Kevin walks very carefully towards the bedroom door and, gingerly, opens it. It swings open to reveal Walter laying comfortably in a leather lounge chair, eyes closed and sleeping. When Kevin steps into the room, the light in it is not violet at all: just a normal, comforting warm white. There is a written post-it note taped to a small book on the coffee table in front of him. There is no bed in the room at all. Kevin goes to him and picks up the note.
KEVIN: (quietly) This is from Walter. It reads, "Enjoy the book; it was written by my uncle's great-great grandfather. I've put it and Mason's work together, and finished building my house. Signed, Walter Carter." (picks up the book) This is borrowed from the Miskatonic Library. It's entitled The Silver Key, by Randolph Carter.
Kevin flips through the short book quietly, reading a few pages and then skipping a few and then reading a few more. He puts it down gently and looks up at the camera.
KEVIN: Ever since our last meeting, when I realised what Walter was building wasn't really a house, I've been thinking about dreams. There's a scene from Hamlet in which Hamlet bemoans
O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
KEVIN: To which Guildenstern replies,
Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Kevin turns around in the space, which seems to dissolve all around him.
KEVIN: Is Walter dreaming, or are we asleep? I won't be staying in the Witch House long enough to find out. I prefer concrete and brick and steel and wood – materials, material things. But Walter, who was a man in some ways out of time and out of place, stuck in a nutshell...
Kevin spots a throw blanket draped over the arm of a nearby chair, and brings it to lay over Walter.
KEVIN: This is the dream house he's built. Let's leave him to his dreaming.
Kevin turns to leave. When he shuts the bedroom door behind him, the light under the doorway is violet again. When he descends to the ground floor, he spots a number of cats there that were not there before. They lash their tails but sit, peaceably, in front of every doorway, like guardians. As Kevin exits the Dream House and walks down the street back to Arkham, then on to Essex County, then on to the real roads of mundane Massachusetts, an October mist curtains the house, and it disappears behind him.