ix.
the well is in the floor, in a part of the building that is no longer pretending to be a room. there is no parapet around it. there is no rope. the building does not lower buckets here; the well is for looking into, not for fetching from.
you stand at its edge. the dark inside it is the kind of dark that has been undisturbed for a long time. you cannot see the bottom. the bottom is not the point. the point is that there is one, very far down, and that the building has decided to keep it.
there is a small thing in your pocket. it has been there since before the threshold. you had forgotten it; the well has reminded you. it is the kind of thing one might drop — a coin, a folded thought, a name you have stopped using. the building is not telling you to drop it. it is simply allowing the possibility.
you take it out. you hold it over the dark. you find, in the holding, a small reluctance — not because it is precious, but because dropping is irreversible, and you have not done many irreversible things lately. the well respects the reluctance. it has seen this hesitation many times.
whether you drop it is your own affair. the procession does not require it. some visitors drop something; some put it carefully back into the pocket and walk on, no less faithful to the building for that. either choice is met by the same patient dark, which has room for both, and for the silence that follows either.
you step back from the edge. your pocket is either lighter or the same. you do not check. the well has done its work, which was not to take from you but to ask, gently, what you were still carrying.