You arrive, as most readers do, by way of the threshold, and you are met by no one. This is intended. The labyrinth has a single employee — the keeper — and the keeper is rarely at the door. The first room is unmarked. Most rooms here are unmarked. The names appear only when you have left.
To the right of the threshold is the library, open until five, with an atlas of dust on the table and ten small books standing on the shelf as found. The cataloguing is honourable but not exhaustive. The librarian is also rarely present. The chair behind the desk is, however, warm, and is being warmed by no one in particular.
Beyond the library is the long east corridor, which leads to the archive. The archive holds twenty-five papers — telegrams, postcards, receipts, a will. Adjacent are two smaller wings: letters from elsewhere, written by people not here, and unsent letters, written by people here, not posted. The latter wing is, on the whole, the more honest of the two.
If you ascend, you reach the house, twenty rooms by floor. The kitchen smells of stock; in the parlour, of wax after a rain. On the kitchen table you may find a note — back in five minutes, or dinner in the oven, or one half-written in a hand the rest of the household does not recognise. The household keeps a household manual, third edition, with pencil annotations in three different hands. Only one of those hands is named.
Above the household is the architecture itself — eighteen details, hinge and latch and finial. The architecture has, in places, decided not to match the architect's drawing. The drawing has been filed in the archive without comment.
If you descend instead, you arrive at the apothecary, which holds eighteen remedies for conditions which have not been clinically established. Next door is the tearoom, kettle on, twelve teas, daily and for tuesdays. Above the tearoom is the apiary: ten pages of bee-keeping; the hive lost two queens this summer; the comb darkened.
Cross the inner courtyard and you reach the workshop. Twelve tools. The smell of pine. Ten clocks are kept, each on its own pace. Ten small mechanisms stand on the bench, all still working. None of them have any particular task.
Beyond the workshop is the kitchen proper, fifteen simple recipes, and then the spice cabinet — twelve jars, row by row. The labels are in two handwritings. The dates are inconsistent.
Take the side door and you are outside. The bees first; then the trees, named; then the path down to the railway line, which connects marin halt at the north end with terminus in the south. Between them: korphavn, glasshope (junction), lockfield, old post, silvergrove, petrel isle (ferry-pier), chalfen, thursby. The eight thirty-six is late today, as most days.
If you walk instead along the shore, you find the beach, ten finds between tides — green sea glass, driftwood, a cuttlebone, a small bottle. The bottle is not empty. It has not been opened.
Above all of this is the sky, watched in sections, and the clouds, catalogued — alto-, cirro-, cumulo-, lenti-, mammato-. There is also the weather inside the house, which has its own classification, mostly emotional. On a still morning in december, the inside-weather and outside-weather agreed for several hours. This is recorded.
The sky at night holds the constellations — twelve mythic figures, plus the interactive sky which the household keeps for guests. Fifteen birds have been seen here; their songs are written down, more or less faithfully, in pencil.
You may come, at some point, to the south corridor, where the phantoms tend to be. A phantom in this labyrinth is not, generally, the bound spirit of a dead person — it is more an arrangement of light and absence. The keeper records phantoms briefly; no further investigation. They are considered junior staff.
The keeper's office is on the ground floor. The keeper writes in the log every evening at six. The most recent entry is page 412. The handwriting is illegible to anyone who is not the keeper. There is a small diary in the desk drawer; only the keeper has read it.
If you arrive, as you may, at the question of who made this, the labyrinth offers no clean answer. There is a tribute wing of fourteen rooms to noemata.net, from which sometemple takes its first syllable. There is a small codex setting out the noemic principles in thirteen articles. There are signatures in the visitor's book, some of them false. The opposite of secrecy: the work is on the table; only the hand is missing.
The labyrinth does not progress. It does not announce itself. It does not, on the whole, ask you to stay. It is content if you do, and content if you do not. Terminus is well-marked at the far end of the line. The great bell is rung at noon. Midnight is exactly midnight, except in irregular years, when, briefly, it is not. A small clock in the south room is interested only in those moments.
You may, of course, leave. The threshold is just as you found it. Whatever you have read on the way back out is read on the way back out, and the building has no opinion about it. Most readers leave by way of the atlas, or by closing the tab. Either is acceptable to the labyrinth.
Should you wish to return, the door will open. Should you not, the door will also do that.