Mrs. Winchester VIII. The Witch's Cap
There came one day a knock on the door - a jaunty, insistent, rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat that was so annoyingly sure of itself I declined to answer.
Now, you have all been at home, heard a strange knock, and declined to answer it. And you’ve all quietly slipped to a room in the house with a vantage point and concealing curtain to see who it was. Traveling salesman? Chatty neighbor? On this occasion, it was merely the President of the United States.
The knock repeated, identically, at three intervals, and by its final sounding, I had climbed, as you just have, up through every story in the house, and down a dark, narrowing passageway to… The Witch’s Cap. It is here, to the side of that tall window, that I peeped through this child’s telescope (in use since my fifth birthday), and recognized the spectacles, riding crop, and untamed mustache of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt.
He was with four other men; if they were fellow diplomats, I could not know, for they were dressed like bear hunters. I stayed by the window for several long minutes until they remounted their horses and rode away. I then came to this opposite window, and watched them retreat until I was reasonably certain they would not return.
I collapsed the telescope with the heel of my palm, and wondered what he could have wanted.
The question didn’t interest me long, for I was again in the sanctuary of my sanctuary — this lovely, lofty, arched redwood dome that amplifies not only my voice and footsteps but, it seems, my thoughts. Once loosed, thoughts don’t flit away up here; they hover above my head, in the hushed cone of the dome, willing to be recalled, but refusing to crowd my mind. The Witch’s Cap is where I come to think, or more precisely, where I come to fetch ideas. Thinking is for executing ideas not obtaining them. Ideas ascend from a place deeper than thought. Here I surrender, not just to what some now call the unconscious, but to the grand unknown - to space, time, and the bountiful void. I become as receptive and without demand as the key on Benjamin Franklin’s kite, and am often as charged.
Different people have different means of arriving at this condition. I walk. Either outdoors, or inside this room. Both are without limit. If one walks in a circle, no matter how close the space, one can walk forever. I have walked a thousand miles in The Witch’s Cap, and have received as many ideas. This house, in its countless individual aspects, has revealed itself to me in the woods, in my dreams, and in the bath, but nowhere as much as in this conical chamber where I have worn a perfect circle in the floorboards.
Thinking begins when a good idea presents itself, and the initial thought is always, “Yes.”
Light-refracting crystals embedded in wallpaper? Yes! A room with one entrance and three exits? Yes! And on the day when Roosevelt’s knocking drove me up the stairs, and I was free to circumambulate with my little telescope, and I imagined a different telescope, a grand telescope, jutting from a revolving dome atop the sixth and final turret and magnifying the mysteries of space for assembled wonder-seekers in The Llanada Villa Observatory….
YES!
To the mystery of this house, I shall add the mystery of the cosmos. With luck and my continued existence, the observatory will be in place for the return of Comet Halley in 1910!
Speaking of returns, not five minutes did I get to savor this idea before I heard, all the way up here, another loud and insistent, rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat!
From Mrs. Winchester, or, A Gun in the First Act by Joe Christiano
Next: The Conservatory