The Extra Corner

What it looks like, and what it does

A plain bedroom, wallpaper stained with age. In the angle between two walls, a fourth vertical seam of shadow hangs in mid-air like a hinge. The bed pushed away from it. The paper near it peeled in a spiral. A sleeper's slippers pointing toward it.

Passive, it seems. The paper in its neighbourhood peels in a spiral. The air near it is slightly colder than the rest of the room, and slightly thinner.

What is known

Room 4, 31 Tanner's Lane. Surveyors measure three walls and note, without comment, four corners.

Objects left in the fourth corner are found reversed. Sleepers who face it dream of a landscape under a very low sky and wake with their ears popping. Two tenants in the 1960s could not be found; their belongings were all in the corner, folded the wrong way round.

What it can do

• Reverses what is placed in it
• Calls sleepers who face it toward a low-skied country

Where it stops

• Cannot be entered awake
• Cannot be measured: instruments disagree about how far it is from the wall

An encounter

Craddock lowered a steel tape into the angle. It came back eleven inches longer than it went. He tried once more, and the second time the tape did not come back. He recorded the remaining length in the report, and recommended that the room be let to someone who slept on their back.

Edmund Craddock, building surveyor, Room 4, 31 Tanner's Lane, A survey visit, one afternoon

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Six independent measurements give four corners and three walls. One of the measurers is no longer available for comment.
• incomplete: Two tenants are recorded as absent from the room. Their possessions have not been released.
• rumor: That the sky in the dream gets lower each time.

Still unresolved

The room's rent has not changed since 1961. Every tenant has stayed for exactly eleven weeks.

Where it has been recorded

• Tanner's Lane (confirmed) — Recorded by Edmund Craddock, building surveyor.

Connected entities

• Mother of Rooms — Both are rooms that exceed their walls. One adds rooms for those who stayed. The other has a place in it for someone who did not.
• The Man Who Is Also a Door — Both are openings in ordinary architecture that lead somewhere the building does not account for. One is polite about it.
• The Cellar Below the Cellar — Both are places in a house that exceed the house. Records of both mention a sense of having been expected.