Ranson got out of the Caddillac he rode around in to get to his mission areas. He went to the trunk of the car and opened it. A set of trays on a roller offered him weapons to use. He pulled them out one at a time and stashed them inside his dark suit jacket. He fitted the sunglasses on last.

“You're taking your whole arsenal?,” asked his driver, Chan. The man wore an old-fashioned chaueffer suit and cap. Gloves covered his hands.

“I'm expecting a lot of trouble when I go inside,” said Ranson. He closed the trunk on the empty trays. “I want to be ready for anything.”

“We can get backup from the agency,” said Chan. His boss liked to deal with things his own way. The agency required him to answer to a more senior agent in the field. He didn't want to do that.

Chan's own experiences with other agents were not as good as they should have been.

“It's a simple lookaround,” said Ranson. “Nothing to it.”

“Every time you say that, we wind up hip deep in creeply crawlies and extradimensional spaces that need to be closed,” said Chan.

“I want you to stay outside and make sure nothing comes in,” said Ranson. “I can do this.”

“You know better than that,” said Chan. He fitted a black mask over his face. “The chief will want to know why I let you walk into a haunted house alone. Then I would be decommissioned.”

“So you're going in with me?,” said Ranson. “That's nothing but extra work for me.”

“Then you should have considered that before you refused to call in others,” said Chan. He waved at the house across the street. “Let's go before we attract too much attention.”

“It's too late for that,” said Ranson. “We were marked as soon as we pulled up. Security has us lined up for bags, or jars. We look too much like an offensive getting ready to burn things down. Anybody inside is probably getting ready to stop us.”

“We'll see who winds up in a bag,” said Chan.

The pair walked toward the gates in the fence. Beyond stood the house. Energy glowed against Ranson's sunglasses. All they had to do was go in there and shut that thing down.

Random circles formed on the yard. They were lucky nothing was coming through yet. At some point something would come out of one of those doors. Then they would be fighting some random passerby wanting to go home, or looking for a new place to exploit.

“Keep an eye out,” said Ransom. He pulled a rod with embedded crystals from under his coat. He pointed that at the center of the gates. The lock snapped open so they could push the gates out of the way.

Chan entered first. He kept to the concrete path leading up to the narrow porch in front of the front door. He kept an eye on the random doors opening and closing. He didn't want to become embroiled in a brawl on the lawn before they reached their first objective.

Ranson put the rod away and walked behind his driver. He wanted his hands free so he could draw the right tool for the job. He felt he had a few seconds to decide what he needed from his arsenal under his coat.

Chan checked the porch before trusting his weight to it. He pushed the doorbell with a gloved thumb. A small chime reached his ears.

Ranson paused. They were breaking in. Why had Chan rang the bell to let the enemy know someone was at the door.

“Why did you do that?,” he asked, trying to keep any judgement out of his voice.

Chan pointed at the sensors in the corner of the porch roof. They had a clear picture of the two of them standing in front of the house.

“I don't think we can wait for them to open the door,” said Ranson. He reached under his jacket and pulled a rifle out. He pulled the charging lever. “Stand back.”

Chan hopped down from the porch and stepped behind Ranson. The agent didn't usually use a lot of force on an assignment. What was different about this one?

Ranson looked at the charge meter of the rifle. He pulled the trigger. The door exploded inward. He waited for the barrel of the rifle to cool down before he stored it.

He stepped inside the gloomy foyer and took a moment to get orientated. He frowned at the stairs running everywhere with landings branching off and doing their own things.

“Extradimensional spaces,” said Chan. He turned in a circle to take in the full effect. “It looks bigger inside than out.”

“We need to start heading down,” said Ranson. He went to the nearest staircase and paused. It looked endless to him.

“I suppose we have a lot of false paths here,” said Chan. He looked at another staircase. He couldn't see the bottom of that one.

“Let's try a portal gun and see if we can cut through some of this,” said Ranson. He pulled out a pistol and fired down his staircase. A blue glob fell out of a staircase leading up and landed behind him. He turned to look at the sound. He vanished from where he stood and reappeared where the glob had become a circular disc. He looked down at the disc with a frown.

“All right,” he said. He put the pistol away. “Some of these stairs are Mobius Strips. That's good to know.”

“It looks like they are growing too while we're trying to figure out what to do,” said Chan. He went to another staircase and couldn't see the end. “How long do you think before this thing busts out of its skin and starts eating the world?”

“No idea,” said Ranson. “We need a way to break this down so we can proceed. I'm tempted to try to blow a hole in the floor, but now I'm afraid of where the blast will go.”

Chan nodded. If he used a big gun on the floor and the blast cut through the ceiling where they were, that would kill them faster than any other problems they might encounter.

“Let's try something else,” said Ranson. He took some coins from his pants pocket. He threw them down the stairwells as hard as he could. All but one bounced to a landing in the foyer. He marked the one stairwell that hadn't sent his coin back, and picked up his change.

He started down the marked stairwell.

“This one doesn't loop?,” asked Chan. He checked over the railing. The steps seemed to go down forever like all the rest.

“Don't know,” said Ranson. One hand kept a grip on the wood railing. “It might be an endless loop of walking, it might dump us to some other part of the foyer we didn't see, it might be bottlenecked at the bottom. We'll know in a few minutes which one it is.”

He peered about as they descended slowly. A house bigger on the inside than outside. Random portals in the vicinity. An energy signature to power China for a hundred years. The agency had been right about wanting answers for once.

Some things men were not meant to know. It was his job to make sure those things were buried one way, or the other. So far he had kept the collateral damage down, but he suspected he would eventually run into something the agency couldn't stop with all of its resources.

That didn't mean he wouldn't try.

Ranson paused. The air shifted around him. He looked around. The floors had shifted for some reason. Was that natural for this, or was someone in charge? Either option presented bad futures to him.

He pulled out a scanner and waved it around. Their staircase was still anchored. He thought it was because they were on it. The rest of the mass had shifted to open new floors and doors.

He did an energy check with the scanner. They still needed to go down. Whatever was powering everything was below them. Once there, they could cut things off to prevent any trouble for reality.

He put the scanner away. He needed to keep his hands ready in case he needed a weapon. He didn't think this was as random as they had first thought. Someone had to be here to turn the power on.

He wondered when the minions would start coming out of the walls. That would make the boredom he was starting to feel go away in a flash.

He paused at a large door blocking their path. He didn't see a lock. Keypad activation, he thought. He could get through this easily enough. What was on the other side of the door?

“No lock,” said Chan. “No hinges. Maybe dropped in place.”

“Or grown in place,” said Ranson. He reached under his jacket and fished for the right tool for the job. “I'm going to try to open it and see what's on the other side.”

“It's better than waiting to see if someone comes after us out here on the endless stair,” said Chan.

Ranson pulled a weapon that looked like a bell with a handle on the narrow top. He pointed it at the door and pulled the trigger. The door slid up under the influence of gravity. He waited for Chan to cross the threshold before he did. He shut the weapon off once he was across the invisible line. The door slammed shut behind them.

Chan started forward, pausing when he reached a door across his path. It looked like a real door, but when he tapped it, the sound made it seem like he was tapping a wall.

Ranson looked around as he put the gravity gun away. He nodded at the door at the end of the hall. It looked like they needed to go the other way.

He paused when he reached an elevator bank. He pushed the call buttons. He doubted they were real elevators. He put it down to the stalling tactics the house was using to protect its secret.

It wouldn't be the first time he had encountered a maze blown out of proportion.

He listened at the elevator doors, but didn't hear any elevator moving. Were there even elevators in the house? And where had they come from?

Ranson knocked on each of the doors. They all sounded like nothing was behind them. He decided to cut one of the doors away so they could get on with their business.

He hoped there was something behind the doors to let him get on with his job. He didn't want to use the grapnel gun to drop down into the basement. He also didn't want an open hole so the monsters could come back and try to eat him and Chan.

He pulled out a torch. He doubted whatever was behind the door would be interested in him. He started cutting the metal.

He sliced around the middle door. It just stood in his way as he considered the best path forward. He pushed it in so it would fall without hurting him or Chan.

He found stairs going down forever again. He frowned. He hated mazes.

He dropped a penny down the middle of the staircase. He didn't hear it hit bottom.

He looked up. The stairs went up by the false elevator doors and climbed up out of sight.

“I think someone is playing a game with us,” said Chan. He looked over the railing. “How do we beat this?”

“I don't know,” said Ranson. He looked up at the stairs heading upwards. He put his hand out in the shaft. The air pulled it upwards. Was something repelling things from the bottom, or had gravity reversed.

How did they get by this barrier?

Ranson pulled out his grapnel. He pointed the spike end up the shaft. He fired and drove the grappling claw into the unseen ceiling. It trailed a metal cord behind it. He stepped out in the center of the shaft. He started floating upwards. He pulled the reel and the line started retracting.

“Where are you going?,” Chan called. He stood at the edge of the stairs.

“The center of things is the only way to move around,” Ranson called back. He felt his speed increase. “I'm heading down to deal with this. Get back out to the fence.”

He saw the top of the shaft approach. He was going to have to swing out for an exit if he could find one.

Then he was going to figure out how to get down to that engine and cut it off.