…Walking toward the staircases now, it felt as though it took us a whole minute and a half to cross the empty foyer past the piano and long-dormant water fountain, which had been painted an aqua green within its reservoir, and was in fact empty. The fountain had two marble, three-foot-high, angels within its center which were quite erotic and kissing passionately.
The fountain stank horribly of bird droppings…
“I’ll bet that most of these birds were born inside this house and have never been outside,” Andrea said.
“They must have some source of food, probably rats. Either that, or there’s an open food celler here,” Helen replied.
“We’ll be able to smell it; if there is,” Kendall said.
…Walking further, we discovered that the west-wing marble staircase itself was adorned with more elaborate scrollwork along its hand-railing and also the steps themselves. Climbing the huge marble staircase felt like taking a journey back into time itself, it was eerie to ponder who may have climbed or descended these very stairs, a hundred years ago…
Reaching the top of the staircase, I looked down a long and foreboding hallway which was the width and length of a neighborhood street. I suddenly comprehended that the front of the house, where the foyer stood, was only the beginning of the massive house. I now realized that the layout of the house was shaped like an upper-case “T” and we’d only been just inside the entryway, or top portion of the “T” itself.
All along this floor, close to the foyer, were wooden benches with ornate iron frames and large white porcelain pots that had once held exotic plants. As with everything else in the house, the porcelain pots were ornately engraved with more intricate scrollwork.
…Looking down the massive hallway again, it appeared to go on for an entire city block or more, it was hundreds of yards long, trailing off into the darkness of the far reaches of vision with only a dim shaft of light shining at the very far end of the hallway. The light probably coming in through a window or another skylight I suspected. It was no exaggeration to say that I could easily pull a set of full-size double trailers, with the Peterbilt, down the long hallway. My thirteen-foot exhaust stacks would have cleared the ceiling with ease…
I also saw a hundred or more of the gold-plated doorknobs decorating rows of closed doors that neatly lined each side of the hallway. Each of the doors seemed to be fitted with a gold latch plate and a keyhole for another one of the massive keys. More of the green rug carpet lay within the center section of the long hallway, over what appeared to be yet more marble flooring. The green rug carpet reminded me of a paved highway along a desolate route running through the Mohave desert, it seemed endless.
Intricate scrollwork also lined the edges of the marble ceiling and wall paneling here as well. Other than a slight degree of dust and minute amounts of peeling paint, the hallway looked like it could have been in use last week.
I now looked at the hallway’s panel of light switches, there were probably two dozen of these switches within the gold-plated panel. These antiquated porcelain light switches moved in and out, with one switch for “on” and another switch below, for “off”.