It all started with messages like this one, shoved under my apartment door in the middle of the night:

Please to come to the Science Building at 1:00 am and to bring four Lithuanian pumpernickel loaves, jar of dill pickles, four wooden curtain rods, and Swiss Army Knife. If you disobey injunction, husband will be told about your previous life as a concubine. Do not trifle, we mean the business. Sincerely, The Four Jaroslavs.

P.S. Not to bring a dog, a cop, a cross, or the garlic.

P.P.S. Yesterday, you, Sophie, bought slice of basil and tomato pizza at John's Grocery.

I had received four notes like that in as many weeks. At first I had dismissed them as pranks, probably by foreigners, judging from the language. The details about my daily life, though, were uncannily accurate and made me feel uneasy. The message itself, of course, was nonsense. I have no husband, and I didn't have a previous life. I don't even have much of a present one, given my schedule at the hospital. And who were the four Jaroslavs? Vampires? Not very likely. These days vampires are not scared of garlic, for all I know they take it for their health. And who is afraid of the cross anymore? Still, the notes were intriguing, so, being off duty that night, I decided to visit the Science Building. Of course, I didn't take the stuff the Jaroslavs had asked for; I didn't think they existed in the first place. As a precaution, though, I put my obsidian pyramid in my jeans pocket before setting off.

I arrived at the Science Building at around one o'clock, and was struck once more by how forbidding it looked. They say that its designer was obsessed by angles and crystals, and later went mad. I found that easy to believe, seeing the massive hexagonal buttresses and the jumble of giant, concrete blocks stacked at random near the entrance.

That night there was a full moon that laid a yellow wash over the deserted, brick patio and cast blue-black shadows into the narrow crevices between the blocks. It painted the lawn in shades of sulfer, drained the flowers of their color and edged the dark leaves of the trees in greenish brass. There was nobody about but me, and I was getting scared. I hurried across the patio and through the massive bronze entrance doors into the building.

Inside I found myself in a vast hexagonal hall with dimly visible corridors leading away from the far side. The only light came in from the outside through the tall glass windows that formed the front of the building. I crossed the hall, picked one of the corridors at random and, carefully feeling my way in the increasing darkness, slowly moved along. After a while I reached an elevator whose stainless steel doors gleamed softly in the little light that was left to me. I pushed a button and the doors opened to reveal a pentagonal elevator car, suffused by a purple opalescence that emanated from its walls and ceiling. I stepped inside, the doors closed behind me, and the car ascended. The purple light changed to pink and from the loudspeaker on the instrument panel came a raspy voice that said in a guttural, slavic accent,

"Greetings, Miss Sophie, please to relinquish your escalator on the fourth floor. We are abiding your docking."

When the elevator reached the fourth floor, the pink glow turned off and the doors opened noiselessly. I stepped out into the sickly light of a pallid moon gazing at me through the glass dome at the top of a giant square stairwell. Leaning against the steel railing that surrounded the stairwell stood four men, dressed in green bombazine jumpsuits. They wore dark glasses and their yellow hair was tied in two long pigtails that hung down their chests.

The tallest of the four men stepped forward and said:

"Welcome to our domicile, Miss Sophie. I am Victor, and other men are brothers, Igor, Ivan, and Yuri. Have you brought our wishes?"

"No, I didn't," I said, "What do you need all that stuff for?"

"Curtain rods and Swiss Army Knife are to fabricate wooden stakes. We are in great need of them to kill the four Vladimirs."

"Who are they?" I said.

"They are Lithuanian vampires from Katorsk. We are Estonian vampires from Vilnitz. The Vladimirs hate us and make us lose way in building. They alternate our space."

"What do you mean: 'they alternate your space'?"

"They crook the angles and up the down-stairs. They also false the colors. We will never get out. We had a schema. But now you have not brought the bread."

"What does bread have to do with anything?"

"In our schema, we hide bread and pickles behind the four doors and seduce the Vladimirs to fall down the stair hole."

At this point, Igor chimed in and said, "The doors, the doors, truly Miss Sophie," whereupon Ivan and Yuri both nodded their heads vigorously.

I must have looked puzzled, because Victor took my hand and said, "Please, to see the doors." He took me to the center of our side of the stairwell where a tall steel door interrupted the railing, and motioned me to open it. I did as he asked, and found myself standing on the edge of the stairwell with no railing between me and four floors down. I stepped back hastily.

"What the heck is all this?" I said in confusion.

"We cut railing," Victor said, "so the Vladimirs will fall in. There be other doors on others sides, but all railings cut now."

"Yes, but what were the doors for in the first place?"

"Safeness, so inhabitants do not climb railing and do dangerous," Victor said.

"But now business," he continued. "You have not brought wishes, so we must tell husband about past as concubine. Sorry, but no alternate course of motion."

"I don't have a husband," I said, "and I don't have a previous life either. I don't know where you get that nonsense."

"But are you not Sophie Winkelman who eats basil and tomato pizza?"

"You got the pizza right, but I am Sophie Dykstra."

"You are obviously wrong woman," Victor said, "And I say sorry for seducing you to this building. But you know secret now, so in consequential, you must stay with us. Will you marry me?"

I stared at him in amazement, but he was quite serious. His brothers looked at the floor and fidgeted with their pigtails. I had to do something, before the situation got out of hand, so I took the obsidian crystal out of my pocket and held it up to Victor.

"Does it mean 'yes'?" he said.

As he stood there in his ridiculous costume, he looked like a little boy lost on Halloween night. For a moment I hesitated, but then came to my senses. I looked around and saw a red EXIT sign above a door at the opposite side of the stairwell.

"Take this, it was my father's," I said, pushed the crystal into Victor's hand, and started running.

My ploy had bought me extra time, and I reached the EXIT sign well ahead of the Jaroslavs. I opened the door under the sign, and found myself staring at four white, porcelain urinals. They were aligned against a white, tiled wall that formed the hypotenuse of a triangular men's room. A toilet stall occupied one of the sides of the triangle, and the door through which I had entered was set in the third side. The ceiling of the room sloped upward away from me, and above the toilet was a single blue light that cast an eerie glow over everything. Oh, my God, I thought in my panic, the Vladimirs have crooked the angles. Behind me I heard the approaching Jaroslavs swish their bombazine pants. With an effort I got hold of myself, closed the door of the men's room and locked it. There was a banging on the door, and I heard Victor's muffled voice saying, "It is imperative to come out, Miss Sophie, only men may relieve here." There was a confused chorus of "Yes," "Not correct attitude," and "Faulty woman" from Victor's brothers, and then the banging on the door started up again.

I passed the night in that hideous men's room, sitting on the stool under the blue light, listening to the Jaroslavs alternately cajoling me and arguing amongst themselves. Finally, toward morning, I heard them shuffle off, and a little later a grey-haired cleaning lady came into the room.

"Thank God, you're here, "I said, and kissed her on both cheeks. "I couldn't find my way out, the Vladimirs have alternated the space."

She looked at me strangely and said, "Nobody can find their way in this building, dearie. I figure it is because all the angles are designed crooked."

"No, no, it is the Vladimirs who crooked the angles," I said. "And they upped the down-stairs, too."

"Now you go on home, honey, and have a nice lay-down," the cleaning lady said. "And don't you worry about the Vladimirs anymore. They left years ago."