Even as journalists attempted to describe the nature of the Grand Cosmo, rumors about the colossal building had begun to circulate in the cheap press, especially rumors about the many subterranean levels, which were said to house darker and more disturbing entertainments as one descended lower and lower. The rumors at first irritated Martin, for hadn’t the Grand Cosmo banished the division between upper and lower that had been a feature of the old-fashioned Dresslers? — but Harwinton was pleased: rumor of any kind was a mark of success, to say nothing of its usefulness as a highly effective and entirely free form of advertisement. Martin, looking at Harwinton’s cool blue blond-lashed eyes, recalled the plump lady in the fountain pen ad, bending over the desk. It struck him that Harwinton himself had probably had a hand in the spread of certain dubious stories, which in any case had begun to lead a life of their own among guests and visitors and the tabloid dailies, and were even being reported, with a certain disdain, by more responsible journalists as evidence of the building’s power to attract attention. It was said that rat-baiting pits flourished in dark corners of the lowest levels, where specially trained rat dogs fought bloody battles against batches of a dozen rats; it was said that a branch of an upstate asylum permitted its inmates to roam the dark in solitary gloom, garbed in the costumes of Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, Jack the Ripper, Edgar Allan Poe. One article reported that the lowest level housed a labyrinthine brothel whose ornate furniture, flowery wallpaper, formidable madam, and thirteen-year-old girls had been smuggled across the Atlantic in the hold of a tramp steamer. Such rumors were to some extent constrained by the very existence of the Grand Cosmo and its verifiable number of subterranean levels, but as if in an effort to evade such constraints, a more fantastic variety of rumor soon began to grow in the rich, shapeless blackness beneath the lowest subterranean level.
It was said that under the thirteenth level a maze of interconnecting passageways had been constructed, each with stairways leading down to still lower levels, unimaginably far down; and there in the world beneath the world, which yet was only the deepest cellar of the cloud-piercing Cosmosarium, black gardens of imagination bloomed. It was said that in the darkness of that sub-subterranean realm, in a forest the color of black tourmaline, wild children, abandoned at birth and speaking no language, were raised by wolves and lived the life of animals. It was said that in moss-stained halls at the ends of crumbling corridors, statues tormented with human longings came to life, roamed the dark with impassioned eyes, and flung themselves upon human lovers, after which they wandered sluggishly until they assumed new and troubling marble poses. There, beneath the world, white and peaceful cities rose in distant river valleys, beckoning the weary of heart and the sick of soul. There, in the Garden of Black Delight, monstrous jet-black blossoms exuded dangerous perfumes, which produced visions of such searing ecstasy that afterward one lost all desire to live. In the House of Metamorphosis, deep in a cave under a hill whose top was an island, Chinese masters trained in secret academies could transform the traveler into a lion, a butterfly, an angel, a waterfall. It was said that to descend into the world beneath the world was to learn the secrets of heaven and hell, to go mad, to speak in tongues, to understand the language of beasts, to rend the veil, to become immortal, to witness the destruction of the universe and the birth of a new order of being; and it was said that if you descended far enough, down past obsidian-black rivers, past caves where dwarves in leather jerkins swung pickaxes against walls veined with gold, down past the lairs of slumbering dragons whose tails were curled around iron treasureboxes, past regions of ice and fire, past legendary underworlds where the shadowy spirits of the dead set sail for islands of bliss and pain, down and down, past legend and dream, through realms of blackness so dark that it stained the soul black, you would come to a sudden, ravishing brightness.
But whether the writers spoke of the imaginary world beneath the building, or of the many worlds within, they all acknowledged, even in their puzzlement, a sense not simply of abundance or immensity, but of the inexhaustible. It was as if, despite the finite number of stories (thirty) and underground levels (thirteen, including the basement), the Grand Cosmo produced in the visitor a conviction that it could never be fully explored, that around the next corner or down the next stairway existed something unexpected, exciting, and never seen before.