Rarer than unlinked people are unlinked places. While I’ve never found any proof of this, I believe that you can discover more unlinked places in large metropolitan areas: Mexico City, Mumbai, London, and the like. This is due, according to my theory at least, to the massive amounts of life and energy concentrated in one area. Just as extremely large objects deform space with their weight, so too do such large cities deform reality.

And when I speak of an unlinked place, I don’t mean a door that once in its entire existence happens to have a Mayan Empire outward post in place of Reykjavik behind it instead of a closet. Or a thin membrane that separates one reality from another with potentially lethal differences in the laws of physics lying in wait behind the door to a kitchen cabinet for all of three seconds. These things happen more often than you know.

I mean a place that truly, permanently, points to places it should not. Here’s a perfect example: there is a hotel in New York City with a forgotten service elevator. The doors will only open to allow entry on the seventeenth floor and the car you find there will only take you to the sub-basement.

Of course, it’s not really that building’s sub-basement. It’s any sub-basement of any other building in New York City, and at any time you choose to arrive there. And while that may sound like it has a limited, albeit interesting, number of potential applications, I’ve found that many practitioners and other unlinked individuals will give out the location and method of access to those who have discovered their secret and pester them incessantly for information.

One, an acquaintance of mine who’s known to all only as Ridley, is particularly susceptible to being bothered as he can always be found in one place; he cannot move elsewhere due to the terms under which he abandoned Heaven.

Ridley told me that at one point he was accosted on his property by three young men armed with guns. Again, due to his terms, he cannot attack others, even in self-defense. The young men knew a sliver of Ridley’s past and demanded access to some arcane knowledge that would help further their criminal ambitions.

Ridley calmly told the trio of the elevator, and of how it was to be used. What a way to bypass security, he told them, by suddenly appearing in the building’s sub-basement without ever having to actually break in? He suggested a target as well: a famous jewelry store in Manhattan, which during the 1940s would have nowhere near the level of security it did today. Use the elevator, Ridley said, go back before they could have stopped you, and steal to your heart’s content.

After the prerequisite threats to return if Ridley was lying, the men did as he suggested, and were never heard from again. What he and others always neglect to tell the source of their annoyance is that it’s a one way trip. You can go to any New York sub-basement at any time during the city’s history…you just can’t get back.

Assuming that they were able to steal something from the store, they would have had to exit the building once it became clear the elevator wouldn’t take them back. I imagine they either wound up in prison or an in asylum. Being stranded in a time different from your own is a good way to be either labeled insane or eventually driven that way. I know this better than I’d like to admit.

I can only imagine how many times that elevator has been used to that purpose. Only the once by Ridley, that I’m aware of. He’s a nice enough fellow, though easily irritated. And he detests guns.