The gas lamps are turned low, and something made of brass, oblong, indistinct, burnished with use, shines amid papers on an escritoire, notes on a forgotten culture's argument with itself. You can't get in. There are footsteps upstairs, the poised, formal walk of another era. Whoever it is, they won't notice you. This is a house divided between regimes of discomfort and lost illusions, of skirted chairs and the re-thinking of undergarments.
Different rules apply each moment.
Visitors are never invited, always unrecognized by their host, who is a man in a hand-tailored wool suit busy in the attic inventing the contents of all the rooms below. Trimmings from his beard litter his desk, which is altar-like, surrounded by flowers, crowded with small upright figures of ritual sacrifice. If he were a god, he'd be the sort who'd never attend much to anything beneath him, not a cruel god but a remote one, absorbed in his own mysteries. Still, he is forlorn in his ignorance of the excitement downstairs, bitter about the costs of being an ordinary man though he understands what you, and others like you, want, who come seeking entrance, hoping to rest on his legendary chaise longe. You, however, can't say what brings you here other than a desire to share your anxiety, to feel it fill his dark majestic house with secrets that were never secrets.