A couple months after the honeymoon, I was trying to track down a water leak that was dribbling water out into the restaurant’s dining room, the first maintenance task I’d had to do that involved anything behind a wall. I asked for building plans, but they didn’t have any. That would never have happened in New York; every building was required to have current, updated plans available all the time, as problems might affect adjacent buildings. Here, the building stood alone, and had been built up by a series of expansions over centuries which nobody had kept track of. All they could give me was a building map that showed the layout of rooms and hallways, the kind of thing we might have given to a guest to help him find a specific room.

When I looked at the area of the leak, I noticed the map didn’t even match the building. It showed the pantry only half as deep as what it actually was, and that wasn’t even right. The dining room occupied the space on the map that actually belonged to the pantry, and it was also bigger in reality than its space on the map.

“What the Hell!” I exclaimed.

“What is it?” Antonio asked.

“Look at this map. The pantry comes further down this way than it shows on the map, and the dining room goes up further this way than is on the map. The two rooms occupy the same space!”

It wasn’t obvious because of the kitchen, some closets, and other things that you had to go around to get between the pantry and dining room, but when I made the trip, paying attention to the relative locations of things, it was obvious. The pantry and part of the dining room really were in the same space! I grabbed my measuring tape and some graph paper, and taped 4 sheets of graph paper together, carefully aligning the lines, and taped them down to an unoccupied dining table to draw a map. Using a scale of 5 squares to a meter, Antonio and I drew a scale map of the entire lobby and restaurant area of everything but the pantry. All the dimensions lined up exactly, except for the pantry itself. The pantry should be no more than 70 centimeters deep.

“I want to take down this entire wall. We’re going to have to get in there anyway to locate the leak, and we’ll get to see more of what’s in the space the pantry overlaps with.”

Antonio agreed, and we moved two dining tables and their chairs out of the way to provide room for the work. We roped off the area, and I dug into the wall, which was made of plaster, and started pulling it down. I’d seen these walls occasionally in one of my buildings in New York. There were studs (vertical beams) just like in more modern sheetrock walls, and little strips of rough wood were tacked across the studs, with gaps between them. The plaster was put up against these strips so that some of it flowed into the gaps to help secure it to the wall. I pulled out a number of the strips while bringing the wall down, and more of them to afterward because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing beyond it.

The dining room wall was a one-sided wall, meaning there was no plaster on the other side of the studs. This enclosed a space where a number of pipes ran to and from the second floor. Beyond the pipes, there was another one-sided wall facing the other way. I’d seen that done to enclose pipe spaces before, too. The small map indicated this other wall would be the back wall of the pantry, but my just-measured map showed this back wall was actually where the front wall of the pantry should be. But instead of the door, there was a large rectangular hole which opened up into ... the outside? It was pretty weird, though. It definitely wasn’t just outside this building. But there was sky, and trees that resembled trees we knew.

Whatever that was needed investigation, but it wasn’t going to be a simple thing. Since we were going to have guests in the restaurant, I didn’t want them seeing that, and Antonio and I tacked up some tarps covering the far wall so only the first wall and the pipes were visible, and I worked on locating the leak. I found it, sealed the faulty pipe joint where water was leaking, and had that part cleaned up by the end of the day.

The next morning there was no more water where it had leaked before, so I figured that the leak was really fixed. Since I knew I was going to need to get back in here to investigate the anomaly, I cut one stud out and installed a door in the near wall at the point where it would be easiest to pass through the row of pipes inside and reach the far wall, and locked it. I removed the rest of the plaster and its supporting slats on this entire wall, and installed sheetrock to close it back up. And once it was closed, I ripped down the tarp inside the pipe space which was no longer needed to hide the portal. The next day I put two coats of paint on the wall, doing other maintenance elsewhere in the building in the time between.

I wanted to consult with the rest of the family before I went any further. Marco and Antonio, at least, didn’t know about whatever this was, and it seemed to pretty clearly contradict at least one element of the origin story. It also seemed to defy reality as we knew it, but then, so did eating the worms, at least, for the reality of most people on Earth. There wasn’t any regularly scheduled meeting of all the family members who worked here, but we talked to the main boss, Mama Martina, and she called such a meeting the next Sunday morning. She informed me, after she’d spoken with everybody individually, that nobody had heard about it. She gave me and Antonio Saturday off normal work to prepare, and Giulio, who was one of the more techie members of the family, also got the day off to help me prepare.

There was a conference room, which was the room we’d transformed into a wedding chapel for my wedding, but this time we used it for an actual meeting, including using the projector. I showed the map the family actually used, and the scale map I had drawn, then overlaying the two (thanks, Giulio!) to make my point. Antonio translated my words into Italian so that everybody could understand.

“The pantry isn’t actually inside the inn. There’s no room for it. The entrance is a portal to somewhere else, and we think that by going through the wall, we can access the other side of the portal, and go somewhere outdoors, presumably just outside of the room that is our pantry.”

There was a lot of commotion as people were shocked at this statement, but I quieted them down, saying, “Let me show you,” a sentence I could manage in Italian. And I led them a short distance to my new door. A number of them were clearly curious about it, since they’d seen the door which they knew wasn’t there last week. I opened it and showed them the portal to somewhere outside, right in the middle of our building. One of them spotted one of the magic worms crawling on a tree, and they yelled excitedly.

After they’d seen enough, I closed and locked the door again and we all went back into the conference room and there was a round of excited discussion, but after a few minutes Mama Martina called the group to order and Antonio went on, summarizing the key points of discussion.

“We know this means that at least part of the history we have passed down within the family for generations is false. We also know part of it is true, since the worms work, as Marco and Joanna here can attest to recently, as can Mama Martina herself and many other people who are not here today. But we can’t change those facts. We can only try to learn the truth.”

This generated a murmur of general acceptance, some of it sounding a bit grudging.

“Who thinks we should explore what’s on the other side of that portal?”

Everyone was universally in favor.

“So the only question is how we go about it. Seeing the worm there just now was pretty exciting, because it supports our theory that it leads to the same area as what’s inside our pantry. Does it lead to some other part of the world where the worms may be known to the locals and they eat them regularly to change sex whenever they want? An uninhabited place where the worms grow wild? How did it come to be connected by a portal to our building? And are there other portals like this on Earth?”

Of course we didn’t know that yet, but everybody wanted to find out. Once the chatter died down, Antonio continued.

“Are we, ourselves, qualified to go explore wherever that is? Is it safe? Are there people we could hire who would be better suited? Are we, as the people with first-hand knowledge of the worms, actually the most qualified? Do we even have enough information to make a qualified decision? Should we actually do it ourselves because bringing in outsiders and telling them the full secret, not just the pasta sauce of change but where it comes from, might be dangerous and putting ourselves at risk from others either wanting to cut in on our business or take it by force?”

And now there was no agreement at all, as clearly everybody in the room had been thinking one or more of these ideas, but almost as many different combinations of them as there were people. Mama Martina called order again, and then people were called on in turn to speak their viewpoints for or against family members or outsiders exploring the place. It took a while to get any sort of agreement, but after more than an hour we decided on this plan:

• We’re going to send family members through first, because introducing it to outsiders represents an incalculable risk.
• We’re going to make sure our family members are well prepared. They are going to have hazard suits with a breathing apparatus, weapons, air quality sensors and other monitoring equipment, GPS sensors, several types of cameras, and possibly other equipment.
• We’re going to do it quickly, because it seems like part of the inside of our building may be exposed to whoever or whatever lives over there. If necessary, we can cover the hole and protect the building from intrusion in this way. As far as we are aware we’ve never had a problem with this, with it open this way for perhaps centuries, but until we know what’s over there we cannot understand the danger.
• If we think it’s too dangerous after our initial foray, we can bring in other qualified people to explore it, or cease exploration.

We were well past our allotted time for the meeting, so in order to not leave any customers looking for brunch unserved for any longer, we adjourned the meeting after appointing a committee to work on identifying who should go and acquiring all the gear, as well as thinking of any other gear we might want to send with them. The committee was going to consist of me and Antonio, as the discoverers, and Mama Martina, which clearly meant she would have the final authority in deciding any issues, but also meant she wanted our input.

Most of the family members went out to serve customers, while Antonio and I were asked to work on acquiring the gear. Mama Martina let us decide on this, up to a price limit; if there was something we thought we needed above that we could ask for her approval. So that was our Sunday, looking online for a lot of the gear and spending a few thousand euros, having most of it shipped to us. We bought the weapons locally.

Monday morning, Mama Martina called us in to her office and showed us a file on a family member I didn’t know. Anna Smith was one of those who’d moved away from Sicily and married outside the family, but she was born here and knew the family secret. She was an experienced biologist and, having been inspired by the worms which were a family secret, she discovered and documented more than 30 previously unknown species in various parts of the world.

“Well I can see why you chose her. I don’t know all your family members, but it’s hard to imagine someone more appropriate,” I said.

“I agree. The best person for the job,” Antonio added.

“Have you asked her yet?” I asked.

“No,” Mama Martina replied. “It’s still early in Britain where she lives, and I wanted to let you know first, but I’ll send her an email right now.”

We watched as she wrote out, “Anna, we have a unique and unexpected opportunity for you at home I know you’ll appreciate. Call my secure phone.”

“Stay close,” she told us. “I expect she’ll call back before the end of the morning and I’ll call you all in.”

So we took care of some other little chores, and about two hours later Mama called us in. Anna was already there on Mama’s computer, in the end-to-end encrypted video call service which the family used.

Anna spoke when she saw us gathered together on the call. “What’s this all about, Mama? Is it something with the worms?”

“Well, yes it is. Anna, you met Antonio, though he was only a teenager when you did. This is Joanna, newly married into the family. Maria, who is now called Marco, chose her as her partner to change with. Before she came here, Joanna had experience doing building maintenance, and that’s been her primary role here, and she was inspecting a small water leak when she discovered something interesting about our building. Joanna, if you’d like to explain?”

“Certainly. Anna, the pantry where the worms live isn’t actually inside the building. There’s simply no space for it. I don’t know how nobody ever noticed.”

Mama Martina was pulling up the slideshow from yesterday’s presentation as I spoke, and started a screen-share once she had it up, showing the crude map the family had been using and then the scale map I had drawn, and where the pantry would actually be if it was really here.

“There was water leaking out of this wall,” I said as Mama indicated which one on the map. “I asked for building plans, because that’s the way I would have worked in New York before tearing into any wall, to know what was inside. But I learned it’s not like that here, and nobody had more than the first crude map shown on the slides. When I was trying to match that to reality, I noticed the inaccuracies. In trying to resolve them, I realized there simply wasn’t space for the pantry.”

I could still see Anna nodding in a small inset image.

“I was going to have to get into the wall to fix the leak anyway, so Antonio and I just took down more wall than would probably have been needed, the entire span running behind this narrow space supposedly overlapping the pantry. And the pantry wasn’t there at all. The entire space I labeled as the pantry on the map I drew is a pipe space between two walls. And on the back side of the door to the pantry, there was an opening to the outside. But it didn’t look like anything outside our building; it goes somewhere else. And we saw one of the worms over there.”

Mama Martina took over at this point. “Anna, I’d like you to come explore whatever this place is. Joanna and Antonio will help haul supplies, defend you from dangers, or whatever is needed. We’ve got no idea, but because it involves the worms which have always been our family secret, we want to keep it within the family.”

“Understood, Mama, and I would love a chance to explore whatever place this is.”

Anna was going to need a week to get free of other commitments and come here, so we let her make those plans. Meanwhile, we got her size and added another suit for her to what we ordered, and waited for all the items to be delivered.