The rain hadn't stopped for three days. It fell on Los Angeles like a punishment, steady and cold and indifferent. Sam Rourke sat at his desk in his office on Broadway, watching it hit the window, and wondered if he should close the blinds or just accept that the weather had as much right to be there as he did.

The woman came in without knocking. She was dressed in black -- a dress, a coat, gloves, a hat with a veil that hid her face. She didn't sit. She placed a metal box on his desk and a roll of bills on top of it.

"I need you to find what's inside this," she said. Her voice was low, calm, the voice of someone who was used to being obeyed.

Sam unrolled the bills. Five hundred dollars. More than he made in a month.

"What's in the box?"

"That's not your concern. Open it."

Sam opened the box. Inside was a key -- strange, not for any lock he'd ever seen, with teeth cut in patterns that looked almost like words -- and a hand-drawn map of downtown Los Angeles with seven X marks.

"Seven doors," the woman said. "Find them. See what's behind each one. Don't tell anyone. Don't come back until you've seen all seven."

She left. Sam locked the box in his desk drawer. He was supposed to forget about it. He didn't.

He went to the first X mark the next morning. It was a service entrance to a building on Flower Street, the kind of door that exists only to be ignored. The key turned in a lock that shouldn't have fit, and the door opened into a stairwell that went down deeper than the building's foundation should allow.

At the bottom was a room.

It was empty except for a chair and a lamp, and the lamp was on, and the chair was warm, as if someone had just stood up and left. Sam sat in the chair. The lamp flickered. He stood up and left.

The second door was a basement behind a wall that looked solid. He found it by accident -- leaning against the wall to light a cigarette, feeling a draft, pressing harder, and the wall gave way. Behind it: a room that was a speakeasy. Glasses on the table. Cigarettes still burning in the ashtrays. A piano in the corner, its keys yellowed. Dust covered everything like snow. Sam stood in the doorway for a long time, listening to the silence, and then he left.

The third door was in a parking garage, on a floor that shouldn't exist. The garage had three levels. The elevator went to the third and stopped. But when Sam pressed the button for a fourth floor, it went up. The doors opened onto a floor with no parking spaces, no cars, no lights. Just a single door at the far end, and through it, the sound of waves.

Sam walked to the door. He opened it.

Ocean. The Pacific, stretching to the horizon, the waves crashing against rocks that weren't there a moment before. The sky was grey and vast and empty. Sam stood on the edge of a floor that dropped off into sea, and he felt something he hadn't felt in years -- fear, pure and simple, the kind that has nothing to do with danger and everything to do with the realization that the world is not what you thought it was.

He closed the door. The ocean disappeared. The parking garage was just a parking garage again.

The fourth door was a room on the wrong floor of a hotel on Wilshire. The fifth door was a stairwell in a church that had been closed for twenty years. The sixth door was a closet in his own building.

Behind the sixth door was his apartment.

He stood in his apartment, looking at himself sitting at his desk, watching the rain, wondering about the box and the key and the seven doors. He saw himself open the box. He saw himself read the map. He saw himself walk to the first door.

Sam understood.

He had been here before. He was the one who left the box. He was the one who walked the seven doors, forgetting each time, remembering nothing until he reached the seventh, and then forgetting again, and starting over.

The loop was complete.

Sam stood in his apartment for a long time. The other Sam -- the one at the desk -- looked up, as if he felt something, as if he sensed the presence of someone he had been and would be again. Their eyes met. Sam saw his own face, older, tired, cynical, and he felt a sadness so deep it was almost relief.

He closed the door.

The woman in black never came back. The five hundred dollars lasted two months. Sam found another case -- a missing husband, a cheating wife, a insurance investigation that paid well enough. He lived in his office, drank too much coffee, and tried not to think about the seven doors.

But sometimes, late at night, when the rain was falling and the city was quiet and the streetlights cast long shadows through his window, Sam would open his desk drawer and take out the key and look at it, and he would wonder: was the seventh door really his apartment? Or was it something else? Something he hadn't reached yet? Something that was waiting for him, down a stairwell he hadn't found, behind a wall he hadn't pushed through?

He would put the key back in the drawer. He would close the drawer. He would go home and sleep and do it all again.

The city went on. The rain stopped. The sun came out. And Sam Rourke, private detective, walked the streets of Los Angeles, looking for doors that only he could see, in a city that was full of them.