short story with real estate

Question

I'm searching for a short story. It was in one of Ellen Datlow's yearly anthologies of Fantasy and Horror, and is definitely pre-1995. The story is about a man going out to a house he's thinking of buying and he ends up trapped in the room. I want to grab the anthology without having to buy all the ones pre-1995.

Answer 1

If you misremembered the anthology it could Blind Man's Buff by H. Russell Wakefield. This is an old story, written in 1929, but it has been anthologised dozens of times over the years. I read it in 65 Great Spine Chillers from 1982.

Lorn Manor was embedded half-way up a Chiltern spur and, as the agent had observed, ‘commanded extensive vistas’. The place looked its age, Mr Cort decided, or rather ages, for the double Georgian brick chimneys warred with the Queen Anne left front. He could just make out the date, 1703, at the base of the nearest chimney. All that wing must have been added later. ‘Big place, marvellous bargain at seven thousand; can’t understand it. How those windows with their little curved eyebrows seem to frown down on one!’ And then he turned and examined the ‘vistas’. The trees were tinted exquisitely to an uncertain glory as the great red sinking sun flashed its rays on their crystal mantle. The Vale of Aylesbury was drowsing beneath a slowly deepening shroud of mist. Above it the hills, their crests rounded and shaded by silver and rose coppices, seemed to have set in them great smoky eyes of flame where the last rays burned in them.

When Mr. Cort enters the house the door swings shut behind and he is left in total darkness. He tries to feel his way out but gets increasing panicked:

At last he stumbled against something, the chair—and something touched him as it slipped past. And then he ran screaming round the room; and suddenly his screams slashed back at him, for he was in a little narrow passage.

The story ends:

"Now, Mr Runt," said the coroner, "you say you heard screaming coming from the direction of the Manor. Why didn"t you go to find out what was the matter?"

"None of us chaps goes to Manor after sundown," said Mr Runt.

"Oh, I know there"s some absurd superstition about the house; but you haven"t answered the question. There were screams, obviously coming from someone who wanted help. Why didn"t you go to see what was the matter, instead of running away?"

"None of us chaps goes to Manor after sundown," said Mr Runt.

"Don"t fence with the question. Let me remind you that the doctor said Mr Cort must have had a seizure of some kind, but that had help been quickly forthcoming, his life might have been saved. Do you mean to tell me that, even if you had known this, you would still have acted in so cowardly a way?"

Mr Runt fixed his eyes on the ground and fingered his cap.

"None of us chaps goes to Manor after sundown," he repeated.

Answer 2

There's a Heinlein story "—And He Built a Crooked House" that matches, except that I can't find it ever having being collected in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, especially since it was first published in 1941, while that series started in the late '80s.

In the story, an architect has built a house that is a 3D projection of a tesseract (a 4D cube-equivalent). The night before the house is shown to the prospective owner, there's an earthquake, causing the house to collapse into a 4D object, projected in 3D as just a single cube.

Inside the house, they find that the stairway loops back on itself; if you go up far enough, you come back from the basement. While the outside looks like just a single cube, the inside still has different rooms. All windows show different vistas from what would be expected: a desert, an empty void, New York from the top of the Empire State Building.

Once inside, the door outside is missing. I think the door they came in through, just opens into another room.

Another earthquake happens and the party (the architect, and the couple that commissioned the house) jumps out of the window overlooking the desert, only to find themselves in Joshua National Park.

When they return to the house, they find it has collapsed into another dimension, leaving just the foundations.