There is a Building in the City that is unlike all others. The Building is a trap.

When Sam, a lonely office clerk, took a lottery ticket from the hands of a wounded mobster, he never imagined that his life was about to change. It did. The ticket won him fifty million dollars. But the money did not end Sam's troubles. The thugs were after him. Sam knew he had to hide, and hide well. That was how the Building came into being.

The Building is a snare: it was designed as a hideout for Sam. On the outside, it looks like a regular sixteen-story building. But on the inside, it is an endless labyrinth of winding corridors, concealed rooms, secret doors, tunnels, and surreal elevators that move sideways. What looks like a deep well turns out to be an optical illusion; the fa?ade of a nearby building is a skillfully crafted piece of scenery. The Building has no real windows: fake ones are illuminated by artificial light, creating the impression of night or day whenever Sam sees fit. There are no clocks in the Building, and there are no calendars. Anyone who dares to go inside looking for Sam will never get out, lost forever in the endless maze. Slowly but surely, the intruder is bound to go insane and stop posing a threat to the elusive owner of the Building.

To help him confuse prospective intruders and to keep him company in his voluntary seclusion, Sam hires professional actors. They аre free to do as they please, provided that in time of turmoil they're ready to play their roles as "gargoyles" that protect their Building.

Time goes by, but the mobsters never appear. Left alone by his pursuers, Sam comes to value the Building for qualities other than the protection it offers. The Building is huge, the characters that inhabit it are many, and Sam begins to lose track of what goes on inside his world. Like a benign deity, Sam takes pleasure in watching the fruit of his labor thrive without his guidance or interference.

The Building lacks in nothing: all utilities are paid years in advance, food deliveries are pre-arranged. Sam's actors get used to the Building and consider it their permanent home. Though their presence is no longer required, the actors choose to stay, developing their respective realities inside the Building-each according to his or her taste. In fact, the actors can hardly be called actors anymore. They become so accustomed to their roles that they grow into the characters they were initially meant to impersonate. The Building turns into a commune of free spirits unaffected by the outside world, a fantastic microcosm. Essentially, Sam's Building is an alternative universe where the notion of time is absent, the concept of space is relative, and there is room enough throughout the sixteen floors to spawn a variety of different realities.

Trouble hits when it is least expected. Sam runs out of money. He is about to lose the Building when he's contacted by a mysterious club of prosperous men and women that have heard rumors about the strange building in the middle of the City. Members of the club locate the Building and offer Sam a solution to his financial troubles once and for all. In exchange, they ask for one thing: to join the community and live alongside its original tenants. Sam has no choice but to let them in.

Like the original dwellers of the Building, the neophytes are allowed to arrange their new lives as they please. But members of the club are drastically different in character from the original inhabitants, and these differences begin to manifest themselves immediately. The first change the club makes is to build a funeral parlor. The locals, frightened by the newcomers' eerie rituals and strange demeanor, retreat to the upper floors, while the new inhabitants claim the lower floors and the basement…

Eventually Sam comes to understand what the club's forming principles are, what its members have in common, and why they were so bent on gaining a foothold in the Building. The main character, Alex, accidentally enters the Building exactly at the time when Sam realizes that he is losing control and that the Building's future is moot.

Alex wanders around the Building, having trouble understanding what is going on. He encounters one strange situation after another. Julia, the woman who finds Alex on the roof, teases him and draws him after her, but never lets him come too close. In the basement, Alex meets Trickster, who initiates him into shadowy and intensely erotic rituals. Thinking that everything in the Building is a trick or a gimmick, Alex dumps a real corpse from the coffin. Finally he comes across Mazel, the head of the strange club that has made the Building its home. It turns out that the members of the Club are hopelessly ill, which is precisely why their "games" are so grave. Mazel invites Alex to take part in one such game: a public execution. No one, not even Mazel himself, knows for certain whether the execution will be make-believe or real. There are too many different realities in the Building to be sure of anything. Having lost himself in the multitude of possibilities, Alex agrees to play the role of the executioner in the horrifying performance.

Another mysterious character that keeps Alex company in the Building is a Jewish rabbi, whose eventual transformation into an Indian chief is both ghastly and comical. Sometimes he helps Alex; at other times, he villainously betrays him. Alex is not sure whether the man is a real rabbi or merely one of the participants in the twisted play that takes place in the Building. By the end of the book, we find out that the rabbi is merely a product of Alex's imagination.

The execution takes place… or it does not; neither Alex nor the reader finds out. Horrified by what has happened (or what hasn't), Alex runs from the execution hall and gets lost in the intertwining corridors. Eventually he runs into Sam and finds out from him that the labyrinth has one more dangerous feature-a briefcase with buttons that can trigger an explosive device that is built into the Building. After the explosion, only the shell of the Building would remain. But neither Alex nor Sam is fully sure whether the explosion would be real or merely an imitation.

Having lost the hope of changing anything about the Building's ways, Sam finally decides to push the buttons, but Alex, deceived by Trickster once more, still does not understand the importance of the moment. Only when the lights come on and illuminate the dark hall where Alex finds himself alongside Sam and Trickster does he see that they are sitting on a narrow concrete strip above a chasm that is several stories deep… and that this is all that is left of the Building.

Alex manages to get out into the street, where he becomes a witness to a seeming fact: before his very eyes, the Building sinks and falls apart. Could it be yet another deception?