Lei opened the door to a strange sight the next morning. As she barreled through the doorway (it had been stuck as usual) she saw Val with his head into the side room whispering something. He was fully dressed and looked ready to go out, if not for whatever was holding his attention to the room. He did not seem to notice that Lei had just busted down his door and was checking in to work for the day. He was wholly occupied with whispering into the unlit side room. Lei couldn’t see what was in there, but she heard the last few words Val whispered.

‘Patches… are you up yet? Are you coming?’

‘Is that her name?’ Lei said.

Val turned around, bug eyed. He saw Lei standing in his living room with a judgmental stare on her face and shut the side room door quickly. He looked around in a daze, and then looked back at Lei in utter confusion. ‘Her? Who are you talking about?’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard you call your cat by her name before,’ Lei chuckled.

‘What are you talking about? That’s not her name,’ Val said.

‘Really? Then who–’ Lei stared him down thoroughly, but Val did not look any less baffled, nor did he move to explain who he had been calling.

Who could he have been calling? The special guest Val had talked about? A special guest who was currently sleeping in his bedroom? There was a bottle of wine on the kitchen counter with two glasses… Lei suppressed a smirk. Stranger things had happened. But there would be time to prod Val about his personal life later – preferably when this guest had woken up.

‘Just you today? Where’s assistant number 2 – I mean, Ravel?’ Val asked blankly.

‘I’m right here,’ Ravel said, coming through the doorway just in time to see Val move to the kitchen and hastily clear up the glasses and wine bottle-  as though he just remembered they were there. Ravel frowned and looked between Val and Lei. ‘Were you just… drinking?’

‘No,’ Lei said.

‘Yes,’ Val said.

‘He was,’ Lei corrected him. ‘I just got here, Ravel. I didn’t have time to, even if I wanted to.’

Ravel gave her a perplexed look. ‘Okay…  You know we could get arrested for that, right? I mean, I think so. I thought you said you were as old as me.’

‘I am. But with all the murderers about I don’t think that’s the law’s first priority.’

‘I don’t think the police here really have their priorities in order… So wait, were you drinking?’

‘Is drinking and law-breaking that all you kids think about? We can all have a beer later, whatever you want,’ Val said, plowing a few cereal bowls into the dishwasher, along with the wine glasses. ‘Today’s going to be a busy day. We’ve got a friend to check on. I hope you brought your best shoes, you’re going to need them.’

‘Are we doing a lot of walking?’ Lei asked.

‘Or are we going somewhere excusive?’ Ravel put in, looking at his rather poorly maintained threadbare sports sneakers.

‘Both,’ Val said. He whipped his own green coat off the couch and pulled it on. As he searched the house for a pair of shoes that were not completely caked with dirt, Lei saw his small orange cat come down the black spiral staircase, down from the small library under the skylight. The cat stretched, and then rubbed itself all over the chairs on its way towards its owner. Val was pulling an ancient black lace-up boot out from under his desk when the cat brushed against his leg hard and almost knocked him over.

‘Oh, there you are!’ he said. He sat down on the desk, papers and all, to pull his shoe on quickly, so it would be a place he wouldn’t forget. He didn’t lace it up yet. ‘Where were you last night? Upstairs? You didn’t even think of coming down to say hi? You could have had a glass of wine too.’

The cat meowed shrilly. Val looked at her sympathetically. ‘I can’t keep my assistants waiting. You’ll have to wait until later if you want something to eat. Or you can go wake Patches up.’ He scratched the cat under her chin. ‘Remember to say “good morning” if you do, okay? It’s not polite to just claw up people’s shirts first thing in the morning.’

Val stood up and dismissed the cat. She dashed right for the side door. Val plodded up behind her, opened the door, and then turned to his visitors once the cat had disappeared into the deep. Lei and Ravel watched in total silence the whole time.

‘Time to go,’ Val said. He closed the side door and immediately tripped over his untied shoelace.

Ravel looked at his shoes again. Lei sighed. She got off the lounger and braced herself for the uphill battle to come.

—

The first of winter’s chills were driving in, but if you lived downtown, it was hard to tell. The buildings blocked the soft winds. Heated rooms and steaming sewers and the breath of many citizens and suspects rushing towards their next destination warmed the air and ground. Fiery leaves still littered the streets. The colors of fall were still in season. Unless you were out in the hillside, you weren’t going to notice just how close winter was.

As luck would have it, Lei and Ravel were led right into the furthest hillside outskirts of town.

‘It’s freezing out here,’ Ravel mumbled, pulling his scarf up over his mouth in a futile attempt to keep warm. He looked nervously left and right, but all there was to see was a forest of dead trees.

This wasn’t a mildly well-kept forest like the park, either, this was outright wilderness. There was something of a path, indicated by faded signs, but nobody had cleared the leaves up here before or after the heavy rain. This left the ground covered in the mulch of dead wet leaves. Every footstep into the dark brown ooze made a distinct squelch and crunch at the same time.

Lei’s eyes stung with the wind. It wasn’t strong by any means, but somehow felt incredibly sharp and painful. She was really not dressed for a winter hiking expedition. None of them were. But it was too late to object to any effect. ‘Are we getting any closer to your friend’s place?’ she called over to Val.

‘I’m trying to figure out where we are right now,’ Val said, looking around at their entirely unhelpful and unremarkable surroundings.

Lei wanted to scream but her mouth felt dried out by the wind. She pulled her jacket tighter around her and stomped after Val as he decided to head off in a completely random direction. They seemed to be heading uphill. Val strode ahead with faster and faster squelches and crunches. He did not even look cold in the face of the icy wind. He was wearing no more than normal. Perhaps after years and layers of grime and abuse, his clothing provided extra insulation.

As the two assistants trudged on behind, Val reached the top of a hill and stopped short. Suspicious, Lei jogged up behind him, and she stopped too. Bringing up the rear, Ravel dragged himself up the remaining feet of hill and sneezed violently. Then he stopped and stared as well.

They were standing on a barren hilltop that had a good view of a number of other barren hills, and the mountains in the distance, where the air was no doubt colder. But between their hill and the one nearest to it, there was a shallow valley, and that was where things got strange. Covering the base of the shallow valley there appeared to be a large, round basin cut straight into the earth. It was white like a concrete swimming pool, or more accurately, off-white, since it was blotchy with pools and streams of dirty, leaf-laden water running through it, runoff from the rain running off the hills surrounding it.

It was hardly a magical sight at the moment, but if dammed off correctly, it would have gathered water for a nice circular moat.

What the potential moat would be protecting was the house situated right in the center of it. It was impressive, but not normal impressive house like in the uptown neighborhoods. It was nothing quite so new. It looked more like an old gothic church, with layers of spiked roofs and a dark, shining spires rising from the back wall. The stone walls were as grey as the hills surrounding it, their texture just as rough. The only flashes of color came from the light reflecting from the tall, pointed windows, a shine of pink or yellow as the sun peeked by. The windows were stained with a multitude of colors, like the windows of a church, but the sky was so overcast any Virgin Maries or wise kings they could have formed were hidden by shadows. This valley really did not get the best light. And there was no light coming from inside.

‘There it is,’ Val said breathlessly. He started down the hill, stumbling over branches, vines, and his own feet.

Lei noticed a number of particular things as they grew closer. The first thing to jump out was the demons. Looping around themselves under the roofs and in the corners were twisted black-painted metal ornaments. They only shifted and smiled when nobody was looking, like the demons under the rails of Val’s spiral staircase, except these demons were huge, the size of an adult human, and clinging to the wall with huge claws – nowhere near as tame as the ones hiding on the staircase.

Ravel had never had time alone to get acquainted with the demons in Val’s house, and did not pick them out so easily, but even he noticed the familiar gloss and frame of the spire. It wasn’t apparent until they got quite close and the sun managed to free even an inch from the clouds, but the spire was made of glass panels. In sunlight the panes lit their insides with the same white-hot shade as the glass of the greenhouse. The wire frame curled as it rose upward, ending in a sharp point that towered at least six storeys over their heads.

The two of them were still staring up at that gleaming beacon until as they approached the thin bridge over the empty moat, leading up to the mansion doors. Only when the sun fell back into hiding did they move their eyes back down to earth. Lei quickly blinked the stinging sun from her eyes in a vain attempt not to fall off the bridge. With her eyes cast upward she didn’t realize just how thin and precarious it was. She also had not realized how deep the moat was. It was a long fall to the dirty concrete floor on either side.

Ravel let out a horrified gasp behind her as his vision returned too.

‘It burns when it’s shining so bright,’ Val mused. He was still staring at the spire and shuffling forward carelessly. ‘But you just can’t stop looking. It’s like the sun. But sometimes it’s the best thing to be looking at.’

‘I see,’ Lei said. She didn’t want to say any more, she just wanted to watch where she was going. Although, as Val said, there were better things to be looking at.

Val reached the end of the bridge with a substantial lead. He hopped onto the nice wide circular platform that stretched out and under and around the house itself. Lei took the last few steps she had too, and then jumped onto it too.

The ground around them was the same as the pool, white concrete, but with sections cut out for grass to grow in uniformly spaced garden areas that roughly circled the building. Some of these patches also had trees growing on them. Lei hadn’t seen these earlier. That was because, like most of the plant life around them, everything was dried up to the same color as the walls of the mansion. The trees had lost their leaves, and those leaves had long blown down into the moat.

But like the moat, they had the potential to be maintained, if the water around it had been dammed off, and irrigated correctly. It actually looked like that may have been the objective, but something had gone wrong, as something had gone wrong with the moat.

Val stepped up the three front steps, crunching on the small leaf fragments left on them, and approached the door.

Lei looked up at the looming front of the building. There was a giant circular window that was a mess of colors, right over a giant set of wooden doors. Around the doors, there were raised concrete swirls, like buttons, or in some places, snails. There were slender black vines snaking up from the ground all over the building in addition to the slender black demons. The demons weren’t moving.

Val knocked on the door, eliciting a strangely hollow sound.

‘There’s something familiar about this place,’ Lei said, trying to work out if the circular window had a picture in it or was just an elaborate mess.

Val was uncomfortably quiet in response. Ravel also didn’t say anything. Lei wondered if they just hadn’t noticed. ‘The glass on the tower, the metal decorations… I’d guess this guy has the same architect as you and your limb-collecting friend?’

‘Oh, of course, that makes sense,’ Val said quickly. ‘And you’re really on top of things now. We do indeed have the same architect.’ He knocked on the door again, harder this time. The knock echoed throughout the rooms of the house, a rumble like thunder. Some birds resting on the rooftop flew off, complaining faintly. Val stared at them as if they were trying to tell him something.

‘I thought the greenhouse was crazy, but this place is… especially impressive. I mean, it must be awesome when it’s all taken care of.’

‘It does usually look better than this. I wonder what he’s up to…’ Val said, looking somewhat confused. It didn’t seem like anybody was in. He gave the doors an experimental push.

‘And it’s all the way out here, covering a whole valley… This guy must be loaded with cash, whatever he does.’

‘I would hope so; I don’t want to think I’m paying the man poorly.’

Lei frowned. ‘You pay him…?’

Val wasn’t listening, so she held that thought. He was too busy pressing his ear against the door. He stood still as a stone for a while, something creaked. And slowly, heavily, the door collapsed in with the weight. He leapt back quickly. ‘Would you look at that? It’s unlocked. ’

Ravel began to panic as he doors swung open. ‘Wait, if he isn’t answering maybe we should-‘

But Val had already knocked the doors wide and made his way into the foyer. Standing under the massive stone archway, in the middle of the violet and yellow beams coming through the giant circular window, Val spread his arms wide to beckon them in. ‘And here we are! Is anybody home?’ His voice rattled throughout the structure, reaching every corner.

Lei and Ravel stuck their heads in tentatively.

‘I don’t think anybody is home,’ Ravel said weakly.

‘Maybe he’s out to work,’ Lei said.

‘No way,’ Val retorted, ‘If he was, I’d know. He tells me these things.’

‘Huh. So he’s a friend who works for you?’

Val looked around himself smiling in total wonder, like a kid in a candy store, or an extremely enthusiastic client looking at a particularly good sales pitch. The latter of which, of course he was.

‘Yep. Maybe you’ve guessed it already. Welcome to the home of the architect himself.’

—

Perhaps it was the church-like structure of the vast amount of empty space surrounding it, but the interior of the stone mansion seemed rather clogged. Behind the arch Val was standing under, past the foyer, there appeared to be a staircase contained in a narrow hallway with no windows. Whatever was in the rest of this building, beyond the foyer or the staircase, was not visible at this point.

In spite of its historically stylized exterior, the inside was little more than a cluttered modern home with some very nice windows. Although, most of the windows were out of sight other than the large circle overhead. Lei stepped through the door and took a look around. Her feet scraped the bare floor. She frowned.

The problem was well disguised by the yellow and purple dots of light, but the floor was rough and raw, the floorboards splintering. It was like somebody had ripped the carpet off the flooring here, or something heavy had been dragged across it.

Lei was still kicking at the floor as Val made his way towards the staircase.

Not eager to be left behind in this alien dump, Ravel moved along quickly, too. ‘This place looks a lot bigger from the outside,’ he said, as means of conversation. The way his voice echoed frightened him, however, and he barely breathed as his voice faded away.

‘Don’t say that before you see the whole place,’ Val said.

Lei looked forward. They were headed for the staircase. The stairs also looked roughed up, with its stripped wooden boards. As the light shifted, so did the yellow and purple rash of lights. They flew briefly over the staircase. A carpet had definitely been ripped from there recently.

‘Where is your friend?’ Lei asked.

‘I don’t know. That’s what we’re here to find out.’

Lei frowned as Val started ascending the wooden staircase to the darker upper floors. They did not creak at all. There were only the hollow thumps of footsteps. It was very well maintained, stripped surface aside. Ravel continued right on Val’s tail. Lei was about to start up too, when she noticed something.

There was an enormous pillar of a nail sticking out of a step near the middle of the staircase. The light from the window gleaned over it for just a second, but Lei saw it. It was oddly out of place, and in an oddly convenient place for unwary climbers to impale their feet on it. In fact, the way it was sticking was downright unnatural- it had been hammered through the stair plank from the bottom, with its sharp end pointing up. Lei wanted to cry out, but it was too late, Val was already onto that step, and any second now she could expect a yelp of pain-

With a tap, Val’s foot landed slightly to the left of the nail. He continued up the stairs without problem. As he reached the top he called loudly, ‘Anybody home?’

Ravel was walking up quickly. The echoing made him nervous. Lei was so stunned that Val had managed not to hurt himself in such an obvious way that she did not prepare herself warn Ravel. His crusty sneakers thumped closer and closer to the nail without any caution-

But they too, missed. He reached the top of the staircase and looked around. ‘Val… boss… wait up. We can’t get lost here.’

‘I thought you said it looked small!’ Val’s voice jeered from up above.

As the red tip of Ravel’s scarf drifted out of sight Lei took a deep breath and continued up the stairs herself. She stopped on the step with the nail. It was right there, faintly shining, clean and silver, just waiting… Lei smiled to herself somewhat wistfully and tapped it with her boot. ‘There was a nail right here and neither of you saw it. I was going to say something but by some miracle-‘

There was a wooden shift and click and Lei’s voice fell away abruptly. At this, Ravel’s head nearly burst, he swung back around and gazed down the stairway, afraid of what he might find. What he found was exactly what he had feared most. Lei was no longer standing there. She was gone. There was no nail on the stairs either. He wondered what she had been walking about. But he did more than just wonder.

‘Val! Where did Lei go?’

‘Why would I know that?’

Ravel rubbed his head all over in panic. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Exactly what it sounds like.’

Giving up on eliciting any form of help from Val, Ravel dashed over to the stairs. ‘Lei? Are you okay? Can you hear me?’ He tapped his feet on the stairs loudly as he went. He had shuffled halfway down the entire flight when he froze. The thought of whatever had gotten Lei getting him stopped him from going any further. He looked up. Val was looking down at him, nonplussed.

‘What do we do?’ Ravel moaned.

‘I don’t see how this makes the job any different. We’re still looking for the owner of the house.’

‘What if he’s not here? What if whatever got him got to Lei?’

‘Then you should be grateful it was them and not you.’

Ravel couldn’t tell if Val was joking. Thankfully, he looked so horrified at the thought that Val decided to show some mercy.

‘I’m sure Lei is fine. She isn’t afraid of killers. So better her than, us, right? In fact, I’m more worried for my friend than I am for her, in the case that a killer nabbed them both. My friend, you see, isn’t quite so good at taking care of himself.’ Val gave Ravel a sad look. ‘Some people just aren’t.’

Ravel cautiously inched back up the stairs, backing away from the spot where Lei had disappeared. He ran his hand through his hair nervously, again.

‘If we’re lucky, maybe they were taken to the same place and we’ll find them both. That’s assuming somebody did take them, and they didn’t just go wandering off. This house has a habit of… eating up its visitors, if you know what I mean.’

Ravel did not know what Val meant, he just knew that this all was not very comforting. But Val’s purposeful stride down the tall second-floor corridor gave him some hope his boss knew what he was talking about. Ravel took a look around them. The floor and rooms were all paneled with dark wood, with walls in most papered white. The paper was peeling, but not dirty. The lacy embossed patterns were intact and visible even from out in the hall, in the dim light. These rooms had been cared for, until recently anyhow.

That was another thing. The light was dimmed not just by the clouds outside by the colored windows. Each room was cast in an array of different hues from stained glass windows that stretched from a few feet above the floor to the ceiling. The colors did not seem to have any particular pattern, no familiar and comforting scenes of a blue Virgin Mary or a red Christ but were simply slapped together, greens with blues or reds with violets, the like.

The rooms themselves were very tall and wide, with floral-themed wood carvings and stone arches crossing the top of each. They were all like their own private, individual cathedrals all lined up, running down a hallway. All that was missing was the candles, the benches, anything but the shredded wooden flooring. Anything would have helped make it look homier, since furniture was missing entirely.

Every room was completely empty. Some had a few wood chips or planks lying on the floor, but Ravel couldn’t tell if they were from the broken floorboards, or pieces of something that was removed. And things certainly had been removed; there were drag marks ground out all over the floor.

They passed maybe five rooms of a similar nature both on the left and right, and then Ravel lay his eyes on a painful anomaly.

One room was like any of the others, but in it there was far more wood. This wood had not all come from the floor, although no doubt some of it did. Something, some things had been smashed and left there. There were the mangled remains of a wooden table leg, and maybe the seat of a chair, a set of dark mahogany furniture taken completely to pieces. Whatever had been used to hack these things apart had taken out some of the floor too; the job had been done in a hurry. But it had been thorough – all that was left was a pile of wood chippings.

‘The work of teeth of the mansion,’ Val said solemnly.

Ravel shuddered. ‘I didn’t think you were being so literal about the house eating its visitors.’

‘Cheer up,’ Val said, ‘The owner controls the teeth.’

‘You mean he did this? In his own house?’

‘I’m hoping it was. Come on, maybe he’s still around.’

Val powered on ahead. Ravel jogged to catch up. ‘Hey, you know this house pretty well, right? Where should we be looking?’

Val shrugged and smiled, not entirely apologetically. ‘You’re kidding. I have no idea where I’m going. I just want to get this over with as much as any of us.’

—

The stairs pulled out from under Lei and she was sucked down into a pit right below them. Footsteps on them sounded hollow, but she would never have guessed there was such a huge void underneath. She saw what little light was visible slip away as the panels flipped back into place, covering the hole before Ravel noticed anything was amiss.

The wind whistled past her ears as she fell, until they were blocked out with a splash. She had been dumped right into a vast expanse of flooded catacombs right underneath the house.

Val was somewhat correct when he said he and Ravel were lucky it was Lei who was consumed by the house. Lei could swim a lot better than most, having come from out of town where the cosmopolitan skill of swimming was actually taught. She paddled to the surface and immediately began clawing about for a way to shore. She found a foothold, but was still shoulder-deep in water. The water was clean, at least, and almost warm. That was a relief. The cold outside was not something she was looking forward to after this.

The place was dark, but there were electric torches handing from the mildew-laden columns that lit the way just enough to see that there wasn’t a shore, and that a visitor wasn’t supposed to land in the water in the first place. Lei saw to her side, just a few inches from where she had landed, an huge, jagged slab of glass or clear plastic. She was also standing on something hard but flat. Floating on the surface of the water, beating against the columns with the small waves nudging them, were some thick ropes, and what looked like metal cable. There had been an elevator here.

The thing was demolished now. Lei swam away from it slowly, hoping to avoid getting caught on any sharp bits that might be left lying around. She was lucky. The only bit she ran into was a chipped wooden stick near the edge of the tunnel. This was puzzling. The elevator didn’t have any wooden components she could think of. Maybe it was loaded with wood and fell with the weight? But why would anybody be transporting so much wood under their house?

And who was the elevator meant to be carrying? The torches lit every last corner of the catacombs, but Lei did not see and signs of a body having fallen, which was either a very good or very bad sign.

Shivering in spite of the lukewarm water, Lei steadily pulled forward until her feet touched something solid. Not a slab of glass. She walked ashore.

Up ahead, there was a stone staircase leading up what looked like a stone tower. The way was also lit with torches that were electric. At the bottom of the staircase, there was even an electrical outlet to power the first few.

Lei was really not in the mood for another staircase yet, so she took this time to try to wring out her clothes and curse a little. She was just about to direct that rage into a roar up the tunnel to let Val and Ravel know she wasn’t dead, but something beat her to it.

It wasn’t really a rage filled roar so much as a shrill wail, but it rang down passageway and silenced Lei abruptly. She glanced at the stairway.

‘Hey,’ she said. She voice was carried up the stairs and bounced into a rattling distortion.

When that faded, she thought she heard a faint thud from somewhere up the stairway. Something very light falling. Then not another noise. No movement but the torches flickering slightly in their attempt to mimic realistic fire.

Lei sighed, which echoed uncomfortably well around the tunnel. She picked up the wooden stick floating near the edge of the water. It was quite a substantial stick, curved for grip and painted with glaze. It was almost made for hitting. It would serve well enough against anyone with a head to beat in. Its sharp, chipped end would also make quite the weapon, although Lei was not sure if that was the kind of damage she’d want to inflict.

But it was always good to have a backup plan. She and braced herself for the journey up the stone stairway and whatever was to come.

—

Up the less stony stairway, in the corridor of cathedrals, Ravel and Val were doing some bonding.

‘So what exactly are the teeth of the mansion?’ Ravel asked.

‘They will explain themselves better than I can, if we find them,’ Val said.

‘Can you at least let me know what we should be looking for?’

‘The man or the teeth?’

‘Both? Whichever we are looking for.’

‘Well, for starters I think you need to get your thoughts in order because we’ve already me- oh, look at that!’

Val stepped from the hallway through a pair of open doors into a room larger – and better lit – than any of the others they had seen so far. The windows were paned with normal, clear glass, letting in fresh, white sunlight as opposed to the colored madness in the other rooms. There were five very tall, grand windows and in these windows Ravel saw the demons for the first time, the twisting frames of metal snaking their thin bodies all across the light, their shadows all over the room. But they didn’t hold his attention long.

The room contained some curious contents. They were neither man nor teeth-like, but somewhat menacing in their own way.

‘Something else got eaten by the house,’ Ravel said, and it wasn’t really a joke.

There were several piles of wreckage lying on the floor, evenly spread out. These weren’t just remains of wooden furniture though; it had been something more delicate and complicated and has thus left an even more tragic mess. There was some wood, some bolts indicating a table, but also colored bits of glass, thin nets of wire, string, mashed cardboard, paper, clear plastic, paint chips, pipe cleaner, wax, cork, cotton wool and tape and whole host of other materials all smashed to tiny pieces. There was so much of it the pile went up to Val’s waist.

Val walked around until he found a heap he liked, then plunged his hands right into it. Ravel was scared he’d cut himself, but knew any protests were going to be heartily ignored, and he had a suspicion if he protested Val would ask him to do it. He turned his attention to some other pile.

While Val’s diving pool had been about half glass and half cardboard, the one Ravel was looking at appeared to be mostly cardboard painted warm hues, with a central patch of shattered glass and a wire frame. Ravel very carefully drew the wires from the pile. They formed a sort of mangled grid. With his other hand he picked out a small, strange box from the pile. It was maybe four inches long and an inch high, and wrapped in foil that was now ripped. He squinted and saw it was actually made up of four smaller rectangles. On the bottom (he assumed it was, it was caked with glue) ‘fridge2’ was written.

‘Good eye. I found my fridge too.’

Ravel jumped at Val’s voice and banged his boss’s nose that had been unwisely placed just above his elbow, right behind him. Val croaked and brought his hands up. Then he sputtered as the bits of plastic and glass on his sleeves dug into his face.

‘Sorry! Sorry.’ Ravel saw that in one of his hands, Val was gripping a similar foil-covered rectangle made of only three smaller rectangles. Balanced on his arm was a familiar looking model staircase made of black wire.

‘It’s cool, happens all the time,’ Val laughed, his chin now bleeding a beard of blood. ‘Now that you’ve seen it, I guess you realize what we’re looking at now.’

Feeling vaguely ill at the sight of Val, Ravel averted his eyes. He thought things over. ‘He’s your architect. These were his models, he worked here.’ Ravel looked at ‘fridge2’ in his hand, and the pile it came from. ‘That must have been the greenhouse on the roof in the abandoned district. The one you were digging in was your house. I guess the one we’re in now… is one of those gray piles.’

‘Very nice. I don’t expect you to know more than that, so good job, good memory. If only you remembered the man himself… but then…’ Val’s eyes dropped to the pile and he shrugged.

Ravel looked at the seven other piles in the room and tried to imagine what they must have looked like set up, which they would never be again. ‘It’s almost sad. All that work gone to waste.’

‘It is sad. But not just for him – this was a message. It means wejust wasted our time. What an asshole.’

Ravel turned in confusion as Val threw his pieces back into the ruins of his house. They fell with a clink, a splash of glass. Ravel never thought there was so much glass involved in the construction of Val’s house, but then he’d never had the chance to look around closely.

Val dusted the remaining shards from his jacket. He answered Ravel’s unsaid question. ‘If his models are destroyed, then that means he’s probably not here. He might even be gone for good. He left a mess, but at least he took his work with him. And there’s nothing left for the house to eat once it eats itself.’

‘I still wish you would explain how the house eats things. It’s making me nervous.’ Ravel went over to inspect the grayish glass/plastic/cardboard mess that used to be the house they were standing in right now. The sun on it threw up a whole array of colors from the stained glass used to model the windows. He noticed there were also an inordinate number of strange shapes, made from grey stones all glued together in clumps.

He knelt down to get a better look at these stones. But stood up quickly when he realized he was standing in a puddle. A puddle of water was leaking down from the remains of the model, out from the bottom of the clutter. He stepped back. Was this water from the model moat?

‘What do we do now?’ Ravel asked, wiping his feet on the bare floorboards.

‘There’s still somebody we need to look for.’

‘That’s right,’ Ravel beat himself up mentally for forgetting so quickly. ‘How could I… We have to find Lei! She’s still somewhere in the house. I hope she’s alright. I hope she doesn’t get angry.’

Val looked worryingly clueless for a moment. Then it came to him, he laughed. ‘Oh, right. Yes, we can’t leave without Lei. But I was talking about somebody else, but I’m sure he’s just as much of a survivor as Lei is! We can look for them both at the same time, how about that?’

Ravel felt at a loss. All he could do was follow Val out the door, leaving behind a trail of wet footprints. Val closed the door behind them.

‘So, are you going to tell me what kind of thing we should be looking for now?’ Ravel asked.

‘Keep your eyes and ears peeled,’ Val said.

—

Lei felt like she had been walking up the winding stairs forever. It always feels like that when everything around you looks the same, all grey stone and flickering electric torches. She felt drowsy. She could barely keep grip of the wooden stick.

To pass the time, she counted the number of electrical sockets she passed and wondered why this tower needed so many. They were so frequent that not all of them even had a torch plugged in. And there were so many torches that the hallway looked as well lit as any household or hospital. Lei counted seventy five sockets before the number of torches petered out and the passage was filled with real sunlight, then there was thankfully something else to look at.

It wasn’t just a simple window up top, either; it was sudden and streaming full force through the entire face of the left hand wall. Lei held a hand over here eyes and peered around.

The stairway continued winding upward, but it changed at this point from old stone steps to a light metal frame, coiling up and off into the distance. Lei couldn’t see the top of the tower; it was a long way up. Her vision was partially obscured by the shadows imprinted by the frame of the tower itself, the round metal frame in which glass panes were inlaid.

Outside the glass though, the view was wide open and admittedly quite impressive and downright flattering for a sub-par day. There was a clear look at the panoramic cloud-filled sky hanging over hills and valleys surrounding the mansion, the rivers that drained into its white concrete moat, the very tips the edges of its roof. Somehow, the dull, cold, dead hilltops looked so perfect and fragile when you were looking at them from afar. Framing the scene from the bottom was the roof of the cathedral-shaped rooms below, dark steeples raised and twisting with the tips of their points spearing through the landscape.

She realized she must be in the glass spire. But she was only seeing half of it. There was a wall between the side with the staircase, and whatever was on the other side of the spire. She thought to herself, if the other half is an elevator, I’m going to be pretty mad that I had to walk all this way, but at least it will be an easy way down. Considering the shape of what she had seen so far, she amended that with, If that elevator is broken too, I’m going to blow up.

As the sun came back out once again, something incredibly bright sparkled from the black rooftop. Lei frowned and stepped closer to the glass, peering down. Something very shiny and smooth was lodged into the dip between the furthest steeples. It shone like a star against the black shingles. She moved as close as she could to the window to get a better look. There was another, further left, and another made itself seen as the sun moved over it to get behind another clump of clouds.

Her thoughts were interrupted by another high pitched wailing that fell from the upper levels and bounced its way down, echoing lengthily.

Lei gripped the stick the way a lumberjack would before taking down a tree. She called upward as loudly as she could, ‘Hello? Who’s there? I’m coming up!’

This time, she actually got a reply. Another whine dropped down from above. It sounded almost sad, mournful, and not quite human.

‘Stay right there! I’m not here to hurt you!’ Lei said, and quickly jumped to the metal staircase and began the ascent.

—

Ravel’s hair stood on end and he looked around frantically, although there was nothing to see but empty oak hallways with dark walls and shredded floors. ‘Did you hear that? It sounded like someone saying, “Stay right there or I’ll have to hurt you!”’

‘Hey, keep it down,’ Val said, smacking the nearest wall as hard and as loudly as he could. He winced and moved on.

‘You told me to keep my eyes and ears peeled, and I heard something!’

Val beat on the next wall panel with his fist and sent a huge bang down the hallway, making is absolutely clear that he was not keeping his eyes and ears peeled.

‘What if someone was threatening us, Val?’

‘Then they should speak up so we know we are being threatened!’ Blood flew from the cuts under his mouth as he shouted.

Val moved to the next panel. They were nearly at the end of the hallway now. All there was at the end of the hall was a rectangular enclosure with a very large stone fireplace flanked by two grand windows. No furniture or carpeting, although there was no reason to expect any at this point.

Ravel decided to keep his ears peeled without Val’s encouragement; however it was quite a task considering Val was smacking his hand on every wood panel in the hallway. Ravel chose not to say anything, until Val found a particularly loud, hollow sounding panel and insisted on whacking it several times as loudly as possible.

The hallway reverberated with the noise. The glass panes shivered. Val gave it a few more slaps. Ravel’s heart skipped a few beats. ‘Please stop,’ he cried.

‘It’s locked,’ Val muttered, ignoring complaints as usual. ‘Of course he’d lock it. But we need to get in! Is there anything around to knock this thing down? Any hammers? Any crowbars? Any logs in the fireplace?’

‘Why would there be wood in the fireplace at a time like this…?’ Ravel asked, shortly before turning to the fireplace and seeing a strange stick of wood lying behind the grate. ‘Oh. Would you look at that.’

‘Oh, excellent. You are a good assistant for finding things,’ Val said. He sprinted over to the fireplace and gleefully pulled the stick up. It was a stick practically made for holding, curved for ergonomic grip, sanded down and glazed. At the upper end there was a rather menacing sharpened metal block. An axe, simple but quite robust and quite expensive looking. ‘This is perfect for unlocking a door!’

Ravel’s hairs were thrown even further on end. ‘That axe looks familiar…’

As expected, though, Val wasn’t listening. He was too busy taking out the wall with an axe. Apparently he had forgotten which panel was the hollow one, because he gave at least two incorrect panels a hack before landing the blade on the right one. Laughing to himself, he proceeded to destroy that length of wall.

Ravel proceeded to put his head in his hands.

‘Now’s not the time for a nap, Ravel!’ Val cheered over the sound of cracking wood. He exhaled loudly and then let the axe hang by his side while he admired his handiwork. There was now a chipped hole in the wall about the size of a man. Ravel saw Val leap right into that hole.

‘Where does this go?’ Ravel asked, hesitant to follow.

Val looked upward. A light was shining at the top of the tunnel. ‘The right way,’ Val said.

—

Near the top of the staircase, Lei became aware of some heavy thumping coming from somewhere in the house. It was coming from below. But since she was already so far up, she didn’t feel like going back down to see what it was.

As she stepped higher and higher, the air grew warm, the view grew more impressive, the sun seemed to come out for good and she saw that the roof was actually littered with a lot of shiny chunks. Bright lights on black tiles. Looking down on a virtual night sky of… what were they?

Now that she was close to the top of the house, she also heard the noises above more clearly than ever. A whine that shook the tower, a thud that echoed all the way down. She walked with determination, holding the stick in her hand tightly. There were no demons here, and only the stars below. Of all the places for get into a fight, this one didn’t warrant complaint. It wouldn’t be hard anyway, after all that had happened that week, beating a banshee in the face wasn’t going to be anything to worry about.

She reached the top of the metal stairway at last and hit a flat wooden panel. Taking one hand off the stick, she felt around it and found a strange groove cut into the wood, a handle, or an indicator of some kind. Taking a deep breath, she pushed it up. When nothing retaliated, she flung it wide open.

Lei pulled herself up through the square opening to the top level of the tower. The smell of fresh air was the first thing she noticed. There was a window open. The next was the light.

There were no more stone walls, just open glass for the sun to lay in from all sides. There was a full 360 degree view of the surroundings. Every valley, every dirt path, every hilltop and river was in sight. The fringes of the city were even visible, the countryside houses, and a few of the tallest buildings in the foggy distance. It all looked amazingly open, amazingly airy and bright. Especially considering it was fall, and most of what there was to see was dead.

By now, Lei was also keeping an eye out for the shining sparks in roof, but she saw now under the exposed sun, that those little sparks were everywhere. There were a good few in the roof, but also a few in the garden behind the house, under the open window. There were several lying on the basin of the concrete moat. And it may have been a trick of the light, but some were even lodged in trees around the complex.

It was windy, so high up. Lei moved across the room to close the open window. It was mostly empty except for the stripped bed frame and a single wooden chair in the middle of the room. The bed was sitting on top of the bed creating a weird tower, like what an unsupervised child would make.

An unfamiliar, twisting shadow danced around the room, but gradually calmed as Lei pulled the window shut. She looked around for it, side to side, and around the tower, and finally saw it, hanging from the top, looped around a piece of the metal frame of the house.

It was a noose made of traditional brown rope, like the kind in movies but that nobody knew where to buy in reality anymore. It loomed silently in the center of the room, roughly a man’s height above the chair.

Lei froze at the sight of it. But like with most cases, it was a relief not to see a body hanging from the noose. But at the same time, if nobody was here at the moment, did it mean somebody was coming back for it? It was quite a complex setup. It would almost be a shame for it to go to waste.

A light wail sounded from the middle of the room, roughly from the tower of furniture.

Clasping the wooden stick once again, Lei circled the tower and looked all around it, from all angles. She gave the bed frame an experimental tap with the stick. And took a stumbled backward as a shadow, so fast it was nothing more than a blur, darted out from under the bed. It sped around the room, behind her, then to the other side, then it jumped on the bed, and after scrambling about on the wooden plat where the mattress would go, leapt to the top of the chair and stared down at her, eyes bulging.

It took a moment for Lei’s heartbeat to settle. She faced the monster from under the bed that was now looking down at her from the chair under the noose. But naturally, it was not a monster at all. It was too small, and too fuzzy for that. She lowered the stick. A faint smile came into place.

It was a small, sleek black cat, gaping at its intruder with wide yellow eyes. Lei held a hand out to it, and every hair on its body stood on end. It didn’t hiss or run, though, just stared.

‘Hey, where’s your owner?’ Lei crooned.

The cat didn’t answer, because cats don’t usually do things like that. Lei drew a little closer. ‘How long have you been here?’ She jumped up onto the bed. Her boots dusted the frame with outside dirt. The cat remained still, a good sign. She held a hand out (the one without the stick, of course.) ‘I’m not going to hurt you…’

The cat stared.

‘Lei! Don’t do it!’

Lei almost fell over at the sound of the voice. The voice didn’t come from the cat, of course. But the cat did dart of in shock. She turned around angrily. ‘I almost had it!’

Ravel and Val were standing halfway out of a trapdoor. Theirs was on the opposite side from the one she had emerged from, so they had come up from the other side of the tower. They both looked rather sheepish.

‘What do you have against a cat?’

‘A cat?’ Ravel looked baffled. ‘That noose… I thought you were going to hang yourself…’

‘Why would I hang myself?’ Lei asked. ‘This was here when I got here.’ At this reprimand, Ravel looked ready to hang himself so she let the matter drop. ‘Wow, Val, what happened to you? You grew some stubble in what, half an hour?’

At this, Val felt the cuts on his face as if he had not been aware of them before. He ended up opening the sores up again and re-wetting himself a bloody beard.

Lei looked disgusted. ‘So. Where have you two been?’

‘We’ve been… looking,’ Ravel mumbled.

‘Where have you been?’ Val retorted, scratching his chin.

‘Where do you think?’ Lei raised her arm in preparation to throw the stick at him, but realized he was holding a similar stick in his hand. It looked familiar in more than just that, though. She turned her windup into a gesture at it. ‘Is that… an axe?’

‘Yes,’ Val replied. ‘And I see you’ve found a piece of one for yourself.’

Lei honed in on the shape of the axe, the square shaped blade. When Val emerged into the sun, she noted the way the light caught it and nearly took her eye out. Another star. She held a hand up to shield her cringing retinas.

‘Yes, they’re very bright. My friend liked to keep them cleaned and sharpened. He called them the teeth of the house.’ Val looked very pleased and moved the axe even further into the light. Lei was glad he did that, though, and not spit out some sort of dentistry pun, although they virtually spoke for themselves.

‘Those are the teeth?’ Ravel asked hoarsely. ‘Why didn’t you just tell me the teeth were axes?’

‘What’s all this about teeth?’ Lei asked.

‘I thought it would be more economical to explain it once both of you were listening,’ Val explained. He lowered the axe. ‘Ravel seemed so nervous all by himself hearing me talk about the house like it was the mouth of hell. See, he’s looking away again. I also thought the fact would also make itself known once we found the stash, but we never did. There were so many the last time I was here… I suppose they went with the owner. A good sign, I think.’

‘Axes,huh?’ Lei looked at the stick in her hand. She sighed and left it on the bed. ‘I think I might have an idea. Take a look out the window.’

Val pulled himself out of the trapdoor and ran straight to the windows. His energy dissolved when he saw what he saw.

Curious, Ravel stepped into the light slowly and followed. He walked to the window and also saw the stars, which were actually axe heads, scattered around the lawns and the moat and the roof.

‘Whoa,’ was all Ravel managed.

‘I liked my idea better,’ Val uttered quietly. He seemed deflated somehow. ‘And… look at them all down there. That’s a shame.’

‘They look kind of like Christmas lights.’ Ravel said, looking more elated than he had for a long time. ‘Or stars.’ He put his hand on the glass in wonder. The wind suddenly deciding the rattle the glass sent him quickly diving away again.

‘You think so too?’ Lei asked.

Val stared grimly out at the starry mansion with something bordering disgust. He stared so hard that his eyes crossed and flickered and died and lit again, but when he turned back into the room, he had regained his normal composure, if composure was what you’d call it. He dropped onto all fours and began grappling around underneath the bed

He mumbled from that position, ‘Well, his work his gone and his teeth are gone so I guess that means the guy is really gone. Ah, well. I guess I should have guessed. At least he cleaned up after himself. Well, all except for one thing.’

‘What are you doing?’ Ravel asked nervously. He almost did not want to turn his eyes away from their unearthly view to have to look at his bumbling employer.

‘Lei, you saw the cat?’

‘Yeah, a black one. Is he down there?’ Lei frowned. ‘What are you doing?’

There was a very catlike screech from under the bed. Then Val quickly pulled himself out from under it, covered in dust and with what Lei sincerely hoped was not cat droppings stuck to his sleeve. He also had the horrified black cat in his arms and was petting it lightly. Lei saw that he had managed to loop a leash around its neck, which the cat did not appreciate at all. Its paws were outstretched and entangled in the length of nylon. Its eyes looked about to burst from its head.

Val whispered a little to it and petted its head. The cat was not eased at all. Satisfied with the total lack of result from his actions and hoisted the cat up. ‘Alright. That’s it for us here.’

‘That’s it?’ Lei asked. ‘You brought us here just to pick up your friend’s cat?’

‘No, we were here for many reasons. All we ended up with was the cat. You can’t win all the time, you know.’ He petted the cat again. ‘Think of it as a learning experience.’

‘I think I’d rather leave.’

‘Yes, of course. Ravel, you remember the way out?’

Ravel was pulled out of his self imposed trance of calmness, but all he managed was ‘Huh?’

Val looked at both trapdoors, then at their surroundings, still surprisingly apathetic about the scenery. He oriented himself, and headed down the trapdoor that Lei had come through.

‘Uh, Val,’ Lei said. ‘Are you sure you want to go down that one?’

‘Is this the one that goes to the basement?’

‘Um. Yes.’

‘Well then, this is the one I’m taking.’ Val started down the steps. ‘Ravel can show you the other way out if you don’t want to go for another swim. I just want to have a final look around.’

‘Swim?’ Ravel said, looking at Lei guardedly.

‘Are you sure you’re cool with that, boss? I don’t think there’s another way up from there,’ Lei called. Her voice echoed down the sunny stairway chamber. ‘It looks like there was an elevator or something, but it was destroyed.’

‘The glass elevator? Don’t worry about that,’ Val chuckled. ‘That thing broke a long time ago. Fell right down the shaft a week after it was installed. No, there’s a second elevator.’

‘Second elevator?’ Lei croaked.

‘Yes. It usually has towels and driers because –well, it seems you didn’t see it, since you came up this way. We would have met up much sooner if you had seen it! That’s why I wasn’t worried. Not that I would be worried anyway. Oh well! Like I said, you can’t win all the time.’

‘There was an elevator?’ Lei muttered under her breath.

‘Uh, I guess we’ll see you later.’ Ravel shakily waved at Val from above the trapdoor.

‘Yes! Good job today assistants. I’ll see you tomorrow! Bright and early! On the dot!’

His voice echoed away. Lei closed the trapdoor above him silently. She looked at the noose and the chair and bed and shook her head. Then she headed down the second staircase, with Ravel right behind her.

—

Ravel quietly led her down the opposite trapdoor, standing a good distance away. Lei wrung her sleeves more out of rage than anything else. Ravel was afraid to ask what exactly was in the basement of the mouth of hell and why one had to swim in it, but he wisely opted not to.

As they descended the wooden staircase (the protruding nail had returned) and passed under the stone arch and through the heavy front doors, neither of them said a word.

Outside the house, things were back to looking grim and grimy and earthy once again. Once you were standing in it, it wasn’t a starry sky anymore, it was just an abandoned mansion with a wilted garden and an empty pool littered with broken axes.

Lei tugged an axe free from a tree stump. It looked like any of the others, like a square sun on a nicely curving stick. ‘There’s something I don’t understand about this.’

‘There are a lot of things I don’t understand,’ Ravel said. ‘Most things about today, don’t make any sense.’

‘These axes belong to Val’s friend, right? But isn’t this also the kind of axe used by the dismemberer?’

A cold child ran down Ravel’s spine. ‘Was it?’ He hadn’t seen the dismemberer from as close as Lei had, but he had seen the axe from the police car, and now the image was brought back into his mind, burning a hole in which that particular model of axe fit perfectly. Yes, that was it. The axe that had chopped that thin pale anonymous body to pieces and etched in those letters, Friends beware…

‘I hope Val’s friend is okay,’ Ravel said weakly.

‘I hope Val’s friend isn’t what this implies he is,’ Lei murmured.

She tossed the axe down into the moat. It cracked in half against the hard, moldy floor and sat there in like a fallen comet burning out under the sun. It was not the only one. Axes with chipped handles, and chipped blades were lying all over the ground. It wasn’t a happy sight. Ravel looked away. He turned his gaze to the walkway that would lead them back into the hillside. That needed his full attention. He felt that even the faintest breeze would blow him off, land him right next to that axe head.

On the bright side, the sun was out so she did not catch a chill on the long, dirty, hilly trek back to the main road. And from the hilltops they crossed, they saw, in the sunlight, the remains of the teeth, or the stars of the owner of the mansion, who they did not know they had met, possibly may not have met, but very well would meet in the future.