The piano looked at her sheepishly without eyes and slunk off into a corner. Freddy kicked some more chairs aside and headed into the hall, then up the stairs, which kept trying to tip her off. She had to put the microgun back in the bag so she had both hands free. It was a bit of a struggle to squeeze past the phone booth that kept phasing into and out of existence, and she nearly stepped on a rat in a waistcoat and trousers, but she knew they were just some more of Cuerva Lachance’s figments, and she pushed on through, finally gaining the landing.
The corridor had split in two. Both branches were littered with small somethings that glittered in the light coming from somewhere or other. Freddy crouched and scooped up a handful of whatever was in the first corridor. The whatever pricked her palm gently in several places. She found herself gazing down at a tangle of what looked like the kind of pins she’d had to use in her textiles class last year. She ducked into the other corridor and came up with a handful of needles. “I know this is symbolic,” Freddy howled at the walls, “so watch me not caring!” A wolf wandered up to her and sat down, its tongue lolling. She flung away her handfuls and, randomly, took the needles path, scuffing aside the needles with her boots so they wouldn’t go straight through the soles. She didn’t look back to see what the wolf did.
The corridor was a path now. It twisted on through what could have been a forest, lurking in what could have been moonlight. One of the most frightening things about the house on Grosvenor Street was the way it wasn’t always possible to tell what was in it. Settings would shift or just remain ambiguous. Something heavy was forcing itself through the maybe-trees. Again, she couldn’t hear it, but she could catch the movement on the edge of her vision. She sighed. The organ music was getting no louder and no fainter. “That’s enough, Cuerva Lachance!” said Freddy. “Where are they?”
Her left foot came down on needles; her right foot came down on sand. Freddy stood blinking in what most people would have been fooled into believing was sunlight and gazed out on what those same people would have thought was a desert. Freddy knew it wasn’t. It was foreshortened. Though the sand stretched away into the distance, the distance was very close by. The light had no heat to it, and the sand beneath her boots had the consistency of wet clay.
The organ music stopped. Josiah stepped out from behind a rock that hadn’t been there a moment before.
Freddy had thought the anger she’d felt at Ban after her adventure in the medieval dungeon had been the worst possible, but it was dwarfed by what she felt now. “You let her do this?” she said. She was impressed at how calm she sounded. “It doesn’t seem like your sort of thing.”
“It isn’t, believe me,” said Josiah, “but sometimes, it’s more productive to give her relatively free rein.”
The chill started at the base of Freddy’s spine and worked its way upward. “Why? What did you do with my family?”
“Do you care? You don’t seem to have all that much to do with them.” Josiah was leaning against the rock. She struggled across the sand towards him. Walking here was surprisingly difficult.
“They’re my family,” said Freddy.
He began to tick them off on his fingers. “Well, you’ve got your mother, who talks to you about once a month, and your stepfather, who bonds with you only in the wee hours when he’s yelling at Cuerva Lachance. I presume you have a father as well, but since I’ve never once heard you mention him, I couldn’t say for sure. You take your sister for granted and treat your stepbrother as an interloper, and in the last day or so, your relationship with them has involved you bullying them into seeing me and Cuerva Lachance as some sort of threat. And now you’ve come storming over here to get them? Is it just the possessiveness, or do you, quite unexpectedly, have a heart of gold? Tell me; I’m interested.”
She glared at him. He’s right, you know, said the contradictory, rebellious, incredibly annoying portion of her brain. Freddy snarled it aside. Maybe she did treat her family badly. It didn’t matter. If Josiah tried to hurt anyone in her family, she would kill him. She had spent eighteen months travelling through time, and she had never even considered not going back to them.
“Stop trying to misdirect me,” said Freddy. “You’ve done something to them, haven’t you?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He shrugged. “Pity. I’m telling the truth. They’re at home in bed. The point isn’t where they are. It’s where you are.”
Cuerva Lachance was there, melting out of the air on Freddy’s right. Everything seemed to go slow. Freddy thought afterwards that it was because in reality, everything had gone very, very fast. Cuerva Lachance pulled a pair of handcuffs out of her pocket and snapped one of the cuffs onto Freddy’s right wrist, which she yanked over so she could snap the other cuff onto the left. Freddy tried to jerk away and slammed into Josiah, who tore the bag off her shoulder, snapping the strap. Cuerva Lachance pushed her back against the rock, and a rope came twining out of it and wrapped itself around her torso. She held her arms free just in time, but since her wrists were locked together, that didn’t do much good. The rope had the strength of dried cement. It pinned Freddy firmly to the rock.
“What are you doing?” she gasped. The rope was cutting off half her air; it was hard to get any words out.
“I’m being pragmatic,” said Josiah, dropping the bag on the ground, out of reach. “Cuerva Lachance is just playing with the nature of reality for fun.”
“It’s very educational,” she said, nodding. “Josie doesn’t usually give me this much leeway.”
“What you thought you saw—and heard—in your house tonight wasn’t what was happening,” said Josiah. “Think of it as a sort of nightmare, if you like. As far as everybody else was concerned, there was no organ music, and the lights worked perfectly. You saw the beds as empty, but they weren’t. That was inspired, by the way,” he told Cuerva Lachance.
“It just sort of happened. It was an idea I had,” she said.
Freddy was becoming aware that she had been very, very gullible. She still wasn’t sure why it mattered. “Okay, nicely done,” she wheezed. “You caught me. What’s the point? Are you going to torture me into telling you who Three is?”
“We don’t need to.” Josiah sat down in the sand, which bounced a little. “We know it’s not you. I figured that out while we were travelling together; you just don’t fit the profile. You’re smart and innovative, but you don’t have all that much of an imagination. It’s down to the other two. Mysteries and role-playing games, isn’t it? Unusual but workable. They’re going to tell us which of them it is.”
Her brain was catching up. “This is a trap.”
“You think?”
“That’s stupid,” said Freddy, struggling for air. “Even if they realise where I’ve gone, they’re not going to come running over here for me. Mel’s more practical than that, and Roland doesn’t even like me.”
“That’s not the point,” said Josiah. “They’re both sure you’re the key to them getting out of this. I’ll bet you keep telling them you all have to talk about it, don’t you? And I’ll bet you’ve held some details back from them so they have to depend on you for the answer.”