He looked at the cord dangling in his hand. The ivory-smooth knob at the end where it had connected to the outlet was as featureless as if it had just been sawn off the tip of an elephant's tusk.
The clock, or whatever hellish device it might be, was already cool.
Theo stuck his head out into the corridor. Applecore had been gone at least an hour and he was getting crazy with restlessness. Tansy's lab or whatever they'd call it here was down that way, but Theo had no intention of dropping in on him and reinforcing the fairy's dislike of mortals by blundering in at an inopportune moment. He'd just go for a stroll in the other direction. It wasn't like he was a prisoner or anything, was it?
Was it?
He stood in the corridor, wondering why it seemed longer than it had when he had looked down it before. How big could this place be, anyway? Was it the main manor house for the Sunny Days Commune or whatever Applecore had called it — Theo could only remember it had sounded like some kind of organic dairy — or was it a separate building? Well, finding a window could tell him something, and getting outside into the air would tell him even more.
He glanced up at a bit of sky peeping in through the skylight. It felt like it should be late afternoon, and certainly the oblong of blue overhead looked like that was about right.
Maybe I should leave a trail of crumbs or something, he thought. Which reminded him that he hadn't eaten anything since he'd been in Faerie, nor had he drunk anything except river water, and most of that by accident. There's a destination, then, he decided. I'll hunt for the kitchen.
Of course, it wound up being a lot more difficult than it looked. The house, most of which seemed to carry on the spare white-stucco-and-color-accents look of the parts he'd seen so far, seemed not just large but oddly unintuitive in the way it was laid out. Every time he thought he'd figured out how it worked and expected to turn a corner and find himself back in a main corridor like the one outside his room, he found himself standing instead at the edge of some kind of sunken living room with a pond and live trees growing through carefully laid-out gaps in the floorboards, or at the door of a walk-in pantry whose shelves were lined with sacks and canisters. Some or even all of these might very well have contained food, but enough of them were jiggling by themselves on the shelf or even making little squeaking noises that he had no interest in closer investigation.
What was even more odd was how some of the rooms disappeared right in front of him, or seemed to, especially those that had windows to the outside world. He would spot a wash of sky peeking through at the far end of a series of linked, open rooms, but when he got to the last room he would find himself looking into another corridor with no window or in fact anything remotely sky-colored in sight. Once he found a sort of parlor room with big, low couches that had a picture window covering one entire wall — he could see an expanse of forested green hill, its crest just touched by the last slanting rays of sunlight, the clouds beginning to turn salmon-pink above it. But when he stepped into the room, the entire window was gone, replaced by a slab of polished black stone. Thinking it might be some kind of polarization trick, he stepped back to the entranceway of the room again, but although the light now gleamed very attractively off the polished surface, it was still opaque black.
Are they trying to keep me from seeing out? Or someone else from seeing me?
He could often hear people talking but could never find any of them. Once he even thought he heard Applecore's clear, high-pitched voice behind a cloth hanging, as though she were in a room just on the other side, but when he swept it back he found nothing but a wall of pale tiles. He heard voices that sounded like the slow, harsh cadences of the ogres, and others stranger still, but they all seemed to float to him from no discernible direction. A few times he wondered if there might be some air-conditioning ducts hidden in the wide wooden roof beams, piping not just air but sound from one part of the house to the other, but if such things did exist, they were hidden beyond his capacity to spot them.
When the lights suddenly dimmed and then went out, Theo had a moment of pure terror. He stopped, as rigid as a mouse when the cat door pops open. The darkness surrounded him like something tangible, something thick, but the abrupt, total silence was even thicker — no whispers, no dull, barely audible humming, just the silence of premature burial. He was suddenly all too aware that he was a stranger in a completely alien place.
Do they have regular blackouts here? He didn't dare move. Or does it mean something worse? A picture from one of his childhood books came to him, Theseus in the dark labyrinth, unaware of the brute Minotaur looming behind him.
He had no idea how long it took until the lights in the hallway came up again, but it was longer than he would have liked: the renewal of the phantom voices was as comforting as hearing the kindly neighbors in the next apartment come home.
The return of light and noise did not solve his other problems. He wandered on through rooms that would thrill the editors of Architectural Digest while confounding any actual architects, found singing shower-fountains in bathrooms made of what seemed like living but unbarked wood, discovered carpets so thick that they seemed to cling to his feet as if unwilling to let him leave and chattered to him in soft voices he could not quite make out, but still could not find a kitchen, or his own room again, or in fact any other living souls that he could recognize as such.
Panicked into a desperation beyond any fear of embarrassment, he stopped and began to shout: "Applecore? Applecore!" If that truly had been the sprite's voice he had heard earlier through a solid tile wall, why shouldn't his own travel the same way? "Applecore? Where are you? Hello! Anyone?"
"What do you want?" asked a feminine voice, cool and collected as a stewardess reciting safety information to a planeload of bored commuters. Theo looked around, but except for a table with an ornamental tree in a rectangular vase, he was alone in the hallway.
"Where are you?" he asked the tree, just in case.
"In the house." As far as he could tell, the calm voice came out of thin air. "Do you need help?"
"Yes, yes I think I do. Who are you?"
"I am the hob," the voice said. "I live in the house. You are one of Count Tansy's guests. How can I help you?"
Jesus, was that all it took? I wish I'd thought of this earlier. "Can you help me find my way? Like, back to my room, if I wanted?"
"Certainly." It seemed unimpressed, as though it were not quite worth its disembodied time to handle such simple requests.
"How about outside?"
"Outside the house?" Now the dainty voice sounded a bit irritated. "I'm sorry, you can't leave the house without Count Tansy."
"Oh." Well, that told him something, anyway. Maybe a bit more than he wanted to know. "How about the kitchen? Can you give me directions to the kitchen?"
"You wish to walk there?"
Theo frowned. "What are my alternatives — rocket skates? Light rail? Yeah, if it's close, I'll walk."
"I could bring it to you if you prefer."
That just plain sounded weird. "No, that's okay, I'll walk."
"Very well. Go forward until you reach the end of this hallway. Turn right, then turn right again immediately."