Freddy felt like a burglar as she let herself into the kitchen with her key. She kept having to stop herself from tiptoeing. It was stupid to feel like an intruder. She lived here, after all. But it was all a little strange. The house seemed smaller than she remembered. It was indescribably odd to look at the pile of books on the chair by the door and recall that exact pile from a year and a half ago. The pile would shift and mutate over the next few weeks, and yet here she was, looking at an old version of it. She’d thought she’d got better at thinking like a time traveller, but it seemed she hadn’t. It was immensely hard to reconcile her personal timeline with chronological time.
Her bedroom, like the rest of the house, seemed too small. She blinked around it in dismay. Had she ever liked that duvet cover? It had great big flowers on it. She thought she remembered her mum giving it to her for Christmas one year, but she did have a plain blue one as well. Why had she chosen the giant flowers? Was there really a pink shirt draped over her desk chair? She didn’t even like pink. Rochelle and Cathy wore a lot of pink. Was that why she had a pink shirt? Had she ever truly enjoyed hanging out with Rochelle and Cathy?
There was a book on her bed. She picked it up. It was the one with the tragic immortal nuzzling teenagers in it. Freddy stared at it, puzzled. She remembered starting it the day she had met Cuerva Lachance and Josiah, but she didn’t remember what had happened to it after that. She had certainly never finished it.
Still holding the book, she wandered around the room. Everything in it was wrong. All the clothes and books and DVDs and games belonged to someone else. I haven’t changed that much, have I? It’s only been a year and a half. I’m still the same person.
She sat down on the bed and opened the book.
It was the most brain-numbing thing she had ever read. She had thought it was stupid before, but she had been able to get through several chapters. Now, she could hardly manage a paragraph. She rose, walked to her bedroom window, slid back the pane and then the screen, and flung the book violently into a tree.
*
“Went home?” said Josiah later when Freddy was poking at a peanut butter sandwich in a moody sort of way. Cuerva Lachance had gone shopping and brought back a surprisingly logical selection of food. She had also bought twenty pounds of sugar, but as Josiah had pointed out, it wouldn’t have been Cuerva Lachance if something hadn’t gone wrong somehow.
Freddy nodded.
“Bad idea,” said Josiah, “though understandable. Got some books now?”
“A few.” Freddy, in desperation, had raided her mother’s library and come away with half the English literary canon. She had also snagged the Coleridge book from the chair in the kitchen so she could read the poem she had interrupted.
“You won’t have that much time for them, all things considered,” said Josiah.
She stared at him. “There’s nothing to do here.”
“Yet,” said Josiah. But when she asked him what he meant by that, he didn’t reply.
16
“Josiah,” said Freddy, “the second-floor bathroom has stopped existing again.”
It was the fourth time in as many days. She never knew when it was going to happen. She would mount the stairs and turn left and nearly walk into the wall. The basement bathroom was permanently plugged, and the third-floor one was on the third floor, which terrified everyone except Cuerva Lachance. Once, in desperation, Freddy had gone out into the backyard and used a bush.
The Josiahs, who were seated at the kitchen table, turned to her with identical expressions of harassment. Josiah 2 had cut off Josiah’s ponytail a few days before, but she could always tell which was which. She thought she would be able to do so even when the gash on Josiah 2’s forehead had faded completely. Josiah 2 had trimmed Josiah’s hair just a bit too short. Besides, Josiah looked slightly more long-suffering.
“Damn it,” said Josiah 2, “I don’t know why she insists on doing that. And it’s always the bathroom, too. It’s never the kitchen or the basement or that cursed piano. This from someone who hasn’t even discovered—”
“Ssh!” said Freddy and Josiah simultaneously. The three of them had been working quite hard to stop Cuerva Lachance from finding out about the organ. Josiah hadn’t told Josiah 2 that they would eventually fail.
The house was changing. Freddy had first noticed it on Wednesday, two days ago, when she had got lost on the way down to breakfast. It wasn’t possible to get lost in the house on Grosvenor Street; the second floor contained one corridor with one turn in it. Still, she had ended up wandering down corridor after corridor, past an endless succession of locked doors. There had been nothing interesting about the corridors. There had just been far too many of them. She had found the stairs by sheerest accident.
On Thursday, Josiah 2 had wound up on the fourth floor of their three-storey house and hadn’t been able to get out. Josiah and Freddy had climbed out onto the roof to fetch him. They had seen him as standing beside the chimney. He had seen himself as being in a room without doors. It had taken some time to persuade him to walk through what had, to him, seemed to be an impenetrable wall.
Now it was Friday, and the bathroom had disappeared again. There were also chairs everywhere, though the spider plants hadn’t turned up yet. Freddy had considered using the third-floor bathroom, but she had heard strange noises in the stairwell and ultimately decided on flight.
“Cuerva Lachance,” said Josiah, “please come in here.”
Someone upstairs cackled. It sounded like a man.
“I mean it,” said Josiah 2. “Honestly, there’s no excuse for this behaviour.”
“Is she always like this?” said Freddy as something very large slammed into something else above, making the whole house shudder. “I don’t remember her being like this.”
“She was on her best behaviour around you,” said Josiah. “Besides, the last Three did choose her. And you know she’s … erratic.”
“Sure,” said Freddy, but it had been different before. She thought Josiah must have been protecting her. She had rarely lived in the same house as Cuerva Lachance for more than a day at a time.
“Cuerva Lachance,” shouted Josiah 2, “do you want to wreck the house already? Get down here!”
“I don’t want to wreck the house at all,” said Cuerva Lachance earnestly from the living room doorway. “Something’s gone strange with the third floor again.”
Both Josiahs buried their faces in their hands. “Perfect,” said Josiah 2. “I love it when you have no idea what you’ve done to make reality implode.”
“If I understood what was going on all the time, I would be you,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I think this kitchen lacks something. What is it this kitchen lacks?”
Freddy said, “What’s happened to the third floor?”
“Well,” said Cuerva Lachance, “I think it may be in space. It’s not clear at the moment, but I would suggest not going up there. I don’t think there’s much atmosphere. And there’s a stereotypical supervillain floating around in the asteroid belt, laughing and smashing things.”
This was so much the opposite of unexpected that Freddy thought she was probably getting too used to Cuerva Lachance. “He sounds fictional,” she said. Josiah twitched.
“Exactly,” said Cuerva Lachance, beaming. “I tried asking his thoughts on the Three situation, but he kept going on about his insane plan to conquer the universe. Couldn’t you just tell us which of you is Three? I’m dying of curiosity.”