Just over a week later, on Monday, Freddy got lost in the house on Grosvenor Street again. It was different this time.
The intervening week had not been a fantastic one. Freddy was feeling increasingly hemmed in. She hadn’t been back to her own house since that first time; it had been too much like trying to stuff herself into a closed slot. She just needed to wait for the slot to open up again. In the meantime, she had little to do except deal with the weirdness of living with Cuerva Lachance and Josiah. She couldn’t really go outside much in case someone saw her. Even standing at a window was a risk. She had been confined occasionally during the time travel—the Sumerian temple being a case in point—but never like this. This was the first time in her life she had truly understood the meaning of the word “cabin fever.” It had not been a good idea for her to watch The Shining on Josiah’s laptop last week.
Luckily, or unluckily, the house itself helped by morphing constantly. It was different every day. Since she’d also lived through these weeks as a largely oblivi ous next-door neighbour, she knew that the changes didn’t show on the outside. The house reminded her of the TARDIS from Doctor Who; it was bigger on the inside. Freddy had long since grown used to ignoring the rules of physics where Cuerva Lachance was concerned, so this didn’t bother her. What did bother her was that she would so frequently have to deal with the implications.
The day all the living room furniture ended up on the ceiling wasn’t so bad. The fictional characters were a little more problematic. As she’d noticed during the time travel, people who clearly weren’t real tended to spring into existence around Cuerva Lachance, though they rarely lasted for long. Many of them were out of books. A white rabbit carrying a pocket watch had woken Freddy up one morning by bemoaning his tardiness, and just yesterday, four children had turned up looking for a magic lion. Freddy had learned to deal with these figments as kindly and firmly as possible. They were obviously not really here, and they sometimes faded and dissolved into colours as she watched. Some of them were capable of interacting with her, but some just acted out the same scenes endlessly, blind to the presence of anyone else.
She asked Josiah about them. It was one of their most awkward conversations. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said coldly.
“The fictional people,” said Freddy. “I noticed a few when we were time travelling, but they’re everywhere here.”
“I keep telling you that living in a house with Cuerva Lachance isn’t the same thing as running into her in third-century Rome,” said Josiah. “But I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“White rabbit?” said Freddy. “Oliver Twist? Big hairy wild man who goes around calling himself Merlin? They keep turning up and wanting to talk to me.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Yes, they do.”
“They absolutely don’t.”
“And there was the supervillain in the asteroid belt.”
“I don’t remember any supervillain.”
“You remember everything,” said Freddy, “except when you’re avoiding an issue.”
“So maybe I’m avoiding an issue,” said Josiah, “though I couldn’t say, since I don’t know what it is.”
She knew he knew about the figments. It was impossible to live in this house and not know about the figments. He just didn’t want to talk about them.
Cuerva Lachance was more matter-of-fact when Freddy asked her about the figments, but because she was Cuerva Lachance, the conversation wasn’t any more satisfying than the one with Josiah had been. “Oh, yes, they’re there,” she said. “I need to paint something blue tomorrow, I think.”
“But why are they there?” said Freddy.
Cuerva Lachance peered out from under her hat. “Why are who where?”
“The figments,” said Freddy patiently. Discussions with Cuerva Lachance often went like this.
“I don’t know,” said Cuerva Lachance. “Did you ask them?”
“I don’t think they’re real enough to answer questions like that.”
“Who aren’t?”
“The figments.”
“What figments?”
Freddy lay awake that night wondering if Cuerva Lachance had genuinely been having short-term-memory difficulties or had instead been indulging in obfuscating stupidity. It could easily have been either.
But even the figments were relatively ordinary next to what kept happening to the geography of the house.
It was never the same … not in a quirky wizard-school oh-look-the-corridors-have-shifted-again-ha-ha sort of way but in a bowel-twisting, anxiety-producing roller coaster of terror that often made Freddy want to lock herself in her room until September twenty-seventh. Unfortunately, her room was not immune. One day, she woke up and discovered that most of her floor had turned into quicksand. She only escaped because her futon was close to the window, and she was able to climb onto the sill and from there out onto the gable below. The third floor was forever morphing into something unexpected. More than once, she heard the sounds of a carnival coming from it. The carnival always ended with terrified screams and crunching noises. She could only hope whatever was happening up there wasn’t real.
Josiah said it was all to be expected. “I try to stop her,” he said wearily as they climbed the enormous tree in the basement rec room to escape the river of snakes. “Honestly, half the time, she doesn’t mean to do it. Things just become less possible wherever she goes.”
“Where’s the top of this tree?” asked Freddy. It seemed to go right through the ceiling.
“Lord knows,” said Josiah.
“I’m surprised it isn’t a beanstalk,” said Freddy.
The sound of the organ briefly transformed the second floor into the Paris Opera House. The spider plants moved when no one was watching them. Freddy would look away for a moment and glance back to see their tendrils arranged in subtly different patterns. The chairs in the living room shifted form and appearance, and sometimes Freddy would walk into a room and find that the walls had gone. The house was everywhere and nowhere all at once.
*
Today, Freddy made sure she had her water bottle and boots before she set out for the kitchen. Finding the main floor of the house was not always easy.
But she rarely got this lost. On her second full day in the house, she had ended up wandering through a series of identical corridors. This trip started out similarly but soon changed. The corridor she was in began to plunge downward. She paused and looked behind her, planning to retrace her steps. The corridor behind her was now also plunging downward.
She went downward. The corridor darkened and changed; the bright ceiling lights gradually gave way to flickering torches set into rough stone alcoves. Hoping desperately that she hadn’t accidentally gone back in time again, Freddy walked on. When she glanced over her shoulder, she saw darkness. The lights had been going out behind her.