She had stumbled out of bed and down the stairs into the hallway before she realised something wasn’t right. She shouldn’t have been the only one. Cuerva Lachance had played at night more than once, and every time, she had brought the entire family, with the occasional exception of Roland, out of bed. Jordan had never tried to call the police after the first time, but there had always been a certain amount of swearing and complaining and going out into the yard to yell uselessly at the tower. It was impossible to sleep when the organ was sounding. Only Roland had ever been able to manage it. It had all happened quite a long time ago for Freddy, but she didn’t remember Mel ever accusing her of sleeping through a midnight concert. It couldn’t be done.
And yet the house was perfectly still. Even Jordan, who could be counted on to go ballistic at the faintest hint of chiff from next door, hadn’t stirred.
Freddy crept back up the stairs. She cracked open Mel’s door and flicked the light switch. The light stayed off. Dimly, Freddy could see the outline of Mel’s bed, rumpled but flat, unoccupied. She began to be aware of her heart thumping in her chest.
She moved to Roland’s door, which she half expected to be barricaded still. It wasn’t. The light didn’t work here, either, but again, she could see there was no one in the bed. Down the hall to Mum and Jordan’s room … and once more, no one.
The organ music was making her head go fuzzy; it was hard to think. Were they all outside already? Or had something worse happened? Were they next door? Had Cuerva Lachance and Josiah got to them? Why weren’t the lights working? Through her mum’s door, she could see the computer’s power bar blinking sleepily. There was electricity but no light. She was alone in the house, and something was very wrong.
She went back to her room. Forcing herself to be steady and methodical, she got dressed in the first thing she could find, which turned out to be her time-travelling outfit. It looked a little odd in twenty-first-century Canada, but it was designed to look a little odd everywhere. That didn’t matter at the moment. She picked up her bag as well. Yesterday, she had felt naked without it. It had been her companion for so long that it was reassuring to loop its strap across her body, even if it didn’t truly hold anything that could help her. She slipped her keys into the pocket she had sewn into her tunic in the seventh century AD in the land that would one day be known as Brazil, and she walked back out into the hall and down the stairs to the kitchen. The music was still everywhere. Freddy thought she recognised “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” which Mel occasionally liked to sing. She opened the kitchen door.
Aside from the organ music, the night outside was as still as the night inside. There was no breath of wind. The streetlights on Grosvenor and Elm shone into the yard, and the clouds glowed faintly with the radiance of the city. As Freddy moved out into the lane, she saw that all the other houses were dark. That was wrong. The neighbourhood always ended up in a blaze of light when Cuerva Lachance played the organ after midnight. Was it after midnight? Freddy hadn’t checked the time. The lights hadn’t worked in her house. Was it the same in the other houses? Why had the light on the power bar been shining if the light switches had done nothing? Her head was going fuzzy again. She thought she might be panicking now, but there was anger there as well. Cuerva Lachance and Josiah could play their little games, but they had no right to kidnap her entire family. Why had they left her behind? She couldn’t think properly with the music this loud.
She ran through the backyard of the house on Grosvenor Street, right to the porch. No one was in sight. The house itself was as dark as all the other houses. The music played on, evolving from Gilbert and Sullivan into something in a minor key. Freddy, panting, grasped the doorknob. She wasn’t expecting much, but the knob turned, and the door opened. Trying not to think about what she was doing, she stepped inside.
She thought she could just barely recognise the contours of the kitchen, but it was hard to be sure. The room had been taken over by the spider plants. In the faint light that trickled through the windows, Freddy saw what looked like a jungle made up of snaking, sinuous trailers with little baby plants sprouting at their ends. There shouldn’t have been movement. Baby plants, thought Freddy, sure, but they look like spiders, don’t they? She could hear nothing but organ music, but out of the corner of her eye, she could see something scuttling. Slowly, carefully, Freddy shifted her bag around in front of her and eased out the microgun. She didn’t know how much it would help against mobile spider plants, but it felt better to have something in her hand.
Something brushed against the top of her head. Freddy reached up with her left hand, and her fingers closed on a writhing bundle the size of her fist. She flung it across the room. The jungle came alive. Plant-spiders erupted from the undergrowth on all sides while trailers whipped across her face and tried to twine themselves around her legs. She flung her right arm across her eyes and lurched forward. “Don’t make me shoot you!” she shouted. She couldn’t even hear her own voice above the screaming notes of the organ. Plant-spiders crawled onto her tunic, heading for her face. She squeezed a bolt out of the microgun, and it crackled through the kitchen, crisping leaves and tendrils. Plant-spiders tumbled to the floor and dived for cover. A trailer sneaked around her neck. She tore away from it, staggering through the last of the jungle to the living room door.
A few plant-spiders followed her in, but they seemed more docile here, out of their element. This room belonged to the chairs. Not entirely unexpectedly, they, too, had come to life. Freddy glared at them. She had lived in this house for weeks, and she didn’t find it all that difficult to adjust to the strange things it did. “No. Just no,” she told the chairs as they edged closer to her, their seat covers curling back to reveal the rows of teeth beneath. “I’m sorry, but I’ve seen scarier. Is there any point to this, Cuerva Lachance? Oh, and now the piano’s going to eat me, too?” It was creeping through the chairs, crouched on its rollers, like a very bulky tiger hunting in the grass.
The anger was getting more acute. It just about did in any lingering fear. Freddy shoved three or four slavering chairs aside and slammed her hands down on the keys of the piano. All she could think of to play was “Chopsticks,” but she played it as vengefully as she could. She could even almost hear it over the roaring of the organ. “There,” Freddy screamed at the piano and the organ and anything or anyone else who may have been listening. “You want music? Here’s some music for you. Everybody’s playing music now! Shut up!”