“What’s going on here?” I asked him helplessly. “I’m a vet, not a—not a—mortician. What animal needs me?”
He smiled seraphically at nothing over my left shoulder. “I am only Eggs, Lady. I don’t not know nothing. What you need to do is call the Master. Then you will know.”
“So where is the Master?” I said.
He looked baffled by this question. “Hereabouts,” he suggested. He gave another beguiling smile, over my right shoulder this time, panting slightly. “He will come if you call him right. Will I show you the house, Lady? There are rare sights there.”
“Yes, if you like,” I said. Anything to get away from whatever had killed that girl. Besides, I trusted him somehow. When he had said I would take no harm if I was with him, it had been said in a way I believed.
He turned and cavorted up the path ahead of me, skipping soundlessly on his great feet, waving great, gangling arms, clumsily tripping over a tree root and, even more clumsily, just saving himself. He held his head on one side and hummed as he went, happy and harmless. That is to say, harmless to me so far. Though he walked like a great, hopping puppet, those huge hands were certainly strong enough to rip a throat out.
“Who killed that girl?” I asked him. “Was it the Master?”
His head snapped around, swayingly, and he stared at me, appalled, balancing on the path as though it were a tightrope. “Oh, no, Lady. The Master wouldn’t not do that!” He turned sadly, almost tearfully, away.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
His head bent, acknowledging that he had heard, but he continued to walk the tightrope of the path without answering, and I followed. As I did, I was aware that there was something moving among the trees to either side of us. Something softly kept pace with us there, and, I was sure, something also followed along the path behind. I did not try to see what it was. I was quite as much angry with myself as I was scared. I had let my shock at seeing that corpse get the better of my judgment. I saw I must wait to find out how the redheaded girl had got herself killed. Caution! I said to myself. Caution! This path was a tightrope indeed.
“Has the Master got a name?” I asked.
That puzzled Eggs. He stood balancing on the path to think. After a moment he nodded doubtfully, shot me a shy smile over his shoulder, and walked on. No attempt to ask my name, I noticed. As if I was the only other person there and “Lady” should be enough. Which meant that the presences among the trees and behind on the path were possibly not human.
Around the next bend I found myself facing the veranda of a chaletlike building. It looked a little as if it were made of wood, but it was no substance that I knew. Eggs tripped on the step and floundered toward the door at the back of the veranda. Before I could make more than a move to help him, he had saved himself and his great hands were groping with an incomprehensible lock on the door. The humming was more evident here. I had been hoping that what I had heard at the edge of the wood had been the flies on the corpse. It was not. Though the sound was still not much more than a vibration at the edge of the mind, I knew I had been right in my first idea. Something artificial was being maintained here, and whatever was maintaining it seemed to be under this house.
In this house, I thought, as Eggs got the door open and floundered inside ahead of me. The room we entered was full of—well, devices. The nearest thing was a great cauldron, softly bubbling for no reason I could see, and giving out a gauzy violet light. The other things were arranged in ranks beyond, bewilderingly. In one place something grotesque stormed green inside a design painted on the floor; here a copper bowl smoked; there a single candle sat like something holy on a white stone; a knife suspended in air dripped gently into a jar of rainbow glass. Much of it was glass, twinkling, gleaming, chiming, under the light from the low ceiling that seemed to come from nowhere. There were no windows.
“Good heavens!” I said, disguising my dismay as amazement. “What are all these?”
Eggs grinned. “I know some. Pretty, aren’t they?” He roved, surging about, touching the edge of a pattern here, passing his huge hand through a flame or a column of smoke there, causing a shower of fleeting white stars, solemn gong notes, and a rich smell of incense. “Pretty, aren’t they?” he kept repeating, and, “Very pretty!” as an entire fluted glass structure began to ripple and change shape at the end of the room. As it changed, the humming, which was everywhere in the room, changed, too. It became a purring chime, and I felt an indescribable pulling feeling from the roots of my hair and under my skin, almost as if the glass thing were trying to change me as it changed itself.
“I should come away from that if I were you,” I said as firmly and calmly as I could manage.
Eggs turned and came floundering toward me, grinning eagerly. To my relief, the sound from the glass modulated to a new kind of humming. But my relief vanished when Eggs said, “Petra knew all, before Annie tore her throat out. Do you know as much as Petra? You are clever, Lady, as well as beautiful.” His eyes slid across me, respectfully. Then he turned and hung, lurching, over the cauldron with the gauzy violet light. “Petra took pretty dresses from here,” he said. “Would you like for me to get you a pretty dress?”
“Not at the moment, thank you,” I said, trying to sound kind. As I said, Eggs was not necessarily harmless. “Show me the rest of the house,” I said, to distract him.
He fell over his feet to oblige. “Come. See here.” He led me to the side of the devices, where there was a clear passage and some doors. At the back of the room was another door, which slid open by itself as we came near. Eggs giggled proudly at that, as if it were his doing. Beyond was evidently a living room. The floor here was soft, carpetlike, and blue. Darker blue blocks hung about, mysteriously half a meter or so in the air. Four of them were a meter or so square. The fifth was two meters each way. They had the look of a suite of chairs and a sofa to me. A squiggly mural thing occupied one wall, and the entire end wall was window, which seemed to lead to another veranda, beyond which I could see a garden of some kind. “The room is pretty, isn’t it?” Eggs asked anxiously. “I like the room.”
I assured him I liked the room. This relieved him. He stumbled around a floating blue block, which was barely disturbed by his falling against it, and pressed a plate in the wall beyond. The long glass of the window slid back, leaving the room open to the veranda. He turned to me, beaming.
“Clever,” I said, and made another cautious attempt to find out more. “Did Petra show you how to open that, or was it the Master?”
He was puzzled again. “I don’t not know,” he said, worried about it.
I gave up and suggested we go into the garden. He was pleased. We went over the veranda and down steps into a rose garden. It was an oblong shape, carved out from among the fir trees, about fifteen meters from the house to the bushy hedge at the far end. And it was as strange as everything else. The square of sky overhead was subtly the wrong color, as if you were seeing it through sunglasses. It made the color of the roses rich and too dark. I walked through with a certainty that it was being maintained—or created—by one of the devices in that windowless room.
The roses were all standards, each planted in a little circular bed. The head of each was about level with my head. No petals fell on the gravel-seeming paths. I kept exclaiming, because these were the most perfect roses I ever saw, whether full bloom, bud, or overblown. When I saw an orange rose—the color I love most—I put my hand up cautiously to make sure that it was real. It was. While my fingers lingered on it, I happened to glance at Eggs, towering over me. It was just a flick of the eyes, which I don’t think he saw. He was standing there, smiling as always, staring at me intently. There was, I swear, another shape to his face, and it was not the shape of an idiot. But it was not the shape of a normal man either. It was an intent, hunting face.