Because the corridor had been so narrow, Lex had been expecting the room to be small, too. But, actually, it was extremely large. The corridor had obviously just been another one of Nathaniel East’s quirks, rather than a result of a genuine need to conserve space.
The large room they stepped into was fairly ordinary in so much as it had a large four poster bed, a wardrobe, a sink and a window that looked out from the front of the building. A hammock was strung across one corner. But the odd thing about the room was its colour scheme, for everything in it was a garish shade of lime green. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the furniture. It was extremely wearing on the senses and Lex instinctively wanted to wince and shield his eyes from the horrible sight. But he kept staunchly in character as Slow Sid whilst Jesse groaned aloud and said, ‘Aw, man, not the snot room!’
Lex couldn’t help thinking that, if someone had snot that colour, then that person must have something very seriously wrong with them indeed. But he said nothing as Jesse closed the door behind them. Instead, he rambled over to the wardrobe and opened the door to check inside it. Then he wandered over to the bed and looked underneath it.
‘What are you doin’?’ Jesse asked, staring at him. ‘Lex?’
Lex ignored him and went to look behind both of the heavy lime drapes that fell all the way to the floor alongside the window. Only once he’d satisfied himself that there was no one else in the room with them did he relax and drop the act.
‘This is the ugliest room I ever saw in my life!’ he declared.
Jesse breathed a sigh of relief then and said, ‘You gave me a horrible turn for a minute there, kid. I was almost thinkin’ that perhaps you really did hit your head in that scuffle outside and the entire evening weren’t an act, after all!’
‘I never break character in public,’ Lex replied. ‘Never. So don’t ever talk to me out there unless you’re talking to Slow Sid. And thanks a lot for landing me with that character, by the way! Having to play your pet monkey all week was not what I had in mind!’
Of course, Lex was secretly rather pleased with the Slow Sid development, but there was no point in admitting as much to Jesse.
The cowboy merely shrugged and said, ‘You’d have found yourself fighting a duel with scar face outside if I hadn’t stepped in when I did.’
‘Rubbish!’ Lex retorted. ‘I can look after myself. If you’d just given me another moment, I would have got myself out of it all right. Next time you decide to help me, don’t!’
‘Noted,’ Jesse replied. ‘Let me know how that works out for you. And, since you’re so keen on staying in character, I guess I’ll just have to take the bed whilst you take the hammock.’
‘Help yourself to the bed, by all means,’ Lex replied. ‘It’s probably riddled with lice. What do you people sleep in, anyway? And don’t tell me you sleep in the nude.’
Jesse shrugged. ‘Shirt and long johns, usually.’
‘Good,’ Lex said, pulling off his jacket. ‘I’m going to go and do a bit of sleepwalking.’
‘Knock yourself out,’ Jesse replied. ‘You won’t find the sword.’
‘That’s another thing,’ Lex said. ‘You never told me you’d been here looking for the sword yourself.’
Jesse shrugged. ‘You never asked, kid.’
‘Huh. Well, sit back and watch me succeed where you failed. It should be an enlightening experience for you.’
Lex stripped down to his shirt and long johns. Barefoot and with his hair messed up a bit, he could instantly pull the sleepwalking card if need be. Or else he could simply say he was looking for the bathroom. Thus attired, Lex left Jesse snoring in the bedroom (the big dolt was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow) and set off to explore Dry Gulch House.
An hour later, Lex had still not seen everything there was to see. The house was enormous. More of a castle than a house, really. And the problem was that it had no logical structure. It was like a maze. Certain parts of the house were therefore easy to miss. Even parts that you had seen would not be easy to get back to once you’d left them behind.
It was clear that the most used parts of the house were the bar downstairs and the bedrooms. Other than that, it seemed like most of the cowboys didn’t wander into the other areas. After all, people had been searching for the Sword of Life for over a hundred years, now, and had never found it. Most people thought that it couldn’t be found at all or that it was a myth and had never existed to begin with. It was easy to see how a person could get lost for hours? maybe even days? inside the house. It was almost as if it had been built to confuse and disorient. Some rooms were completely dust free, whilst others were coated in a layer of the stuff several inches thick.
The thing that jumped out about the house straightaway? other than how utterly bizarre it was? was the fox motif that was everywhere. Practically every single room had at least one fox in it somewhere. Sometimes it was easy to spot? a large wooden statue in the centre of the room, for example. Other times, you had to look more closely. The fox might be a tiny model glued to the skirting board, or it might be carved into a leg of a table, or appear just once somewhere on the wallpaper. Sometimes there was just a fox’s head, in others there was a complete fox. And he was always wearing a waistcoat. Lex thought back to the painting in the entrance hall of Nathaniel having tea with a giant fox and supposed it must be the same one.
A second thing jumped out at him and that was the prevalence of the number thirteen within the house. Chandeliers had thirteen arms; wallpaper flowers had thirteen petals; tables were set with thirteen chairs; and unused fireplaces were stacked with thirteen logs. The number thirteen bothered Lex more than the fox did. Everyone knew that thirteen was a magical number. Everyone knew that Nathaniel had been friends with a witch who had cast a sticking spell over the contents of the house for him. Lex knew as well as anyone that magic could be tricky, and that it could be dangerous, and so the thirteens everywhere made him proceed even more cautiously than before.
At one point, he passed through a huge library with shelves upon shelves of books. There was even a ladder to reach the ones all the way up at the top. These books couldn’t possibly compare to the thrill of the library tree, of course, but Lex was quite excited by the sheer number, just the same? until he realised that they were all identical. The library housed one volume and one volume only? The Life And Times Of Nathaniel East, by Nathaniel East.
Lex pulled a face in disgust. All this shelf space, wasted on just one book. He reminded himself that Nathaniel East was Jeremiah’s great-great uncle. It therefore should have come as no surprise that the man’s house was full of portraits of, and books about, himself. Vanity clearly ran in the family.
Lex pulled one of the books off the nearest shelf and flicked through it. It was a slim volume that seemed to be a rambling account of the dreamworld Nathaniel had clearly lived in. Lex recognised two of the chapter headings from the paintings in the entrance hall. In those chapters, Nathaniel told of how he had, several times, taken tea with a giant fox named Plantagenet. Apparently, they would sit and chat for hours over the cucumber sandwiches and sugar tongs. It seemed that the fox had many fascinating stories to tell and those afternoons were, Nathaniel wrote, some of the most pleasant he’d ever spent. In the other chapter, he blithely told of how he had once defeated a great white dragon wielding nothing more than a smoked trout.
‘Smoked trout!’ Lex muttered derisively. ‘It ought to have been a swordfish, at the very least!’
He took the book with him. There really wasn’t much point in trying to pinch it when the sticking spell over the house would not allow anything to be removed from its walls, but he could at least take it back to his bedroom and have a flick through it later.
He continued on through the house. He was attempting to draw a rough map as he went but? as other architects had found before him? it was almost impossible to capture Dry Gulch House on paper. The rooms ranged from the almost ordinary, to the astonishingly impractical, to the outrageously bizarre. Lex walked through one room with a lofty ceiling from which hung thirty or so open umbrellas. Glass bubbles were set into the wall and twenty or so bath-tubs, overflowing with rubber ducks, stood below.