by Alex Bell
‘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.
In another room, Lex found a sort of chapel with three stained-glass windows, on which were written obscure poems. The first read:I, Nathaniel East, here doth claim,
That all who try to slur my mortal name,
Will fail and fail, again, again,
For I have not hidden it in vain.
The second read:Time will tell, as time does well,
What will change, what stays the same,
Who will triumph, who will fall,
For I have seen it all before.
And, finally, the third:Plantagenet shall guard the sword in a fond embrace,
Until the cowboy king shall take it from its rightful place.
For noble cause in a heroic race.
Much danger, peril, death, all else do risk,
If they wouldst try and take it with the kitchen whisk.
Lex had heard of the windows before. Most people thought they were a riddle, telling where the sword was hidden. Lex accepted it looked that way but, after all, Nathaniel East had only hidden the sword once he realised his house was being ambushed by a gang of outlaws. If these windows had been put in when the house was originally being built, then he couldn’t possibly have known that was going to happen. Some sources suggested that Nathaniel East had believed he could see the future. But, just because the nut believed it, it didn’t mean it was true.
Even so, there was no denying that the poems on the window certainly seemed to point towards the hiding place of the sword. Lex wrote the verses down in his notebook next to the map he was sketching. There had been various different interpretations of the riddle. The obvious one for the ‘cowboy king’ was a cowboy who was tougher, meaner and stronger than all the rest, which didn’t hold well for Lex if Nathaniel’s prediction was true since he was, in fact, a completely fake cowboy. Underneath the act, he was no more a real cowboy than he was a duck-billed platypus.
But he noted the riddle down, anyway. He already knew who Plantagenet was, for the book had stated that this was the name of the giant fox. Unfortunately, knowing this did not help Lex much, for the simple fact that the fox motif was literally everywhere in the house. Finding the right fox did not narrow down potential hiding places by much, if at all.
Lex opened the book again, hoping for more information that might furnish some further clue. He skimmed through the relevant section and learnt that Nathaniel had believed this Plantagenet to be what he called a ‘dream-fox’. Lex rolled his eyes, for doubtless this meant that Nathaniel had only ever seen Plantagenet when he’d been asleep, and yet the mad old fool hadn’t had the sense to realise that this meant the giant fox wasn’t real at all, but merely a product of his own loopy mind. In addition, Nathaniel noted how Plantagenet always came to see him at the same time: thirteen o’clock. Lex narrowed his eyes at th
is. Thirteen o’clock − the witching hour. If there ever were such a thing as a dream-fox, then thirteen o’clock would be the time it would come. It certainly explained why the number thirteen appeared so often within the house. Could it actually be that a giant fox really had—
Lex shook his head, impatient with himself. If he didn’t watch out, he’d end up as nutty as Nathaniel. He’d never heard of a dream-fox before − never in all the books he’d read. And Lex was very well read.
He went on, past staircases that led up into ceilings and windows set into the floor. At one point, the entire floor was made out of glass. It looked directly down on to the umbrella room. Lex could tell because he could see the umbrellas − all of different colours − opened out beneath his feet.
He spent a few minutes in the entrance hall examining the paintings there. He noted that the one with Nathaniel having tea with a giant fox was entitled, Taking Tea With Plantagenet. Not only that, but the fox appeared in several other paintings, too, usually in the background and sometimes partially obscured. One painting of Nathaniel showed him serenely strolling, stick in hand, through a battlefield. An ancient battlefield from the looks of things because the warriors all seemed to be half naked, and wielding bows and arrows. Indeed, even Nathaniel’s top hat had an arrow sticking through it. And there, at the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, was a fox’s tail, only just visible.
In another painting, Nathaniel stood, balancing on one leg, in a river, surrounded by pink flamingos. He had his umbrella up, despite the fact that it wasn’t raining. And on the nearby bank, peering through a bush, was what looked suspiciously like a giant fox in a waistcoat.
Lex spotted the fox in a few more paintings but it was always partially hidden or obscure. The teatime one was the only one that showed him clearly. Clear enough to see that he couldn’t possibly be real.
Lex moved on to the fourth floor. At one point, he opened a door and almost went through it before realising − just in time − that there was no floor beyond − just a sheer drop to the courtyard below. Later on, he came across a sort of games room that might have been fun were it not for the fact that all the balls on the snooker table, and all the chessmen on the chess table, were nailed firmly in place.
He did not come across another person during his explorations. The cowboys staying in the house were all either asleep or still down in the bar. But, in actual fact, Lex could have easily got away with wandering about the house, even as Sid the Kid, for it was just so easy to get lost, which was probably why the other cowboys stuck to the bar and the bedrooms rather than attempting to navigate the rest of this madhouse.
As Lex went on, he began to feel a little disheartened, for the house was just so big. It had taken years to build and it would take years to search. Jesse had been here on four separate occasions looking for the sword and had no luck. Hundreds had attempted the task before him but with no success. Lex had only four days before the third round began. Four days to do what everyone before him had failed to do.
He had an excellent sense of direction but, when he started trying to make his way back to his bedroom, he found it extremely difficult, even with the map he’d drawn. The problem was that most of the rooms had doors leading to several other rooms. It was not simply a case of one room following on from another in a logical order.
At one point, he came across a room that was full of doors. There was a grand total of twenty, set around the walls. Lex opened every single one of them, sure that many must lead to the same room. One door led nowhere: when Lex opened it, there was just a brick wall behind it. And another led to a room so small there was no way any human would ever be able to get into it. But the other eighteen doors all led to different rooms. How was that even possible? Surely there should not be enough space for them all. Granted, they were all narrow rooms but even so . . .
Lex felt a mounting sense of frustration. The house was too big and there was no logic to it. He could be the cleverest person in the world and still be unable to crack the riddle on the stained-glass windows. Trying to unravel the messed-up mind of a madman was like trying to untangle a never-ending ball of string.
Still, there was nothing for it but to forge on. Lex spent most of that night exploring the house. In fact, due to the fact that he got hopelessly lost, he was later back to his room than he’d intended, and only fell into his hammock a bare hour before the sun began to rise.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE BLACK SWANN AND THE SECRET TEA PARLOUR
The next two days were a tiresome, irksome business for Lex. His time was split between playing Jesse’s pet monkey for the entertainment of the other cowboys down in the bar, and searching for the sword at night. It was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. If Lex had had a proper riddle to work with, he would have cracked it already by now, but all he had to go on was a madman’s drivel that might not even hold the answer at all.
Something unexpected happened on the second morning, though: Jeremiah came to Dry Gulch House. Lex was in the bar when he arrived. Jeremiah came on his own, by carriage − the fool. He must have brought the carriage with him on board his ship, for it had the East coat of arms emblazoned in gold on the door. No doubt he had travelled across the desert in it when he reached the Western shore and was forced to leave his ship behind.
Lex was sitting by the window eating a tin of beans when Jeremiah arrived. Someone had given him a spoon but, for the look of the thing, he felt compelled to spill most of them down the front of his shirt, anyway.
No one actually noticed Jeremiah until he walked into the bar. When he came in, dressed in his fancy royal-blue coat with the golden buttons, hair brushed, jaw shaved and generally looking as clean cut as a man can be without being a woman, he couldn’t have stuck out any more than he did. Everyone went quiet, staring at him in amazement. Everyone knew that only cowboys were allowed into Dry Gulch House, now. Peasants weren’t allowed, farmers weren’t allowed and noblemen definitely were not allowed.
‘I am Jeremiah East,’ he announced to the room. His booted feet were planted firmly apart on the floor like he owned the place. It was clear that he was pleased with the fact that everyone had gone silent at his appearance. He had no idea that this was just the calm before the storm. ‘This house was the rightful property of my great-great-uncle, Nathaniel East. It was unlawfully taken from him a hundred years ago by savages. I have consulted a lawyer who has assured me that, despite the time that has elapsed, no deed of ownership was ever passed. This house is therefore still the property of the East family. You are all trespassing. I will give you one hour to vacate the premises. I expect you all to provide me with contact details so that later we can negotiate reparations for the vandalism done to the house. If you carry out my instructions to the letter then I will agree to waive my lawful right to collect rent for the period during which this house has been illegally occupied.’
Lex goggled at him. He’d known Jeremiah could be stupid, but he hadn’t realised just how stupid. As an ex-law-student, Lex knew that everything Jeremiah had said was, technically, true. But things like that just didn’t matter out here. Not here in the Wild West where disputes were decided by duels and the sheriff was just someone to throw stuff at on a slow-moving day.
The scar-faced cowboy Lex had crossed earlier was the first to react. He stood up from the table where he’d been drinking and told Jeremiah − with rather a lot of unnecessary swearing − to get out. Jeremiah actually looked shocked and outraged by this. It was clear that he had expected his little speech to work flawlessly.
‘The law is on my side,’ he said, going quite pale with anger. ‘I have the documentation with me, if you’d like to examine it. It’s quite bad enough that my poor uncle was slaughtered right here in his own home by a gang of savages like you, without having his house overrun by them as well! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves! You’re a corrupt, contemptible lot of cowards and I want you out of my family’s house right now.’
Ca
lling them cowards was going just that little bit too far. These were men who produced far too much testosterone as it was, and prided themselves on being tough and manly and other such meaningless things. Yet there Jeremiah stood, looking rather smug and clearly thinking that he had just put everyone in their place, when, actually, the most likely reaction now was for one of the cowboys to stand up and shoot him straight in the chest.
‘Y’know I’m getting the sort of feeling that history is about to repeat itself,’ the scar-faced cowboy said. ‘First the uncle, then the nephew. We’ll put your head up in the trophy room, kid.’
‘You wouldn’t dare touch me!’ Jeremiah sneered.
Lex could have groaned aloud. He believed it! The idiot actually believed he wouldn’t be harmed here, when the fact was that he was seconds away from either being shot, or dragged outside to be strung up from the nearest tree. Lex had to wonder how the nobleman had even managed to survive into adulthood. He shook his head in despair (but only on the inside). The parents were to blame, really. This was what a posh school and too many private fencing classes could do to a person. But Jeremiah getting himself killed was the last thing Lex wanted. After all, he didn’t want to win the Game by default. Where would be the fun in that? He wanted to win gloriously. And that would be difficult to do with both Lorella and Jeremiah dead, and no one but Tess and a little sprite left to compete against. It would be like being the only adult on a toddlers’ wrestling team: you’d win all right, but there would be no glory in it. No, this wouldn’t do at all. Lex was just going to have to save the nobleman from himself. Again.
