across floor and walls; the glancing illumination showed costumes historical and fantastical, fantastical-historical, and merely erotic wandering the unhallowed halls. Music blared and thumped from various sources: Abba in the ballroom, Queen in the gallery, grunge in the stables. The Norman church tower that was the oldest part of the building had been hung with red lanterns, and stray guests sat on the twisting stair smoking, snorting, and pill popping, until some of them could actually see the headless ghost of William Fitzherbert watching them in horror from under his own arm. Spiders that had lurked undisturbed for generations scuttled into hiding. In the kitchen, a poltergeist worked among the drinks, adding unexpected ingredients, but no one noticed.
Suddenly, all over the house—all over the country—the music stopped. Midnight struck. Those who were still conscious laughed and wept and kissed and hugged with more than their customary exuberance: it was, after all, the second millennium, and mere survival was something worth celebrating. The unsteady throng caroled “Auld Lang Syne,” a ballad written expressly to be sung by inebriates. Some revelers removed masks, others removed clothing (not necessarily their own). One hapless youth threw up over the balustrade of the gallery in the misguided belief that he was vomiting into the moat. There was no moat. In the dining hall, a beauty with long black hair and in a trailing gown of tattered chiffon refused to unmask, telling her light-hearted molester: “I am Morgause, queen of air and darkness. Who are you to look upon the unknown enchantment of my face?”
“More—gauze?” hazarded her admirer, touching the chiffon.
“Sister of Morgan Le Fay,” said a celebrated literary critic, thinly disguised under the scaly features and curling horns of a low-grade demon. “Mother—according to some—of the traitor Mordred. I think the lady has been reading T. H. White.”
“Who was he?” asked a tall blonde in a leather corselette, sporting short spiked hair and long spiked heels. Behind a mask of scarlet feathers her eyes gleamed black. She did not listen to the answer; instead, her lips moved on words that the demon critic could not quite hear.
After a brief tussle, Morgause lost her visor and a couple of hairpieces, revealing a flushed Dana Walgrim, daughter of their host. She lunged at her molester, stumbled over her dress, and crashed to the floor; they heard the thud of her head hitting the parquet. There was a moment when the conversation stopped dead. Then people rushed forward and said the things people usually do under the circumstances: “Lift her head—No, don’t move her—She’s not badly hurt—There’s no blood—Give her air—Get some water—Give her brandy—She’ll come around.” She did not come around. Someone went to look for her brother; someone else called an ambulance. “No point,” said Lucas Walgrim, arriving on the scene with the slightly blank expression of a person who has gone from very drunk to very sober in a matter of seconds. “We’ll take her ourselves. My car’s in the drive.”
“You’ll lose your license,” said a nervous pirate.
“I’ll be careful.”
He scooped Dana into his arms; helpful hands supported her head and hitched up the long folds of her dress. As they went out the literary critic opined, turning back to the spike-haired blonde, “Drugs. And they only let her out of rehab three months ago.”
But the blonde had vanished.
In a small room some distance from the action, Kaspar Walgrim was oblivious to his daughter’s misfortune. One or two people had gone to search for him, thinking that news of the accident might be of interest, although father and child were barely on speaking terms. But they could not find him. The room where Walgrim sat was reached through the back of a wardrobe in the main bedchamber, the yielding panels revealing not a secret country of snow and magic, but an office equipped by a previous owner with an obsolete computer on the desk and books jacketed thickly with dust. Beside the computer lay a pristine sheet of paper headed Tenancy Agreement. Words wrote themselves in strangely spiky italics across the page. Kaspar Walgrim was not watching. His flannel-gray eyes had misted over like a windshield in cold weather. He was handsome in a chilly, bankeresque fashion, with an adamantine jaw and a mouth like the slit in a money box, but his present rigidity of expression was unnatural, the stony blankness of a zombie. The angled desk lamp illumined his face from below, underwriting browbone and cheekbone and cupping his eyes in pouches of