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.
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
