searching for a way out. Velvet wallpaper had covered the walls, and bookcases lined them. But now the former hung ragged as skin from a corpse, and the latter's leaded glass was cracked and sagged outward. Piles of papers and books, black with damp, lay scattered about the floor. The air was rich with imperial decay.
In front of the fire stood an overstuffed sofa, its back draped with an antimacassar of ancient vintage. Upon the sofa, book open upon its lap, sat a skeleton in reading cap and smoking jacket. Richards approached it quietly. It was long dead.
Despite the dampness of the room it was stiflingly hot. Richards hurriedly glanced about, searching by the dancing light of the fire. All the books were on the floor; the cases were empty. Richards picked one up and it disintegrated into mush, smearing his fingers with lost knowledge.
He closed the door with a click behind him and returned to the hallway. A burst of maniacal laughter sounded from somewhere in the bowels of the house.
Richards sighed, and considered what he would do next. Water dripped steadily from the ceiling: plash, plash, plash. The house groaned. Another wave of faintness passed over him. He forced himself on. There were two more doors on the ground floor, both under the stairwell balcony at the rear of the room. He picked the left.
This door opened upon a more modest part of the house: a stone-flagged corridor with two further doorways. One, at the far end, was sealed by a door of heavy, studded wood; the other, halfway down the lefthand wall, was empty, and it was here he went first. He went down a low step into a dusty scullery, two stone sinks against the wall adorned with brass taps, otherwise empty. A further door opened out into a large kitchen. A big fireplace occupied one wall, filled by a flaking range, a long pine table in front of it. In the far corner a door led outside, ivy creeping around its edges. A broken stoppered jar lay in a pile of salt in front of a smoky window. Two closets were built into the wall, and a large press stood against another. All were mouldering and devoid of content.
He went out of the scullery and kitchen, back into the corridor. He looked at the other door. His arm pulsed and he swayed. He was gripped by a sense of deep foreboding and made to hurry, but no sooner had the thought formed in his head than he was gripped with a nameless dread, and he had to force himself on, his legs fighting him every step of the way. It seemed to take forever to get to the door, and he hesitated before putting his hand to the catch. A deep cold emanated from the door, and it shrank back from him as he reached for it.
He grasped the handle, lifted and turned.
The door flew open. All the air in the corridor blasted toward the opening. Richards fell forward, managing to cling to the doorframe before he toppled down the stairs on the other side, five mossy stone steps descending to a turn, the cellar beyond awash with sickly light.
'Get out!' a voice bellowed. 'Get out!'
An invisible hand shoved him hard in the chest, sending him sprawling onto the flags. The door slammed and the wind ceased, the intense feeling of fear going with it.
'Christ,' he said, 'I hope I don't end up having to go down there.' He struggled up, nearly fainting as pain shot up and down his ruined arm. He felt nauseous, and had to wait for a full five minutes before he felt well enough to stand.
Only one door remained on the ground floor, back in the entrance hall. Richards picked his way round fallen mouldings and puddled water to it, in the corner by the fireplace that dominated the hall. Unlike the others, no decay tarnished it, and the colour of its mahogany was rich and red. Brass was expertly inlaid round the hinges and handle. It was a handsome door, a warm door. Richards pushed it open, and immediately recoiled from what he saw inside.
A dining room, long and dark, the candles that illuminated it struggling to push the shadows back into black flock wallpaper. It was cleaner than the rest of the house, free of time's cruelties. Clean, except the long table in the middle.
Blood soaked the linen tablecloth. Two gory ruins that had once been people, though Richards could tell that only by a single severed hand half-open on the floor. Around the corpses were mottled things, white skin marbled with purple veins. Their clawed feet dug through the cloth into the wood where they squatted on the table. Useless wings hung from their shoulder blades, quivering as their heads jerked from side to side as they tore at the corpses.
They looked up from their bloody meal, these wan guests with their pinched faces. Red muzzles hissed out their hatred. Richards slammed the door.
He backed away, eyes on the wood, but nothing came out. He went to the foot of the stairs. Up them he walked, and turned onto the grey floorboards of a landing. It was long as a street, at odds with the external geometry of the house. There were many doors in both directions, but one at the very end made him stop.
A child's bedroom door, white, a little battered and grubbied by the application of crayons, damaged motile stickers playing scenes of princesses and ponies across its middle, a ripped YamaYama motif at the top, disembodied rabbity hands waving slowly back and forth. Richards mustered his strength and walked as fast as he was able, faster as he approached, ignoring the urgent pleas coming from the other rooms. By the time he reached it he was striding forward, and he barely slowed as he grasped the handle, twisted it and flung open the door.
The room inside was clean and perfect, the room of a young girl whose mother cared for her. Bright sunshine beat on a cascade of terracotta roofs stepping down in huddles to peer at a blue sea; hot, but in the room it was cool. Muslin curtains stirred in a light breeze. A door leading to a balcony stood open, a rectangle of warmth extending from outside across the wooden floor, framing toys in gold, draping another doorway of light across the room's narrow bed.
A man sat on the bed, in the centre of the light from the balcony. He stirred as Richards closed the door, and turned to face the AI.
'Giacomo Vellini, I presume,' said Richards.
The man looked at him blankly, face sorrowful yet empty. He frowned. 'Who are you?'
'I am the Class Five AI Richards,' said Richards.
'Are you? Oh.' The man turned back to the daylight, then back as if he'd remembered something important. 'I can't find her. I can't get out.'
Richards walked around the bed slowly to stand by the balcony door. 'Who can't you find, Waldo?'
'My sister, Marita.'
'Queen Isabella?'
A ghost of life came into the face of Waldo. 'Yes, that's right, Isabella. She used to play at queens as a little girl. She always wanted to be Queen Isabella.'
'The Spanish one?'
Waldo nodded and smiled dreamily. 'Yes, the Spanish one.'
'What happened to you, Waldo? Can you remember?'
Waldo shook his head. 'I had something to tell her, and I fell asleep. When I woke up I couldn't find her. I don't know. I'm sorry, I get confused.'
'This door here, is this the way out?'
Waldo nodded. 'But I can't go through.' He frowned. 'Why?'
Richards was filled with sympathy; he knew why. He'd seen this before. Waldo was a ghost in the machine, an imprint of a living mind left when its owner had died, a fragmented one at that. He saw that the light extended right around Waldo uninterrupted. He had no shadow. That made a lot of sense.
'I don't think you can go back that way, Waldo,' he said. Richards crouched low and looked up into the man's face. Waldo was, had been, thirty-five, but he looked boyish; he carried a little too much fat and it smoothed his features. He looked lost. 'But do you mind if I try?' said Richards gently.
Waldo looked at him as if he'd not seen him before, then his face cleared. 'Yes, yes, of course.'
Richards turned to the door. That was as good as a permission, from a human user in a Reality Realm.
He was free.
His mind rapidly reconfigured itself, bursting from his human avatar and layering itself into the complexities of the ragtag Reality 37. He felt the world being torn apart, like the tugs of stitches coming from a healed wound, k52's ravenous, alien code rewriting it into something new, something unrealised, the germ of a possibility.
He peered into it and almost laughed at k52's audacity. He had to talk to Otto. Now.
His perception of the virtuality dissolved into the roar and tumult of the System Wide Grid. The balcony door became a portal, a hole punched secret and secure through the walls surrounding the supposedly inviolate RealWorld Reality Realms; Waldo's back door. He pushed part of himself through it. Tendrils of fact reached out to
