For a long moment, there was nothing: no new sounds and no movement other than the circling bird on the other side of the glass. Then the air around him shifted, and somehow the gallery shifted too, in a way Pantin could understand only as a sort of sigh. The wood-on-wood slither came again, taking the clock-ticking away with it. Pantin took a deep breath and opened his notebook to the page with this gallery on it. He turned the page and looked down at the sketch he had begun of the other gallery, the one with the rust-colored carpet.
Now, I don’t know why the house’s answer to Pantin’s asking for access to its most vicious chamber was to make him pass through another similarly malevolent space first. Perhaps the house or the clock parlor or whatever entity had the most influence at that moment decided that it had better show Pantin what he was asking for. Perhaps the house figured if the boy couldn’t manage the bloody gallery, he certainly couldn’t survive the map room. Perhaps it decided the boy must have some sort of death wish, in which case the house was fully within its rights to decide to set his inevitable end in the gallery, where the carpet was already spoiled beyond fixing and blood splatter didn’t particularly show up against the flocked red wallpaper.
Who can know these things, really? We spend our lives passing through spaces, not wondering what they think of us or what logic they possess, other than the logic we imposed on them as builders or occupants, which is nothing more than a reflection. Surely places, if they survive for long, develop their own logic. Their own personalities. Their own senses of strategy.
In any case, Pantin grabbed his lantern, scrambled to his feet, opened the door, and flung himself into the red gallery without a clue as to what he was in for. It’s possible the house did him one last favor on his way through the doorway, because his foot caught on something right at the threshold and he landed on his hands and knees. His light rolled away and went out, flashing its last flicker on the sharpened, moving blade of a pikestaff. The blade, which had been in motion since just before the boy had opened the door, missed his head by inches and embedded itself in the door frame hard enough to send splinters flying. One of those splinters nicked Pantin’s ear as he rolled sideways screaming and saw the suit of armor motionless by the door, bent into an unnatural curve with one end of the pole clutched in its gauntlets and the blade still stuck where it had landed.
He spotted the second suit of armor moving in the dimness out of the corner of his eye, but the moment he looked straight at it, it stopped. At a sound behind him, he whirled to find the suit with the pike motionless, but its blade was now free of the door frame. Another wheeze of scraping metal yanked his head around to see a third suit standing stock-still in the middle of the gallery, right between Pantin and the curving staircase that led to the foyer. A fourth suit behind the third had frozen in the act of stepping away from the wall opposite the balustrade.
More sounds behind him, and Pantin spun again. The second suit was much closer now, and it carried a huge, gleaming battle-axe. But in pivoting, Pantin had turned his back to Three and Four, and he could hear both of them moving. He turned to check on the first one, and not a moment too soon. Number One froze with the pikestaff over its shoulder, and it’s likely that with even a second more, it would have swung for Pantin’s head, and that would’ve been the end of this story.
The underlying geometry of the house might’ve been incomprehensible, but the logic behind the suits of armor was crystal clear to Pantin, who had played Stop and Go in the schoolyard plenty of times and who had no problem accepting the idea that otherwise-inanimate objects might be able to move when one wasn’t looking. He scrambled backwards across the gallery until his shoulders touched the balustrade, turning his head rapidly from left to right to try to keep an eye on all four suits. He couldn’t quite do it; the suits had been at this for a good hundred years, and they knew where all the sightlines were. And they were fast—they didn’t fail to take advantage of every half-second Pantin’s eyes were elsewhere.
By the time the boy was on his feet again with his back to the railing, Number One was halfway across the gallery with its pike ready to strike and Numbers Two and Three had made some good progress toward him from the opposite ends of the space. Behind Three, Number Four had taken up a sentry position at the top of the stairs. Pantin suspected that was a bit of a bluff, since he was pretty sure all he’d have to do to keep the suit immobile was walk up to it, looking right at it, and keep his eyes on it until he was safely down on the first floor. But it hardly mattered, because he’d also have to pass Three to do that, and once he was past, he’d have to keep his back to Three in order to keep his eyes on Four. Not to mention if he kept watch on Three and Four for any extended period of time, he’d have his back to Two, and Number One was a yard away with its very long weapon at the
