Had the wallpaper been like that, before? Hadn’t the bedspread been a little threadbare? For that matter, had there been curtains? I couldn’t remember. The room seemed less determinedly reassuring and more… exotic? Not quite. Well, I’d been awfully tired.

I put my boots back on and cleaned up a little at the dresser. When I tried the door, I felt an instant of fright. Then I remembered I’d locked it. At least nobody had been hanging curtains while I slept.

In the hall, on the floor by the door, I found my canvas pack. So the porter had come up. I dropped it in a ladderback chair that I didn’t remember, either. The corridor was quiet. I thought about trying Frances’s or Mick’s doors; then realized I didn’t know why I’d want to.

When I came out of the bathroom, the enormous gray dog was waiting in the hall. It rose to its feet and gave that articulate single wag of its tail. Then it turned and went to the junction of the next corridor, and looked back.

“Don’t tell me,” I said aloud. “The old mine caved in, and I have to come rescue little Timmy.” The dog, mercifully, did not respond. I could test matters by trying to walk back to my room, but why bother? I followed the dog.

A left turn, and a left, and I was at the top of the stairs. It was as annoying as not arriving at the top of the stairs the last time I tried it. At the bottom of the stairs I was in the beautiful front hall. The dog trotted into the ivy parlor. I thought it seemed a little smug; given the success Frances and I had had at reaching the same place by the same route, I supposed it had a right. I heard voices and clinking in the parlor: low, even voices and the noise of crockery used as its manufacturer had intended. It seemed, if not safe to go in, at least the next logical step.

Everyone looked up when I entered, including the dog. Everyone was China Black and Mr. Lyle, Frances and Mick. They were sitting on a pair of cushioned wicker couches that faced each other, one team to a couch. I had just begun to wonder which team I was on when I looked past them.

The far wall of the parlor held a log-swallowing fireplace, surrounded by painted tiles and complicated woodwork, surmounted by a mantelpiece with what seemed a hundred unmatched candlesticks on it, and a huge, gold-framed mirror over that. On either side, taking up the rest of the wall from side to side and floor to ceiling, fronted in leaded glass, were bookshelves. Full bookshelves.

I made the circuit around the couches without exactly seeing them and stood in front of the right-hand case. What was probably the complete works of Mark Twain, in leather. The Jungle Book. The Encyclopedia of Folklore. Treasure Island. Shakespeare, Yeats, Piercy, Eliot, Woolf. Halliburton’s Book of Marvels. Grieve’s herbal. Stephen Jay Gould and Martin Gardner. And those were the ones I recognized. Who were Gene Wolfe and Alice Walker and Kenneth Roberts and Jane Austen? Maya Angelou and John Crowley and Zora Neale Hurston? And there was another bookcase on the other side.