He reached up through that wet nothingness and grabbed at the wooden frame that held the panes of glass in place. Another pane splashed and dripped away from his touch and his hand closed on the wood, which thankfully was as solid as it looked. More so—it felt as solid as iron in his palm. He thought it might hold his weight.

Thus anchored, he carefully brought his right hand up to grab at the frame as well. He pulled himself up the frame as if climbing a ladder. Little by little his legs came free of the floor. The moonlight did not stick to them or hang in droplets from his breeches, nor did the moonlight shift or flow as he pulled free of it.

In time he climbed up onto the frame of the window altogether, and got his feet up on the sill so he could stand there and let his legs take his weight. Then he looked down.

The floor below him looked as solid as ever. The mouths in the shadows had shut themselves again and showed only darkness. The hall was exactly as it had been when he first entered it. He had progressed about six feet down its length.

Well. That was something. He also had the measure of the place now. He knew its rules—at least some of them.

The next patch of moonlight was ten feet away. He needed to cross over a maw of darkness to get there, and when he arrived he would have to deal with its floor trying to swallow him whole. He thought he might know a way to handle that. Taking the rope from around his waist—the same one he and Kemper had used to get inside the villa, with its end dipped in silver—he tied it to the highest part of the window frame. He gave the rope a couple hard tugs until he was sure it would not come unknotted when he put his weight on it. Then, holding to its silver end, he leapt back to the featureless wall behind him, where the door had been when he came in. The floor there was solid and did not have teeth. It was perhaps the only patch of ground he could stand on safely in the entire hallway.

He rubbed his palms on his breeches to wipe the sweat away, then tied the silver end of the rope around his wrist. Getting a good running start, he dashed forward to the patch of liquid moonlight and then jumped up onto the rope. It swung him far out over the moonlit floor and up over the darkness beyond.

Beneath him teeth snapped at the air and a long pink tongue shot out to grab him the way a frog seizes a fly. Malden pulled his legs up and tucked them against his chest, and the tongue barely tickled him as he passed.