“It’s just weather. Weather never hurt anyone.”

Cait rolled her eyes.

“Anyway, Terrence said he’d give me a lift,” said Effie. “Didn’t you Terrence?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’ll take Effie back to the university.”

“All right,” said Orwell. “Well, we’ll see you at the lecture.”

“If they survive,” said Cait. “If we survive.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” said Orwell.

“I’m going to go and set up,” said Jupiter Peacock, checking his pompadour again in Lady Tchainsaw’s massive mirror. “I believe we have most things in place. Lady T, can you go and organize the cats?”

“I am allergic to them,” she said. “Vile creatures.”

“Professor G?”

Gotthard Forestfloor sighed. “All right,” he said. “But this had better work. Lady Tchainsaw, you stay here and supervise the pedesis. And then once everything has been done you can bring the girl to us.”

Effie was lying on Lady Tchainsaw’s black velvet chaise longue, pretending to be unconscious. Her hands and feet were tied together with silk scarves. Lying on a vast bear rug on the ground, Terrence Deer-Hart really was unconscious. He’d drunk the vial of fluid and taken the little pill that Lady Tchainsaw had given him. Now he had found himself in some sort of incomprehensible landscape with some strange voice telling him he had two choices. What did this mean? He knew he was supposed to be entering the girl’s mind to learn how she went to some library in the Otherworld. But how was he supposed to get in?

You now have two choices, said the woman, again.

What does that mean? Terrence asked her back.

You can go into one of the structures around you, the voice explained. They represent the consciousnesses of people near you on the physical plane.

Terrence looked around him. There was a vast, avant-garde building with Russian domes and a black marble exterior. The only other building he could see apart from that was a small yellow-brick townhouse with the word LIBRARY on it and a poster advertising a special display of adventure stories. That must represent the girl. So, all he had to do was go in through the antique revolving door and . . .

Effie felt Terrence Deer-Hart entering her mind. She hadn’t been entirely sure what she was going to do with him, but it became immediately obvious once she sensed his empty, troubled soul. The first thing she did was mentally flip him on his back, like a karate throwdown of the mind. Terrence’s consciousness now just watched as Effie—on the physical plane—removed the silk scarves from her arms and legs using only her mind to do so and, in a very deft maneuver, then got up off the chaise longue and retied the scarves around Lady Tchainsaw’s arms and legs.