To make matters worse, the room swayed. Not very much and not very often, but he could feel it. It was like a gigantic robot trying to put her cute little metal box to bed. He kept telling himself it was all in his imagination, but it sure seemed real enough when he leaned over the toilet and threw up.

Frazier was a miserable, miserable man, and it only poured salt in his wounds that he didn’t know why he was here, or who had captured him.

It had to have something to do with that nuisance of all nuisances, George. Master George. Please. What kind of man has the audacity to refer to himself as Master anything?

The sound of scraping metal jolted him from his moping. He looked up to see a small slot had slid open in the center of the main door, only a couple of inches tall and wide and about waist-high from the floor.

This is new. He stood and walked over to the opening, peeking through. He yelped and fell backward onto his bed when a cat’s face suddenly appeared, baring its fangs and hissing.

“Who’s there!” he yelled, his voice echoing off the walls with a hollow, creepy boom. He recovered his wits and righted himself, staring at the small open space. The cat had already disappeared, replaced by a mouth with an old ruddy pair of chapped lips.

“Hello in there?” the mouth spoke, the voice heavy with an English accent.

“Yeah, who is it?” Frazier grunted back at his captor, though he already knew who was behind the door.

“Quite sorry about the inconvenience,” Master George said. “Won’t be long now before we send you on your way.”

“Inconvenience?” Frazier snarled. “That’s what you call locking up a man for three months?”

“Come on, old chap. Can you blame us after what you did to those poor children?”

“Just following orders, old man.” Frazier sniffed and folded his arms, pouting like a little kid. “I never meant any true harm. I was, uh, just playing around with the car to scare them. No big deal.”

“I must say,” George countered, “I disagree quite strongly with your assessment of the situation. Mistress Jane has gotten too dangerous. She’s gone too far. I mustn’t allow you to return to her until . . . we’ve taken care of something.”

“Taken care of what?”

“Just one more month or so, my good man,” George replied, ignoring the question. “Then we’ll send you off to the Thirteenth where we won’t have to worry about you coming back.”

Intense alarms jangled in Frazier’s head. What the old man had just said made no sense. Unless . . .

“What do you—”

His words died in the metallic echo of the small door sliding shut.

Chapter

32

~

Shattered Glass