“Hell, I don’t know,” Gregory said, almost stammering. “I went inside. The downstairs was dark. A car was in the garage, and there were lights on upstairs in the back. I reckoned that the downstairs office was closed for the night. If I was quiet, I could get away with it. The back door wasn’t even locked, so I went in….”

“Where I found him,” Oversoul Seven said briskly.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” George’s eyebrows leapt upward.

“Well, he didn’t take anything, that’s the important thing,” Seven said. “We had a talk. So I didn’t want him to get in more trouble than he was….”

“For Christ’s sake,” George said.

“So when you left,” Seven said, brightly, “I went downstairs to see what was going on, and found Gregory here pawing around looking for drugs.”

George, looking awed, just stared at Seven. “My God, that was a brave thing to do,” he said. “Dumb. But brave.”

Seven had the grace to blush, and George said, “But why? I’d have been able to handle it okay.”

Seven did not answer, leaving George to figure things out for himself.

“Yeah,…” George said, still confused.

Gregory, who had been just standing there, then said, “That isn’t all, though. This last is wild.”

“This last,” Seven was sure, was going to consist of Gregory’s story about finding the gaslights turned on, the house appearing in the time of George’s grandfather, and worse—of Gregory’s confrontation with George the First. Seven braced himself and eyed George uneasily.

“Wild?” George thundered, sounding quite a bit like his grandfather. “That’s all these last few days have been. Wild. So get on with it.”

Gregory gulped. “Well, before Seven found me, somebody else did—a gentleman dressed in an old-fashioned red dressing gown, carrying an ancient rifle. He aimed it right at me. First, though, he switched on the lights, only they weren’t electric. There were gaslights all over. I yelled I wasn’t armed at all.”

Silence. George’s mouth dropped open. He rubbed his brow and said, “I just don’t believe what I’m hearing.”

“I didn’t believe it either,” Gregory nearly shouted. He was more and more agitated, remembering. “He sat me down and gave me a lecture, and he was a dentist, too. He put cloves on my gums. Only … everything looked like a movie set, like the room was out of the last century or something. I thought … it was some crazy relative of yours or something. He said he was Dr. George Brainbridge. I was trying to figure out what to do when Dr. Seven, here, came in. He yelled, and the guy in the dressing gown picked up his rifle and went upstairs. Then Seven let me go. I ran back to the psych center without being caught. The next morning, Window healed my teeth.”