Free The Stranger by Max Frei, Polly Gannon Page A

to restore order to it. There was no time to spare.
    All that happened is still right before my very eyes, though at the same time the memory is vague.
    At first we seemed to roam aimlessly through the enormous house. The people in gray tried to run away from us, although some of them snarled at us and bared their teeth.
    Sometimes they behaved even more bizarrely. In the large salon with the fountain, where Sir Makluk had received us the first time, two boys executed an intricate ritual dance in complete silence. They gracefully ensnared themselves in what looked like neon streamers. When we approached them, however, we saw with horror that the streamers were their own intestines, which the boys were pensively drawing from their own stomachs. There was no blood—and no pain, either, apparently. The viscera glistened in the twilight of the huge hall, reflected in the streams of water from the fountain.
    “There’s nothing we can do to save them,” Juffin whispered. With a careful gesture he suspended the scene. Now that the curse that stopped the World had been carried out, there was no need to start the whole process all over each time. The curse followed behind Juffin like the train of a garment, and I, in some way, helped him carry it. The only thing to do was to wrap each room as we came to it in the shadow of the curse, forcing people to freeze in the most eccentric poses.
    We wandered through the house; our journey seemed to have no end. Sometimes I was beset by the thirst for blood, but I was too preoccupied by warding off the attacks of the frenzied household items hunting us down. More than anything else, I was insulted by the attack of a thick volume of the Chronicles of Uguland.
    “Hey! I read you, you jerk!” I shouted indignantly, fending off the assault of the savage fount of knowledge with a weighty cane with which I had sensibly armed myself at the start of our campaign. Sir Juffin put a stop to this scene, as well.
    In one of the rooms I saw my own reflection in a mirror and shuddered. Where had those burning eyes and sunken cheeks come from? When had I become so emaciated and haggard? I had eaten not so very long ago! Actually, from Count Dracula’s point of view, I had never eaten anything worthwhile. Ugh! How disgusting! But it wasn’t too difficult to keep myself in check. A person grows used to everything. We’ll leave it at that.
    We roamed through the house. It seemed that was the way it would always be from now on: time had stopped, we had died, and ended up in our individual, honestly earned purgatory. In one of the rooms, we came upon Sir Makluk himself. He was occupied with domestic duties: he was industriously rolling up an enormous bookcase, with all the books inside it. The most amazing thing was that he was already halfway finished. The old man turned to us and asked amiably how we were doing. “Soon everything will be well,” Juffin promised, and Sir Makluk froze in the middle of his monstrous labors. Yet another statue in this newly established wax museum. A youth in gray was shuffling around on the threshold, quietly snarling and clapping his hands rhythmically. In a moment, he froze, too.
    Then we walked through the empty corridor, and it seemed to me that I was lagging behind ourselves, because for a fraction of a second I observed the backs of two heads. One belonged to Sir Juffin, and the other was my own.
    “Are you tired, Sir Max?” Juffin asked with a smile.
    “Let’s get out of here,” I replied mechanically.
    “Sure. What is there left for us to do here? Get ready. Soon you’ll be fine.”
    “I already feel pretty normal. Everything has passed, except for the nausea.”
    “That’s just hunger. A couple bucketfuls of my blood and it will disappear like magic!”
    “Very funny.”
    “If I didn’t laugh I’d retch at the sight of you. Have you looked in the mirror?”
    “You think you looked any better when you hissed at the monster in the