'O'corse, he's a bit skinnier'n me,' said Gaspode, after a while.
'Now you two run and fetch help,' said Victor. 'Er. We'll wait here.'
He heard them disappear into the distance. Laddie's faraway barking indicated that they had reached the outside air.
Victor sat back.
'Now all we have to do is wait,' he said.
'We're in the hill, aren't we?' said Ginger's voice in the darkness.
'Yes.'
'How did we get here?'
'I followed you.'
'I told you to stop me.'
'Yes, but then you tied me up.'
'I did no such thing!'
'You tied me up,' repeated Victor. 'And then you came here and opened the door and made a torch of some sort and went all the way into that - that place. I dread to think of what you'd have done if I hadn't woken you up.'
There was a pause.
'I really did all that?' said Ginger uncertainly.
'You really did.'
'But I don't remember any of it!'
'I believe you. But you still did it.'
'What - what was that place, anyway?'
Victor shifted in the darkness, trying to make himself comfortable.
'I don't know,' he confessed. 'At first I thought it was a temple. And it looked as though people used it for watching moving pictures.'
'But it looked hundreds of years old!'
'Thousands, I expect.'
'But look, that can't be right,' said Ginger, in the small voice of one trying to be reasonable while madness is breaking down the door with a cleaver. 'The alchemists only got the idea a few months ago.'
'Yes. It's something to think about.'
He reached out and found her. Her body was ramrod stiff and flinched at his touch.
'We're safe enough here,' he added. 'Gaspode will soon bring back some help. Don't you worry about that.'
He tried not to think about the sea slapping at the stairs, and the many-legged things that scuttled over the midnight floor. He tried to put out of his mind the thought of octopi slithering silently over the seats in front of that living, shifting screen. He tried to forget the patrons who had been sitting in the darkness while, above them, centuries passed. Perhaps they were waiting for the lady to come around with the banged grains and hot sausages.
The whole of life is just like watching a click, he thought. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself from the clues.
And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house.