than nine feet tall, more than ten with the architrave frames, so the regular distance was an optical illusion.
The marble squares on the floor would have been two feet on a side in any designer magazine, but in Joey’s house they were three. A full yard. The baseboards would have been twelve inches high in a fancy Victorian place. In Joey’s house they were a full foot and a half. A regular door knob would hit me in the thigh. Joey’s door knobs would hit me in the ribs. And so on. The net effect was I felt very small. Like I had been shrunk, by a mad scientist. Maybe the aluminium glass people would take it up next.
And I felt slow. Obviously. It took 50 per cent longer to get anywhere. Three steps from A to B was really four and a half. It was like walking through molasses. Or walking backward. Always hustling, and getting nowhere. Like going up the down escalator. Disorienting, like a whole different dimension.
I stopped what I thought was six feet from where the hallway turned. But it could have been nine. Either way I held my breath and listened. And heard nothing. No crunching of broken glass underfoot, and no opening and closing of doors. So I inched towards the corner, or three-quarter-inched, or an inch and a half, or whatever it really was. I had the Browning in my left hand, and the Glock in my right, with one in the chamber and twelve in the magazine. Five rounds expended so far, four under the Jaguar’s hood at Charlie’s house, and one into the bowling club’s subsoil, via Joey.
I figured if Kott was expecting a head to come around the corner, he would be expecting it at normal height, purely as a matter of default instinct. But what was normal? Eye level about five feet six inches from the ground, probably, which was 55 per cent of a normal room’s height. Which would translate to about eight feet three inches in Joey’s funhouse world. Which would mean Kott would be staring way over my head. But even so I played it safe. I made sure he would be staring over my head. I knelt down low and took a look at baseboard level, which because of the millwork’s exaggerated height was perfectly comfortable.
I pictured my brow and my eyes, suddenly visible, but tiny next to the extravagant moulding.
No sign of Kott.
I saw shards of glass on the marble. From the window. I saw closed doors. To parlours, and libraries, and sitting rooms. I didn’t see Kott. Was he behind a closed door? Temporarily, maybe. Or perhaps he had never moved. Perhaps he was still upstairs, in the guest accommodations, patient like snipers were, with his .50-calibre Barrett on a table, aimed directly at the door to the suite.
I thought back to the architect’s blueprint we had seen. The guest suite was in the rear left quadrant of the house. Above the kitchen wing, basically. Up the stairs, and turn right. I stood up again, and checked all four ways, and breathed in, and breathed out.
Then I started up the stairs.
FIFTY-FIVE
THE STAIRS WENT half the way up on the left, and then turned a 180 on a half-landing, and went the rest of the way up on the right. And like everything else in the house they were regular items, but expanded in size, so I had to labour up them, stepping 50 per cent higher than normal each time, lurching forward half as far again as my muscle memory expected, to reach the next stair, and then repeating it all. Plus I was aware the back of my head was about to be visible in the upstairs hallway, through whatever kind of railings or spindles the carpenter had used. Kott could be up there, prone, with his muzzle right in line with the banister. He would get me in the back, just before I stepped up to the half-landing. At a range of about twelve feet. Which was four yards. And I wasn’t made of aluminium oxynitride.
So I hugged the wall, and went up backward, until I could see the second-floor hallway for myself. It was empty. No sign of Kott. I hustled the rest of the way and found myself in what looked like a repeat of the downstairs hallway, except the floor was carpet, not marble. Carpet as wide as a new-mown prairie. I saw a bunch of doors, all