Percy crossed the wrought iron gate. A few steps along the gravel path, he turned back to look at the busy city street beyond the garden wall. No one ever looked at him or at the house. Lights flared everywhere as the night settled, in windows and street lamps and passing carriages. People walked with empty purpose. He had never known that a busy street could be so ruthless. But where he stood, past that rock wall covered in ivy, it smelled of stillness and dew, and an earth-deep quiet spread its roots all over the garden.

Percy looked at a cluster of gardenias and rhododendrons to his right. Three dishevelled heads stuck out of a dishevelled shrub. Valeria nodded at him before they retreated back into the leaves. Somehow it didn't make him feel much safer.

He walked over to one of the rose bushes, hesitated between a red and a white, and went for a white. He would sooner wave something white rather than red in front of an enraged beast. Unless the colours had some bearing on what would happen to him? Maybe the girl hadn't been torn to pieces because she'd picked a red rose. He raised his hand, about to slap himself as he always did when he felt his own thoughts lock him into place, but stopped when he remembered the three heads watching on.

The small handwritten cards at the foot of the bushes caught his eye. He leaned down to read one of them. "Opening Gala of the Theatre Royal", followed by a date. And the card next to it, "Spring Charity Concert", and another date. The scent of the red roses touched its velvet hand to his cheek.

Another quick glance at the crowded shrub, and then in the opposite direction, at the door of the manor. He was ashamed of how scared he was. He missed home now. A sudden burst of anger at himself took hold of his hand, and forced his fingers around a rose stem, snapping it off.

A roar rushed him with unrelenting might. It pushed him to the ground and scraped his cheek on the rough gravel. In an instant, he scrambled to his knees, feeling his breath burn his lungs in a blazing panic. He looked hazy-eyed at the front door of the manor, but saw nothing and no one. A trembling leg hoisted him up into a half-standing, half-crouching, fully-faltering position. Out of nowhere, two inescapably strong arms wrapped around him and lifted him up. His feet left the ground, his vision left him, and his body slumped into sudden slumber.

Percy had fainted before. He knew how it went. This was perhaps the closest he had ever got to feeling unashamed of his reasons for fainting. The first time had involved a mounted swordfish; the second time, an accidental and ignominious collision with a cart full of geese; so this was a remarkable improvement.

He felt the first stirrings of wakefulness creep over him. He resented it, and the throbbing headache it brought, but at least he seemed to be lying on something comfortable.

"... come here of all places. This was my turf."

He opened his eyes.

And saw nothing but another pair of eyes staring at him, into him, mere inches from his face. A little gasp squeaked out of him.

The pair of green eyes belonged to an attractive girl about his age, with a heart-shaped face and a heart-shaped mouth. Her wavy brown hair had a creamy richness to it, nothing, Percy thought uselessly, like the tired straw brown of Myrtle's hair.

She stared at him still, unfazed as he flinched and backed away from her. He was in a palatial bedroom, with red brocade wallpaper and a high, gold-trimmed white ceiling. In fact, everywhere and everything had golden frills, busying themselves over every surface and giving the room a jewel-like sparkle. He was lying on an ample four poster bed with golden vines wrapped around them. A fireplace facing the bed roared with avid intensity.

"So who are you?" the girl asked.

She sat next to him on the edge of the bed, and wore a simple but pretty lilac dress. Somehow, she managed to sound both like she was interested, and like she didn't care.

"I'm... Percy. Can I ask the same of you?"

"You can always ask."

"Who are you, then?"

"I'm Delia."

"Alright. Well, I suppose that doesn't tell us much about each other."

He tried to steady his racing heart. His eyes would occasionally scour the room for any hint of a beastly shadow.

"Don't worry, he's not here" she sighed.

"I – right. I'm assuming you're the girl he took?"

"Why did you get taken?"

He was struck by how defensive she sounded. Nothing in her demeanour was flagrant, but he'd heard that tone lacing his own voice many times before. And she was eager to throw his questions back at him.

"I... picked a rose."

She arched her eyebrows in disbelief, and a little chuckle bubbled past her pink lips.

"Really? With all the florists in this city, you decide to go flower picking in the grounds of the notoriously cursed house?"

"Well why did you do it then?"

Delia stared him down with a determined silence. He wondered how tall she was; it was hard to tell exactly, with her sitting down. But that stare of hers made her look quite tall.

"He's not happy he had to take you, you know" she said eventually, looking away from him to smooth down her dress. Her voice now sounded alarmingly matter-of-fact. "He said something when he brought you in, what was it... 'He's not muse material', something like that. But he has to follow the terms of the curse. All I'm saying is, don't be surprised if he's beastly to you."

"And he isn't beastly to you?"

"No more than in his usual way."

"And what way is that?"

"The way of all great artists. The way that got him cursed by a sorceress who doesn't understand the first thing about art. There's a reason he can't be as sociable or pleasant as other people. He's not like other people. His mind is filled with music all the time."

She wasn't looking at him now, so Percy took the chance to look at her. She wasn't smoothing her dress at all, like he'd thought at first: her hands and fingers moved in patterns over something that she could see on her lap, but he could not.

"I heard he's a great composer" he murmured.

"You heard?"

"I'm new in town. He's well-known here?"

"Of course he is" she sniffed with contempt, though he couldn't tell what exactly she was despising. Probably him. "He composes for the festival every year. If it wasn't for his entry they would never win against the other town. But they don't understand him."

She stood up primly from the bed and gestured to a chair by the fireplace. Draped over it was a fine pair of breeches and a magnificent silver tunic.

"Please put those on and come down to dinner. He'll be expecting us soon, and he abhors lateness."

Percy watched her leave the room. As soon as she closed the door behind her, he jumped from the bed, grabbed the lit candelabra on the bedside table, and went over to the window. The green velvet curtains had an obscene heaviness to them; he felt like he was parting open the eyelids of a gargantuan monster.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The window faced the front grounds and the street beyond them. He rattled the glass a little as he tried to open it, but gave up soon enough. He looked at the shrubbery that the others had hidden in, and waved the candelabra about a few times, until he was certain he would have caught their attention by then, if they were still there. He hoped they were.

He reluctantly walked away from the window and the view of the street it offered. He could already tell he was in the kind of house that went to great lengths to muffle out the world beyond its walls. He went to the chair by the fireplace and touched the tunic; it felt as soft as it looked. He couldn't remember the last time he had changed his clothes. He unbuttoned his own worn tunic and struggled out of it, tossing it aside with such eagerness that it toppled over a small ink blotter on a desk nearby.

Percy stopped with his dirt-laden trousers already halfway down his legs. An ink blotter. And a quill, and an inkwell, and bookends, and clocks and vases and a fire poker, and the candelabra he had grabbed earlier, which now sat on the desk, warming his bare backside. He covered it quickly, one hand for each cheek, even though it achieved very little. How could he not have remembered it earlier? This was the house where a curse had turned servants into objects. He did not quite know what that meant, and whether or not it would be easy to tell apart cursed household staff from normal household items. Until he understood it all better, he would be careful; he had no desire of being objectified himself.

He hastily grabbed the magnificent clothes and held them up to cover his groin, looking frantically about the room. He spotted a large wardrobe adorned with splendid floral motifs, and he moved gingerly towards it, sending suspicious looks at every dastardly piece of clutter that dared cross his way. That snuffbox looked out of place, and no one in their right mind would own a porcelain figurine that looked like that. He opened the wardrobe's doors and scrambled inside, closing them behind him at once.

He had a sigh of relief at the glorious absence of any objects or trinkets in the privacy of that wardrobe. He finally dressed himself in peace, with the conviction that his strategy had been right, and the suspicion that he had put his trousers on wrong. His right arm hesitated half-way along the left sleeve of the tunic. What exactly did one mean by 'objects', anyway? When would one be considered too small, and when would one be considered too large? Did it include hairpins and chaise-longues? Matches and four-poster beds? Pins and wardrobes?

He propelled himself out of the wardrobe with a heave of disgust. He tried hard not to think of entrails. Behind him, the armoire stood serene, disembowelled only insofar as he had dragged out a couple of dresses in his escape.

The word 'overthinking' had always sounded wrong to him; the nasty thing about overthinking was that it was never over. He cleared his throat and left the room without throwing a single look behind him, which was the only display of dignity he had left.

When he stepped out into the corridor, he realized just how unhelpful Delia had been. Summoning him to dinner and warning him of the beastly master's dislike of lateness, but neglecting to tell him the way to the dining room, had a precious touch of sadism that he respected, even as he suffered through it. He wandered about for a while, trying out different turns and doors. The hallways and rooms he passed were just like the bedroom he had been taken to. Everywhere he looked was golden ornamentation and embellishments, lining the wooden panelling on the walls, scurrying over the edges of painted ceilings, stretching its vine-like tendrils over mirrors and portrait frames and door handles. The house had a horror of emptiness, just as the city past its walls had a horror of silence. The house itself, however, was silent, almost tyrannically quiet. Even the clocks he walked by seemed to tick on tiptoes.

Once he found the carved oak staircase that led to the ground floor, it did not take him long to reach the dining room. The double doors were wide open, and through them he saw a thin, ridiculously long table set in front of a fireplace. Sitting on one end of the table, facing him as he walked in, was Delia. Her hair was done up prettily with ribbons, and her lilac dress suited her to perfection.

His eyes immediately darted to the opposite end of the table. The wide and high-backed chair obscured any view of its occupant until Percy dared step closer. As he did, the cursed features of Armand, the master of the house, creeped into his field of vision. He saw first two large, hairy arms; then a mane of dark hair over broad hunched shoulders; and then nothing more: the beast had his back turned to Percy as he scribbled feverishly on a piece of paper that was tucked between an empty wineglass and a mostly untouched soup bowl.

Percy looked at Delia. She was merciful and gave him a lead, gesturing for him to join her. He stepped quietly so as to not disturb the crackling of the fireplace scratching at the air. He kept his eyes fixed on her to avoid the temptation of looking elsewhere. She pointed to a chair next to hers. He sat down, thinking how ridiculous they both looked there, crowded together at one end with so much empty table stretching beyond them. And stretching, and stretching, and finally his eyes caught up to the beast at the opposite end, pouring over a scrap of paper and superbly indifferent to Percy's presence.

Percy squinted. He was both relieved, and, strangely, disappointed. From what he could tell, Armand's hairy and bestial features were only monstrous in so far as a human-sized kitten would be monstrous. Percy almost wanted to walk over and scratch under his chin to see what his purr might sound like.

Delia nudged him for him to start eating the soup set in front of him. He complied reluctantly, his leg and elbow pressed against hers as they tried to fit at that end of the table.

Halfway through his soup, Percy was certain he would choke on the silence. Armand had not looked up once from his sustenance – whether it was the soup or the paper, Percy could not quite tell. It was beginning to madden him, being so spectacularly ignored after getting pounced on and dragged into the house. He would almost have preferred roars and rage, or even a sinister silence, to such a blatant disregard of his presence. The least he was owed after being captured, he thought, was attention, whether good or bad.

First, he cleared his throat: truly the coward's choice of announcement. It did not even earn him a twitch of recognition from the beast's feline ears. Percy glared at Armand over his soup spoon.

"Excuse me" he said, straining his voice into an irritating buzz.

Delia sent him a look, and then a sharp elbow to his ribs. Armand still denied Percy any reaction, but his fur seemed to ripple ever so slightly, as though it now took him at least a modicum of effort to brush off Percy's presence. It was all the encouragement he needed.

"Could we perhaps – converse a little?" he said.

The beast's fur rippled again, and this time, he was generous enough to throw in a more noticeable reaction. He shushed Percy.

Percy gawked at him in supreme indignation. As far as he was concerned, being shushed warranted a duel to the death to defend his honour.

"I... how can you... why would you even – "

Armand let out a long, drawn out groan and rubbed his paws over his face.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it! I had it, I had it!"

Percy looked on in wonder as Armand trudged through those same words over and over again, howling and crumpling the piece of paper. His voice had a low, cave-like rumble to it that might have been menacing, had it not been so close to a whine.

Percy was a self-assessed coward, and might easily have been scared by that display. But he was also a connoisseur of tantrums, and he now judged with detached skill the spectacle before him, a professional looking on endearingly at the efforts of an amateur.

"Whatever it was, I'm sure it will come back" he said cheerfully. "And really, you shouldn't be working at dinner – "

The table roared as Armand slammed his paws on it with a sudden burst of rage. The plates and cutlery clattered with a frightened clinking sound. Percy's breath caught in his throat, too scared to leave. He could almost feel the table aching under his hands.

Armand stood from his chair, drawing to his full size, and how very full it was, massive and towering from the dizzying heights of his anger. Wasn't it funny, Percy thought in a little jitter of panic, how people looked so very shorter when they were sitting down. It wasn't that he regretted comparing Armand to a kitten; it was simply that he remembered that kittens were carnivores, too.

In two powerful leaps, Armand covered the distance separating him from the opposite end of the table, and loomed over Percy with a snarl dripping from his lips.

"You fool! I was so close, and you ruined it!"

Percy felt himself become smaller and smaller under the crushing weight of the beast's irate growls, until there was nothing left of him but little crumbs that would be glad to be swept under the table. A blistering moment later, Armand drew back, inch by inch, and then turned his back to them with a grunt before raging out of the room.

"Why would you do that?!" Delia muttered through gritted teeth once they were alone.

"What? Ask for an explanation after being forcefully dragged into this house?"

"You picked a rose."

"Last I checked picking a rose isn't a kidnappable offence!"

"Well you shouldn't be surprised that he was angry at you after you distracted him" she sniffed.

"But why did he even require us to be here if he's not quite here himself?"

"He doesn't like to be alone at meals."

Percy stared at her. He could feel his patience wearing thin, and he decided to wear it out some more.

"Why would you even care? Didn't he abduct you, too?"

Delia gave him no response: she merely finished her soup, patted her lips with her napkin, and only then turned to him again.

"You should go apologize to him" she said.

Percy stared. Another duel to the death. Tomorrow, dawn would be crowded.

"Apologize to him?"

"And go quickly, before he focuses on his work again and you make everything even worse."

And she left, once again denying him any directions. So much the better, he thought as he stood up with a grumble. If he was caught drifting aimlessly about the house – as soon might happen, if he was to search for the kitchens – he could blame it on her poor captainship. A little peak of ill-temper made him kick the leg of the table, to which he then apologized profusely. Forks and knives? Chairs and tables too, perhaps, then?

He left the room and set himself adrift along the hallways.