The house that was a city grew and, as is the way with cities, buried its past beneath an ever-advancing present.

In the cellars of the Queen, where three corridors met to form a Y, three stone heads graced the capital of a buried pendentive. The settled dust of thousands of years had raised the level of the floor and grown hardened by the footfalls of passing errands. Lime leached from all the stories above had marbled the black granite walls and joined with the dust of the floor to form a polished cement.

The heads were malign at first glance, a dead craftsman’s nightsweats and horrors: vaguely a cow, a goat, and a manticore. Each had some resemblance to the beast it portrayed―and not without an idiot twinkle―but seen through a glass cast with a ripple in it, reflected in a mirror with peeling silver. They were figments, and existed nowhere in nature.

They were the past and they were buried. They had been surrounded, enveloped and eventually forgotten in a subcellar of the great masonry sprawl as addition after addition was piled over them.