Tick Tock

She just likes the place to be lit up like, as she puts it, ‘a cruise ship on a dark sea.’”
    “Why?”
    “To remind herself that we're all passengers on an endless and magical journey.”
    “She actually said that?”
    “Isn't it a pretty thought?” Del said.
    “She sure sounds like your mother.”
    The limestone front walk was bordered by inlaid mosaic patterns created with terra-cotta and yellow ceramic tiles. Scootie raced ahead of them, tail wagging.
    The ornate surround at the twelve-foot-high door consisted of sixteen highly embellished scenes intricately carved in limestone, all depicting a haloed monk in different poses but always with the same beatific expression, surrounded by joyous crowds of smiling and capering animals with their own haloes—dogs, cats, doves, mice, goats, cows, horses, pigs, camels, chickens, ducks, raccoons, owls, geese, rabbits.
    “Saint Francis of Assisi, talking to the animals,” Del said. “They're antique carvings by an unknown sculptor, taken out of a fifteenth-century Italian monastery that was mostly destroyed in World War II.”
    “Is it the same order of monks that produces all those Elvis paintings on velvet?”
    Grinning at him, she said, “Mom's going to like you.” The massive mahogany door swung open as they reached it, and a tall silver-haired man in a white shirt, black tie, black suit, and mirror-polished black shoes stood just beyond the threshold. A fluffy white beach towel was folded precisely over his left arm, in the manner that a waiter might carry a linen bar towel to wrap a champagne bottle.
    With a reverberant British accent, he said, “Welcome to The Great Pile.”
    “Is Mom still making you say that, Mummingford?”
    “I shall never tire of it, Miss Payne.”
    “Mummingford, this is my friend, Tommy Phan.”
    Tommy was surprised to hear her say his name correctly.
    “Honoured to meet you, Mr. Phan,” Mummingford said, half bowing from the waist as he stepped back from the doorway.
    “Thank you,” Tommy said, nodding in acknowledgement of the bow and almost giving the words a crisp British accent.
    Scootie preceded them through the doorway. Mummingford led the dog aside, dropped to one knee, and began to dry the mutt and blot its paws with the beach towel.
    As Del closed the door, Tommy said, “I'm afraid we're as soaked as Scootie. We're going to make a mess.”
    “Alas, you are,” said Mummingford drily. “But I must tolerate Miss Payne to an extent I'm not obliged to tolerate the dog. And her friends enjoy sufferance as well.”
    “Where's Mom?” Del asked.
    “She awaits you in the music room, Miss Payne. I'll send his nibs along to join you as soon as he's presentably dry.”
    Scootie grinned out of a cowl of white cotton, enjoying his rubdown.
    “We can't stay long,” Del told the butler. “We're on the lam from a doll snake rat-quick monster thing. But could we please have coffee and a tray of breakfast pastries?”
    “In a trice, Miss Payne.”
    “You're a dear, Mummingford.”
    “It's the cross I bear,” said Mummingford.
    The grand hail, at least a hundred feet long, was floored with highly polished black granite on which their wet rubber-soled shoes squeaked with each step. The white walls were hung with enormous unframed canvases: all abstract art full of motion and colour, each piece illuminated precisely to the edges of the canvas by projector lamps in the ceiling, so it seemed as if the art glowed from within. The ceiling was panelled with bands of polished steel alternating with bands of brushed steel. A double cove provided indirect lighting above, and additional indirect lighting flooded out at floor level from a groove in the black-granite baseboard.
    Sensing Tommy's amazement, Del said, “Mom built the outside of the house to please the community architectural committee, but inside it's as modem as a spaceship and as Mediterranean as Coca Cola.”
    The music room was two-thirds of the way along the main hall, on the left. A black-lacquered door opened onto a room floored with polished white limestone speckled with gracefully curved marine fossils. The sound-baffled ceiling and walls were padded and then upholstered in charcoal-grey fabric, as if this were a recording studio, and indirect lighting was tucked behind the baffles.
    The chamber was huge, approximately forty by sixty feet. In the centre was a twenty-by-thirty custom carpet with a geometric pattern in half a dozen subtly different shades of taupe and gold. In the centre of the carpet were a