...on the grounds of Chateau Leafhead (driving a truck large enough to move the jellyfish tank) and the first thing I noticed was the Universe-Interpreter. It just looked like a totally weird telescope to me. Most people would have thought it was a visual decoration with no practicality whatsoever.

  The house looked as if it had countless rooms. Nobody was around so I rang the bell. After a moment I heard someone through an intercom.

  "Who are you?" asked a voice that I was sure belonged to Dr. Leafhead. "Collection agency about the spiders?"

  "What? No. I'm Jonathan Farquharson. You sent me a letter about coming here to work as an intern."

  "Yes, I remember it well," said Dr. Leafhead as he lapsed into a nostalgic coma. "It was late spring. I was busy converting some of the household plants into carnivorous reptiles through a very complicated alchemical process involving spleen-cells and shredded parsnips. Later that evening the television said something I didn't like about hurricane trends so I invented a new weather channel. I also told you to come at once. That was four years ago."

  "Some of the items on your list were hard to find. I thought it better to be late and have everything then to show up right away empty handed."

  "I did hire somebody else," explained Leafhead.

  "You did?"

  "Yes. Melvin was a good Intern. Unfortunately he didn't outlive your tardiness. If you just look to your left you'll see I have his gravenext to a few of the other Interns who have passed away while living here."

  I turned and saw there was in fact a small gathering of markers on the far lawn.

  "I should mention that none of them died in connection with any experiments of mine," said Leafhead. "Those Interns are secretly incinerated," he added with a whisper.

  "What?"

  "I said their devotion is exceedingly unmitigated."

  "Oh."

  "Wait right there. I'll be down within three orbital rotations of the microscopic universe Jaladrome as it is affected by an Earth leap year when passing through the fifth quadrant of Cygnus."

  In five minutes the front door creaked open. Dr. Leafhead didn't quite look like your usual mad scientist. He wasn't very old and didn't wear glasses or an immaculate white lab-coat. He did wear a lab-coat, mind you, it was just that any trace of cleanliness had been wiped out by a psychedelic splatter-painting of past experiments. One cliche he did fall under was the shock of grey hair. It was electrified by a manic indifference towards grooming. He rather looked how Steve Martin would look if he dropped a ton of acid and got struck by lightning.

  Suddenly his wristwatch crawled off his arm and scurried into the gardens.

  "It's gotta get some fresh air and unwind," explained Leafhead casually. "No bother. I have a bunch more. Do you want one?"

  He reached into a pocket and produced two wristwatches. He handed one to me. It was clear I was dubious about whether or not I wanted a miniature robot clinging to my arm.

  "Don't worry. They're harmless."

  I put the watch on. It took a minute to calibrate itself to my state of mind before displaying a time that was not correct, but instead the time I would have guessed it was had I been queried by a random passerby.

  "I thought we'd tour the grounds first," suggested Leafhead. "They are much more interesting than the house."

  I doubted this was true, but didn't argue for I was anxious to see the Universe-Interpreter. As we walked across the lawn I slowly steered our path towards the device. I had to know what it was.

  "I can't help but notice that our once firmly established walking direction has gradually shifted to the south-west at a rate of about 3.2 centimetres per every alternate footstep," mused Dr. Leafhead.

  "Has it?"

  "Yes. It has. Do you know what that means?"

  "No," I answered.

  "It means that you are curious about the Universe-Interpreter. Which is the exact reason why I chose to tour the grounds."

  "Universe-Interpreter?" I puzzled. It did sound like something I would be interested in.

  "The machine is calibrated to have perfect perception. Whatever is looked at through the Universe-Interpreter is seen how it truly exists in space and time, as opposed to how the brain might see fit to incorrectly decipher it. Sort of like a rotten eggplant on new year's eve."

  "Uh...right."

  "Here it is," motioned Leafhead to the strangest looking thing I had ever seen. "One of my greater inventions. I keep it out here on the lawn because it is solar powered."

  Somewhere at the heart of the machine was an ordinary telescope. Emanating from this heart were many adornments that weaved together through baffling methods of connectivity. For brief moments it appeared to make sense, like the part where computer cables connected to a simple monitor screen. These moments of clarity gave way to stuff like a rotary-dial telephone attached to a bubbling vial of Magnesium via strands of police ribbon and spaghetti.

  "What are the dream-catchers for?" I asked, noticing several had been thrown into the mix.

  "They catch the dreams."

  "Fair enough."

  "Have a try," suggested Leafhead. "See what I look like."

  I re-adjusted the Universe-Interpreter. I was amazed to find when I looked through it that Dr. Leafhead had not changed appearance but had simply vanished entirely. Everything else remained the same... the trees, the house in the background was all there.

  "You're gone!" I exclaimed.

  "Fascinating," replied Leafhead. "The universe doesn't see me today. That or your adjustments were unwarranted to the temperamental nature of the device so it chose to ignore me. Or possibly the battery is just drained. It was cloudy yesterday. No matter, we will return to the Universe-Interpreter when you have better trained your brain to think like a slice of lime. To the laboratory!"

  When he said laboratory he must have meant the entire house, for there were not a bunch of normal rooms that one had to pass through before reaching a sequestered lab room. Wondrous-looking things spilled out into the mansion, beginning right away with the intricate foyer room.

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  "I decided to make the very first room one of the most fascinatingly distracting," said Leafhead. "Visitors are comfortable and entertained enough that they rarely feel the need to move on to any other part of the house. Some people actually think this is the entire house. Helps keep nosey people away from the more important rooms where world-altering experiments are perpetually underway. I get quite a lot of people poking around here, you know. Some of them are undercover intelligence agents out to raid my brilliance for dark purposes."

  I did not reply. I was dazzled by the holographic rooftop constellation chart, as well as the fact that the surrounding walls were a virtual jungle landscape down which cascaded an ultra-realistic 3-D waterfall. Robot arms descended from out of nowhere and helped remove my jacket. Another set of arms replaced the jacket with a crisp-white lab coat.

  "You should find that to your fit," said Leafhead. "Sorry about the cleanliness. By the time all the white is gone you will have become a great scientist."

  One of the robot arms decided to help out by flinging a globule of blueish matter on the coat.

  "See! You're off to a great start!"

  Before he could say 'follow me,' the floor below us suddenly turned into a moving walkway and I found myself being guided along at a leisurely touring pace.

  "This is the Prime Hallway," he said as we moved through an epic space that defied the logic of being indoors. "Each sub-hallway, wing, room, attic, basement, library, secret chamber or any other section of the house at some point connects with the Prime Hallway."

  I could see that an infinitude of doors, staircases and narrow hallways branched off in any direction. Nothing quite looked like the last. One door looked utterly futuristic, being made up of a transparent wall of turquoise vapors held in place by ultra-violet light shining through alien prisms, while many of the other doors were of the classic Gothic castle variety.

  "That is the entrance to the South-Western section," said Leafhead gravely as he motioned to a wooden door locked up with an absurd plethora of bolts, boards and chains. "There will no need for you enter that part of the house at all."

  Another room was being kept private by a thin blood-splattered shower curtain.

  "That's just one of the kitchens," explained Leafhead. "I've been experimenting with new synthetic dyes for hilarious prank food products in my down time. I am very close to perfecting a line of perogies that are actually pressurized paint bombs. Whoever tries to eat one is covered with a splattering of putrid muck that is impossible to wash off for at least a month."

  "Have you ever created any monsters?" I suddenly asked.

  "Pfft," said Leafhead disdainfully. "Monster-creation is a sophomoric act that I perfected as a teenager. All it ever got me was a few near-lynchings by the village locals before I'd even graduated junior high school. Abnormal brain transplants? No way. My monsters were highly intelligent and well-behaved. But they were monsters, so I shouldn't have been surprised by their presence invariably causing fear and violent outrage wherever they went."

  Out of nowhere I felt a painful sting to my elbow. "Ouch!" I shouted. "Something just stung me!"

  "No, I think it was a bite," Leafhead had said coolly. He seemed to use the most casual tone when speaking about the most serious topics. "Remember how I said I turned some of the plants into carnivorous reptiles?"

  "You actually did that?" I asked, looking around for any more of them.

  "They were never meant to roam free around the house. Thought I'd gathered them all up by now but I guess there are still one or two hiding somewhere."

  "Hey, I'm bleeding!" I said, noticing my entire left shirt sleeve was suddenly drenched.

  "I can fix that," said Leafhead. "Soon we will be at the StorageCentre, where there is a collection of probably the greatest hospital equipment on the planet. For now enjoy the sights."

  I looked up at the roof of the Prime Hallway. It was a domed half-pipe like the psychedelic Fremont tunnel in Las Vegas. Except instead of the roof being a 3D screen like it was in the foyer, it was now covered with epic paintings of the animal kingdom.

  "Up ahead is the Terrarium."

  The Prime Hallway appeared to reach the end of the road at the Terrarium. A vast room appeared with a gigantic domed sky-light, allowing god-beams of natural lighting to hit a centrifuge of diverse plant and animal life. Around the perimeter of the room was a deep moat in which swam the various aquatic acquisitions of Leafhead Incorporated. Protected by the moat was an island made up partly of grassy fields and partly of deserts, on which many different creatures grazed. Various trees, vines and shrubs grew freely. Ordinarily contrasting forms of life and landscape mingled in harmony, as if Dr. Leafhead had successfully meshed every type of ecosystem on Earth into one singular microcosmic bio-dome, which in fact he had. It was astonishing. I asked Leafhead if we could hang out in the Terrarium for awhile longer, but he reminded me that I was rapidly losing blood due to the recent reptile bite and that it was imperative we reach the StorageCentre soon. For this I thanked him.

  Aside from the collection of expensive hospital equipment, the StorageCentre was endlessly occupied by shelves of categorized samples, electronic scraps and tools. In one corner a quarantined room housed hundreds of different mold colonies.

  "Tomorrow we will bring everything from the shopping list into here," said Leafhead. "Except the jellyfish and the rye bread."

  "Where will those go?" I asked.

  "The jellyfish will be integrated into the Terrarium, of course," said Leafhead. "The rye bread is not to be eaten. It is an essential component for the Universe-Interpreter."

  "About that hospital equipment?" I asked.

  "Yes, it's over there."

  The floor had stopped controlling where we walked, so we made our own way over to what looked like a functional medieval torture device.

  "This is The Stitcher," said Leafhead proudly. "In the span of mere minutes this machine can painlessly stop the blood-flow and heal the wound of an injury of just about any level of severity."

  "Wow, great."

  "However those types of reptile bites are incredibly poisonous," he continued with a dark turn. "So first you must undergo a blood-session within the De-Toxifier."

  There was another medieval torture device beside The Stitcher. It was a small, metallic egg-shaped room that looked as if one of it's functions was to be a gas chamber or a prop in a Cronenberg movie.

  "The De-Toxifier process is going to take a few hours. By now the mutation-causing poison has begun to permanently graft itself into your bloodstream. The machine will need to drain the entirety of your blood so that it can be filtered through a bleaching cycle."

  "The entirety?" I asked.

  "Only a liter or so at a time, of course, to avoid death."

  Even though I was terrified of the De-Toxifier making a greater mess of my vital signs, I somehow knew that I could trust Dr. Leafhead. Even if I didn't necessarily trust everything I found in his house.

  I opened the door of the De-Toxifier and climbed inside.

  "You will be awake for the whole procedure," shouted Leafhead through a thick glass window. An alarm sounded while a computer counted down from 1 minute. "But not in pain. Hopefully. For something to do you can watch a film I made for new interns who require acclimatizing to the madness of my homestead."

  Leafhead slipped away. After the minute had counted down, the alarm stopped, the machine started and the film turned on.

  "Welcome to Chateau Leafhead," said the recorded image of the Doctor. "If you are watching this film it means that you have been hired as an intern. Congratulations. If you are watching this within the De-Toxifier, it also means you have already critically injured yourself. Do not be down on yourself. No intern yet, not even the great Melvin, has avoided a bout with the De-Toxifier in the first week. It is the only logical outcome when someone faces the many diverse and sudden threats of my home from a perspective of total ignorance."

  Leafhead looked about the same age in the film, and had mentioned the most recent intern Melvin, yet everything about it clearly looked as if it had been filmed in the 1970s. I assumed he had added some visual effects like scratches and graininess in an editing program. But why he had made the room look like a set for a period movie made no sense to me.

  "Navigating the house and grounds can be a daunting and dangerous task. For the first few days you will wish you had a map. There are somewhere between one and two hundreds rooms, but basically all the main aspects are divided into 8 sections following the 8 major points of the compass." The movie went into a split-screen, showing a digital map of the house while a poorly cropped Leafhead listed off the areas. They were as follows:

  SOUTHERN WING - Main Foyer.

  SOUTH-EASTERN WING - LabCentre, where the most interesting experiments take place.

  EASTERN WING - LibraryCentre and Intern Living Quarters.

  NORTH-EASTERN WING - Dr. Leafhead's Living Quarters, off limits.

  NORTHERN WING - Terrarium.

  NORTH-WESTERN WING - StorageCentre.

  WESTERN WING - Relaxation Zone, only assured safe place in the house.

  SOUTH-WESTERN WING - Off Limits.

  He went on to explain how some of the wings actually occupied different time zones than others.

  At this point I passed out and did not see the rest of the movie. Before I woke up I was moved by a pair of robot arms to a bedroom in the Intern Living Quarters.