Dubious Miraclasm the giant soon became tired of listening to music entirely. He'd listened to each and every one of his records, and then listened to them again, and then a third time—now his coffee break was basically all used up. Maybe being done with it all for a moment and having nothing to listen to but his own thoughts would be a nice change of pace, do him some good. Wholesome, sorta. So he took off the current record—the rare red edition of Sunbladder Dig's “Maybe I'm Won't Goin'a”—and opened the safe to put it away.

Lorenzo, Ben Garment, and Jockey took the instantaneous opportunity and scrambled out of the wide-open door, booked it away down the hill and far away from the safe, and had plenty of time to make good their flight, for the giant's ponderous movements made slow progress in putting away his audiophile paraphernalia. They got all the way to the cottage before they stopped to catch their breath.

“Well,” said Lorenzo, “that's us sprung, but now we'll have to find a way to rescue Roby from the safe—but at least we know where she is.” He glanced back forlornly and with his bee-eyes saw Dubious Miraclasm closing the safe door and spinning the dial.

“At least we know where we are,” said Jockey, “and where we aren't—the safe, I mean.”

“We aren't safe?” said Ben Garment.

“We aren't in the safe,” said Lorenzo.

“We're never safe,” said Jockey. “No one is. Life is a risk—or rather, a certainty... as there's no making it out alive.”

“That may be,” said Ben Garment, “but yonder stick bug seems to think otherwise.”

Nearby, a stick bug was munching on a leaf. Taking notice of their taking notice of it, it waved, and resumed its snack.

The cottage door opened, and out came the poisonous witch Grotilda, wielding a copper butcher's knife and a lead meat hammer, and she said to them, “Alas! Yonder children! You've got beef, or come to make it? Have it your way! For behold!” —and then she came running at them, swinging the knife and the hammer, but Lorenzo, Jockey, and Ben Garment were unrancid and spry, and fled from her, so Grotilda's wild swipes found no purchase, and in her hectic swoops she threw away her balance and fell down in the mud.

“Ho, crone!” said Ben Garment. “That's a fine right hook you're looking for, but you haven't got it, have you?”

Grotilda kicked her feet and pounded her fists and burst into tears—not literally. I mean, could you imagine? “Oh, you children!” she said. “With all your flesh intact! You'll do well to embrace that youth, my sports, but behold me—three hundred years old if I'm a day, and I am—and now far gone past my orphan-snatching prime! I can hardly ambush a wand'rer on my own stoop!”

Ben Garment and Jockey and Lorenzo saw that this was very sad, and it was a terrible thing to grow old and become beaten and worn, and become unable to hunt orphans for sport any longer. They gathered around Grotilda in the mud, and bowed their heads.

“Shall we,” said Jockey, “let you get a few stabs in, so you might experience your golden years anew?”

Grotilda looked up, shining sparkles in her eyes. “Oh, child, that'd be very kind of you! Very kind indeed!”

“Wait!” said Lorenzo. He eyed Grotilda with suspicion, intrigue, and a five-o'clock shadow. “I sense a trick.”

“I think we're on the same squire,” said Ben Garment. “The witch has an ulterior motive—for in fact, she wishes to stab us!”

Jockey gasped, and then Lorenzo nodded sagely, and then Ben Garment gasped.

“No!” said Jockey. “After all we've been through together, you'd betray our trust so?”

“Curses!” said the witch, tossing her tools away. “So, I've been found out. Well, nothing gets by you! Help me up, at least.”

Jockey put forth a friendsome hand to let the old gal clamber from the muck, and Grotilda reached up towards her, but then Lorenzo stabbed the witch with his stinger, and the witch howled and died, and fell down and curled up into a fetal position, and dried up and withered away until she was small enough to pin to a three-by-five index card and mount beneath glass for one's butterfly collection—if you'd put a dried-up witch in your butterfly collection, which would be kinda weird.

“Ah, the circle of life,” said Jockey whiskerlessly.

“Behold!” said Ben Garment, as from one of Grotilda's hands fell a pin, full of poison, and from another came a diaper, also full of poison. She also had a box of poison in her backpack. “Another trick in hand!”

“Well, that,” said Lorenzo, “was an accident. But, no matter. Now that the witch is disposed of, let's use this cottage as our base, and plan our reentry to the safe and Roby's extraction.”

The three of them all went into the cottage through different doors, and sat down at the one table in the one room, and checked the fridge for snacks, but there was nothing but baby-cut carrots, so they quickly shut the fridge in horror, chained it closed with a chain made of some really strong metal—I guess... brass?—and then threw the fridge in the oven.

“That'll bake up good,” said Ben Garment. “Let that roast up and soak in its own juices for a while, use that as the base for some gravy. We'll be eating good today.”

But then, the cottage suddenly stood up, and all the doors closed, and all the windows closed, and the cottage laughed. With them trapped in its maw, it sprinted across the plains, humming a merry tune while they were jostled about inside.

“I didn't expect,” said Jockey, “that it was one of these cottages!”

“Always expect the unexpected,” said Lorenzo.

“That's literally impossible,” said Jockey.

“More to the point,” said Ben Garment, “look at the compass!”

They all checked the compass—because now there was one—and it was spinning all hither and yon, so that they had not the slightest idea of the path they were taking, and since the doors and windows were shut, and the windows shut with shutters, they saw nothing outside, and didn't even know how long the cottage's legs were (very) or how many it even had (just two, like a normal cottage) or whether they were feathered (mind your own business).

“This house,” said Lorenzo, “seems to have a mind of its own!”

“False!” said the tangled, strangled voice of the ghost of the witch. “For you see, it was all part of my very elaborate trap! And now I've possessed the cottage, and the cottage has possessed you!” She laughed in a wheedling laugh, and now the cottage began to run downhill.

“Come on,” said Ben Garment, “there's got to be a root cellar or chimney that'll get us to the outside world!”

Lorenzo shook his head sadly. “Alas, no, this one room's all we've got. Curses! I should've seen this coming.”

Jockey put her hand on his shoulder so as to comfort him in her own way. “It's not your fault. This was inevitable, after all.”

“I know,” said Lorenzo, “but I was hoping to avoid it as much as possible. But—wait! That's it! Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

Jockey nodded eagerly. “Yeah! Faster-than-light communication is possible by taking advantage of the EPR paradox—call Alice and Bob at once!”

“No, not that,” said Lorenzo.

“Well, then, I'm bumped,” said Jockey.

“Come, let's try groupthink!” said Lorenzo.

While the valedictorian and salutatorian put their brilliantish minds together and developed a cunning plan to trip the cottage with a big stick, Ben Garment rummaged through the cabinets, where he didn't find anything but pots and pans, as one does—and a box of crackers. He lifted up the box, but it was heavier than a thousand mountains all rolled into a little ball the size of the tip of your pinky finger, so he dropped it, and it made a loud sound, which distracted Jockey and Lorenzo and made them totally forget about their plan. The box popped open and that aforementioned ball rolled out, and got stuck in between the floorboards.

“Augh!” said the ghost of the witch. “What's this? A feeling like I've got something stuck 'tween my teeth! Augh! I must have it out!” She opened her door and reached inside to unstick the stuck thing, and Ben Garment, Jockey, and Lorenzo took the opportunity and leapt out of the door—and then immediately climbed onto the roof, because the cottage's legs had grown to a hundred miles long, and now they were high in the sky, and up there, nearby to the cottage and level to the roof, was a passing cloud on which Terry the farmer had planted an eggplant garden.

“Howdy, folks,” said Terry. “Can I interest you in some fine egg's? Fresh, plump, ready to go anytime. A thousand dollars a piece.”

But they weren't listening to Terry's friendship, and instead looked around for some oars or pool sticks they could do battle against the cottage with. I mean, with which they could do battle against the cottage. God forbid we set to spinning the ghost of Shakespeare's zombie! Anyway, Terry had no such tools, but his neighbor, Sterry, who also had none, had a blue house, and it was much nicer than Terry's eggplant garden, so they went over there. Sterry met them outside and looked them up and down, then side to side.

“Admission's one egg' each,” he said.

“Won't you,” said Ben Garment, “make an exception?”

“It's an emergency,” said Lorenzo. “We've got to battle with a witch's ghost!”

“In that case,” said Sterry, “it's two egg's.”

“Now that we can afford,” said Ben Garment.

So they handed over six thousand dollars to buy two egg's apiece and this didn't go according to plan, because they didn't read what Terry said carefully enough, and instead of buying eggplants at a thousand dollars apiece, they bought them at a thousand dollars a piece. So they bought six pieces of eggplant, which wasn't even enough to make parmigiana, and that was also their last six thousand dollars (Jockey's allowance was once every three and a half fortnights) so it was something else up with which they'd have to come.

“Well,” said Lorenzo, “looks like we're going to have to call our lawyers.”

Both Terry and Sterry exchanged a worried look on hearing that comment. “Hang on—no need to get the law involved,” said Terry.

“That's right,” said Sterry. “Listen, let's talk it over. Come inside my house, I'll have the missus fix us up some coffee and we'll sort out this whole mess.”

So Lorenzo, Ben Garment, and Jockey went into Sterry's blue house, and then suddenly the doors and windows were slammed shut by the crafty and abrogated farmers, and the house then grew legs like Grotilda's cottage, but longer legs, two hundred miles high, and now they were far, far up in the sky, where the clouds were thicker and the sun was bigger. However, before they could even get the coffeemaker out of the dishwasher, it became clear how the blue house managed to get legs longer than Grotilda's cottage: instead of two one-hundred-mile-long legs, it combined them into one two-hundred-mile long leg. Since the blue house could barely hold its balance, what with its one leg and everyone inside going back and forth trying to find all the parts for the coffeemaker, which was in ill-repair and also an antique where it had, like, a leather filter you have to dry in the sun, or whatever—but, since they were all running back and forth all the time, the house couldn't stay upright, and soon it tumbled, and it shouted as it fell all three hundred miles back to the ground, the still air of a calm day as a tornado against it as it plunged, and Ben Garment, Jockey, and Lorenzo jumped right at the last second when the house made impact, so they were fine, but the house exploded into a million pieces and fragments went in every single direction, even right.

“A too-close one,” said Lorenzo.

“But not close enough for undoing,” said Ben Garment. “All the same, inviting homesteads are things to be avoided.” He thought of Roby, and her bad luck with domiciles, and how he'd chided her for losing the grand manor. We are not so different after all! “Excepting geographically, he said aloud. I mean,” he said aloud.

Lorenzo and Jockey, extricating themselves from the mess, extricated themselves from the mess. “We're a long way off, for that house's stilt tilt tipped us quite a way from where we rose.”

“This,” said Jockey, “is an undiscovered country, now discovered, and without name.”

All around them was a great land of sprawling plains, cozy valleys, vast steppes, primeval forests, towering mountains, burning deserts, rolling hills, mucky swamps, flowing rivers, shimmering seas, and the wreckage of the fallen blue house. They did not know what they should do next, but they had time to think it over.

They started looking for pieces of the coffeemaker.