Jez flicked the light switch to the ladies lavatory. Upright between his index finger and thumb Gremory held an ugly, double pronged fluorescent light bulb. The ugly, double pronged fluorescent light bulb ignited humming with a perky enthusiasm. Faith went blind. She wasn't a solid anymore, she wasn't sure what she was but solid wasn't it. She wondered if she would need medicating with cornstarch. Where her addled brain thought her mouth probably located it was brimming with an artificial twang of lemon.

This was the Translocational Light Railway.

Château De Gaul perched precariously three rough stone stories high on a worn precipice. Tens of feet below the Château's rear was the Dordogne river. De Gaul had character, it had seen such a hum of IC it had acquired an alive, alabaster romanticism trapped in the French seventeenth century with a hobby of projecting Gothic hauntings of fond family memories by warping resident fog and barking the occasional wail petrifying nearby hikers.

De Gaul's foundation was a Frankenstein of medieval, eighteenth and nineteenth century masonry. The front gardens were a light hearted labyrinth of hedges which moving away from the chateau extended a claustrophobic tongue hugged either side by black pines, whitebeams, elms, cork oaks and maples, to the wrought iron entry gates set into a moss coated stone wall where an aged stone plaque read Chateau De Gaul. Beyond it all were horizons of Gremory owned preened flat pastures on one side and the leafy banks of the river the other.

For Catherine's communion in the mid eighteen hundreds, silk sleeves rolled up, Gremory, with help from the bushy, handlebar goateed pre-raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse, 1849, Rome, Italy to present, had water-painted the grounds in shades of fair maiden, sprite and forestry. It had been a fantasy tinted evening back to fairy tales, an unsubtle but seductive reminder of days when fey played free on Level 0. Much to Marc's exasperation at the turn of the twentieth century and Catherine's endless delight Gremory had yet still neglected to take the decorations down.

De Gaul remained canopied in aflame storm clouds of resplendent rose gold and watery pink with sagging ash bellies. The thickets of trees hiding the château and bordering the driveway were infested with auburn haired nymphs which extended siren arms out to wanderers and kept trying to drown paparazzi in wine glasses stolen from the patio terrace.

The inner gardens were planted with flourishing, carnivorous vegetation of bruised scarlets and amethysts veined with emerald. Fireflies buzzed in willows and yews beneath which sat spindly tables of twisted silver legs knotted with vines of a semi-oil, platinum petaled flower which sneezed a pretty holographic glitter.

Waterhouse had commissioned discs of pond water mid-air suspended like enormous candelabra which lengthened conically down as icicles may have glistening and still fluid. Lilly pads hovered on their perfectly parallel surfaces and within them ivory skeletons their legs tangled in pondweed swam, twirling front and back and breaking the surface into stunning maidens and males.

The chateau's comfortable country-house interior was more modestly homey with classical proportions, pale marble and decadent paneling. Gremory an art and beauty enthusiast obsessed with vestige De Gaul was elegantly furnished with a dazzlingly assortment of gilt mirrors, commodes, renaissance sculptures, armoires, oil paintings and country scene tapestries. Bathrooms held double basins of mottled marble and venetian glass and the bedrooms oriental rugs, draped four posters, vaulted ceilings and original mouldings.

De Gaul’s domestic servants were Alps.

Faith had been very alarmed by a greeting from a fleet of seemingly semi-dissolved moles in miniature sized, post-Edwardian household uniform. She discovered they were Alps using her PD App, a digitalised quick-reference glossary and complete transcript of Pseudomonarchia Daemonum with cheerful, colour coded descriptions of all damned species. Using her phone’s camera lens the App could read IC compositions as though they were QR codes. Meaning she could, with a snap, identify any demon.

It had just finished downloading and having tried unsuccessfully to use it on herself she was delighted to find the alps. If the reviews popping up on her twitter feed were anything to go by it was going to prove an absolute godsend. Not an actual God Send of course because that would be very disturbing.

The PD App informed Faith of the following:

The Alp is the sixth removed half cousin of an imp. It’s a confused genus with a muddy evolution. Elvic and Indo-European their most accurate depiction was in Johann Heinrich Füssli’s 1802 Nightmare although in reality are about a ninth this size. They communicate entirely in sulphur clogged squeaks. They’re credited for sleep paralysis and being the specie in existence with the least amount of facial elastin, giving one the impression of your teddy’s waxy, nicotine crumpled and ethanol steamed uncle.

Put off by the bad press kidnapping human infants inspired for them most alp entertain themselves nicking random nick-knack’s and putting them to new use. Several centuries ago this became a bit of a social epidemic. After Atlantis’ reinvention as a subsurface theme park exclusively for all those under four feet the Law of Diameter was imposed.

The law forces their restriction to steal objects below a thirteen inch diameter.

Gremory told her that they were minidems. Minidems, he explained, can be one of any hundreds of classes of demon with a low independent IC. These forms of demon are normally tricksters, more irritating than harmful and to avoid burnout they tend to fall into employment as minions by a higher IC demon, like himself. In exchange for services they get an IC share equivalent of room and board and can just about keep their immortality ticking along happily.

He added topically that Alps are very fashionable at present as their employment is both cheaper and has less misplaced input than their western counterparts.