Elijah steps into the wooden room and can barely hear himself thinking above the clanging of glasses and the throwing of cheers. A surly man rushes in between guests. Sweat drips from every pore and his face is nearly swallowed by his chin. Stomping over and about with his color-plaited rat-faced sidekick complete in jester cap, the pair catch every drunken word of praise for “House-master Raamah” from all the party guests. All at once, the big man hurries everyone out except Elijah, and reveals a glowing key, yellow on the outside with a handle that contains swirling pools of two distinct vapors, one black and one white, which move in a unified counterclockwise direction but never mix. Raamah tosses this wonder into the air, and it explodes into a pink pollen cloud much too big to be contained in this house. Elijah can no longer see anything but the pink mist. The sounds of coughing and shouting and scuffling out an exit rattle around in his head like long-forgotten screams. The room becomes visible again, but a vaporous resin hangs in the air. Mice scurry about and dive through small holes in the walls. With nowhere to run, Elijah turns to the skies above for answers, but he can see only the brown, mildewed wood of the ceiling. The chandelier above shakes, and vapor eyes appear in the flame of its electric candles, darting rapidly around. The chandelier begins to spin faster and faster as an ear-piercing cackling shrouds the room in fear. The chandelier crashes to the ground like a meteorite and the glass casing of the flames explodes. The eyes flow like snakes through the air until they each hit a wall of the room. The purple eyelids stretch against the surface of the walls until the whites appear and bulge like eggs that could fall onto the floor at any moment. The walls and ceiling begin to close in on Elijah as the cackling continues. The pitter patter of the mice grows ever closer, and a ceiling board falls to the ground, revealing a faint glow behind it. Pressed against the ground, Elijah reaches into the crevice and pulls out the key. He stabs the ceiling piece with the key in the center of its eye. The ceiling shatters and Elijah clambers mostly out, but he is left dangling by his left wing. As the box disappears, it rips his wing at the base. Elijah falls to the ground as several mice are left crushed inside the remaining box. Elijah looks away as those mice lucky enough to find freedom scurry off in various directions without a trace of worry for those left to be crushed to death by what remains of the House of Raamah.