**Based on a dream I had a few nights ago...**

The iron knocker was cold and heavy in my hand, but still I pounded it once, twice. A slight girl with brown hair cut at her jawline answered the door. She could not have been much older than me, but she held herself with authority. "Your name, please," she said.
"I--"
"Speak up, don't just stand there gawping."
"I--" I gripped my throat. It was as if I'd swallowed my name. I knew who I was, but I couldn't get the word out.
The girl looked me over as I stood there with my mouth gaping open and closed. "Do you know where you are?" she asked me.
I looked around. A low white fog obscured most of the surrounding landscape, but I could see that I stood before an enormous mansion in the middle of what seemed to be a field of unkempt grass. The mansion stretched high and wide, and was made of dark stone and mortar.
"I'm not sure," I said. I found that I could not remember how I came to be standing on the great slab of a doorstep, and yet there I was, gazing up at leaded glass windows and heavy, iron-gilt doors. "What is this place?"
"This?" She bent out of the doorway and twisted to see what I was looking at. "It hasn't got a name." I must have looked at her strangely, because she added. "It doesn't need one. It's the only place around."
"Your name, then?" I asked.
"Mine? Molly." She looked me over again, and I saw a decision flicker in her brown eyes. "Come inside."
I stepped through the entrance, and the door fell shut behind me.

I followed Molly down a long, carpeted hallway a few minutes in silence-- or at least, I thought it was silence until I noticed a thrumming, low and unceasing. It was so quiet that I tried to ignore it, but the longer we went on walking, the more the sound seemed to be boring into my brain. It was like a wasp's heartbeat, an indication of some insidious creature that was nesting deeper and deeper into my skull.
Finally I had to speak up. "What makes that awful sound?" I asked.
Molly stopped walking and faced me. Her mouth and forehead were pinched with distaste. "The generator," she said.
I looked around at the candles glowing on the walls, casting shadows into corners. "But... you don't use electricity here."
"Exactly."