An hour later, you are bored out of your mind. You're afraid to enter any more rooms in the house, so you have sprawled across the bed in the guest bedroom to wait for your old clothes. You stroke your furry tail. It's strange how easily you are coming to accept what's happened to you. You're really enjoying the feel of the soft fur, and if society won't give you too hard a time about it, you think you might actually be able to live with your feline features.
Being barely five feet tall, though, is something you don't want to put up with. You don't want to have to wear platforms your whole life just to look most people in the eye.
Having made up your mind, you venture downstairs and find the study Mr. Archblack spent so much time in. You knock on the heavy oak door and he bids you to enter.
You slowly approach him in his red leather chair. He is reading a thick hardbound book. Several educational journals are stacked on the floor by the chair, and the end table has three large books that look similar to the one he is reading. He doesn't glance up at you.
"Yes? What is it?"
"I'm very sorry to interrupt," you say, "But I really have to ask if you can do anything in your power to restore me to normal. I'm not eighteen, I'm not five feet tall, and I'm not a cat. I just can't go home like this."
He finally glances at you through the thin reading glasses perched on his nose. "You are a guest in this house," Archblack says carefully. "We greet you with open arms and allow you to stay for however long is necessary. However, guests in this house do not rudely depart at their convenience."
"It was rude of me to come here in the first place, I realize that," you plead. "I will leave you alone and never return. I will never tell anyone of this place."
"You most surely will not. Please retire to your own chambers, miss."
"Please help me!" you say sternly. You're getting tired of his passive attitude.
He closes his thick book and stares straight at you. "You enter my home. You wash in my bath. You sleep in my bed. You dress in my clothes. You eat my food. Do not presume to ask me for any favors when I have already extended so much courtesy."
"What do you want?"
"Equal payment," he says simply. "You cannot leave this house so long as you possess what is mine and I possess what is yours. That is the nature of things here. Only when our two lives are without debt can we be physically separated."
"You mean...I'm linked to you now? To this house?"
"As is the family tradition. Age-old spells surround this house that will prevent you from setting foot off the property."
"Then please just let me take my clothes and go."
"That will no longer be possible," Archblack says flatly. "You require something else from me. A way back to normal."
"And you won't give it to me unless I pay you back equally, is that right?"
He nods. "My house has robbed you of your original identity, and that must be returned in order for you to leave. But if I am to spend countless hours preparing the delicate magical spells to return you to normal, you must spend an equal time in service to me."
"As a maid," you conclude. "Is that how Harriet came to work here?"
"Harriet finally fulfilled her debt when my grandfather was seven years old. She remains because she wishes to. I hope that, one day, you may grow as fond of this home as we have."
"And when you die, the last of your line...the house disappears with Harriet and me in it."
"You will have lived a full life," he explains. "I have many decades to go."
"I won't have lived a fulfilled life, though!" you protest. "This is insane! You're insane!" You turn around, thick ponytail swinging in fury, and storm out of the room. You throw open the large front doors and run down the path to the woods.
You stop when you reach the very edge of the property, where clean-cut grass and bushes meet rough trail and tall trees. You will yourself to continue on, but your body refuses to move. Minutes you spend trying to coax your leg forward, but you remain motionless save for your face, which twists in rage and despair.
What have you gotten yourself into?
What have you gotten yourself into?