The corridor is empty, but footsteps are coming, almost padding. Run downstairs then—what a risk I’m taking! Or is it the police? Will I rush outside and find them there, smiling?

Coming up the stairs toward me, with a sheaf of papers in her arms.

“Snowy!”

Your face, so like hers and just a little like her face at her mother’s bedside in the little tremor of alarm—the one I saw die—and go away smiling, belonging to something else—the name that echoes now up the stairwell. She’s lunging back with a feigned start of surprise, and the flash of a golden band on one of the fingers that darts its gleams into my eyes, making them blink, and my body twists and footing wavers on the top step. Golden light! September!

My feet push me back from the brink and away from that thing with your likeness, aged and unlike my memory—unlike my memory. It’s changed you, not just maturing. Not Snowy Amworth anymore. That is, I remember you because you don’t look like you did – that’s the trick. If you looked the same, I couldn’t remember you because I would be seeing you, not remembering you, and I have to remember you, because they want that memory torn out of me like a beating heart to eat. Coming toward me up the stairs with a sheaf of papers and her face over nothingness, the beast, over the memory of a day and a fall and the faint noise of bone breaking in the spine.

I ran back into the corridor, I did not take the bait, the golden light warned me. I hurried to the other side of the building and ran down the stairs two at a time thinking it would be there and finding nothing, the open door, the street burning with the dazzling light of the sun.

Was it today? Or tomorrow? Was this only a warning, or was I too alert? Or am I counting on everything to be over? I look back at the building, to see if your face is there in any of the windows—nothing there. They’re trying to panic me, to see what I will do. My feet take me uncertainly toward the park...

But why would I go there, if not to incriminate myself? Or am I going to find his corpse lying sprawled on a bench behind a huge boulder, one hand outstretched palm up?