“ ‘I don’t want to frighten you,’ said the voice. ‘But you must understand they want to change you. They want to make you so you can’t see or hear me.’

“ ‘That can’t be done,’ I whispered. ‘Go now. I must be alone. Don’t you ever want to be alone?’

“No answer.

“ ‘Where do you go when you’re not with me?’ I asked.

“No answer.

“ ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Where do you go when you leave? Or do you stay with me, invisible, just watching and learning?’

“No answer.

“I felt him leave. I felt a change of temperature in the room. I heard things stirring, the paper tissue ruffled in its box, the creak of the bed, the faint rattle of the Venetian blinds, then nothing.

“I made the Sign of the Cross. What was I going to do? Where was I going to go to find someone who would understand this? Hell, I needed someone to tell me what to do.

“I went into the bathroom and washed the slimy semen off my legs. I washed my hands. Then I came back, and I took my rosary out of the nightstand. Big Ramona had found it for me. It was a garnet rosary from my First Communion. Lynelle’s gift. I started to say it.

“But I couldn’t meditate on the mysteries. I thought of the stranger. What if he came back to Blackwood Manor? If the Hermitage was destroyed, what would he do? I pictured him, those fiery dark eyes. How perfectly furious he had been, pivoting wild as a dervish as the broken glass assaulted him.

“And if I went to sleep, I’d dream of Rebecca.”

CHAPTER 21

21

“GOBLIN WAS on time for the meeting with the panel of psychiatrists. He was my faithful duplicate again, and the look of contempt and boredom had vanished from his face. He put his arm around me and I could see that he was afraid of what was to happen with the panel.

“As we entered the room—Goblin, me and Aunt Queen—I felt for one moment: What could it be like if I were to trust these people? If I were really to make an appeal to them? Could they help me, not with some cooked-up psychiatric diagnosis but with an active assault on Rebecca and Goblin and on the panic that had driven me to the Hermitage? Could they be a party to my efforts to fight the trespasser?

“My own sheer disloyalty to Goblin, born out of a brand-new fear, put me to shame. But, not being able to read my mind, for all his new attainments, he had no clue of it.