And couldn’t quite stifle the sound I made when something brushed against my face. I staggered backward. Nothing happened. I reached out and found something between my fingers: plastic — long ribbons of it — hanging from the ceiling like loose-curled vines.

What I had to stifle then was a stream of epithets. It was videotape. Half-inch videotape pulled off its reels and draped like party streamers as far as I could reach.

Light fluttered through the room, and I thought at first it was a reflection from somewhere. But in the afterimage I realized what I’d seen. The blinds had been drawn back from the wall of window glass, and the first pale flickering of lightning had passed through. Lightning. What about wind? That wasn’t my part of the show. I couldn’t spare either hope or fear for the weather now.

But it had given me that moment’s illumination. In it, I’d seen thickets of tape, veiling the room from one side to the other. Albrecht’s collection, it must be, everything I’d found for him, everything he’d commissioned from anywhere else, all originals, because he’d insisted on that. I closed both fists on handfuls of tape and began, methodically, to pull it down.

The furniture was gone. When I reached the place where the two couches had been, I found only empty floor. A stab of lightning showed me the marks in the deep carpet left by the couches’ feet, and by the Chinese table. He might not be here at all, I thought suddenly, alarmed. A cluster of tape slipped through my fingers to the floor. He might have left this here for me, and be sitting somewhere below, imagining the scene, laughing. If so, he could have left something else as well, something lethal.

No, it felt wrong. Tom Worecski had a wonderful imagination; I had the proof of it right here. But I didn’t think he’d want to miss the effect he’d caused, even if he had to limit himself to judging by the noises I made. I gathered up an armful of tape and yanked.

Bleaching white light shot into the room from the window and was gone, with the crash of mangled air on its heels. I staggered and fell, and jammed my knuckles into my teeth to stop sound and air.

Dana was hanging from the ceiling. The afterimage was printed on my vision wherever I turned: head down, naked, her bare arms dangling among the twists of videotape, the ragged remains of her blond hair sticking out around her face, her mouth dark with dried blood, her eyes wide and empty. Her throat had been cut.

There was another flash, and I didn’t have warning enough to look away, so I saw her again. I would have to see her to get past her. I ought to get her down from there; but oh, gods, gods, I couldn’t do it. What did you burn candles to Erzulie for, Dana? To save you from someone like Tom Worecski? Had she been alive yesterday, when I held her hair in a box? I couldn’t tell, not from one lightning flash to the next. A broken mannequin, a ruined fashion doll — but all the while she’d been alive, she had been real, and I hadn’t noticed. Now it was too late.