She was as he had known her before the drug: beautiful, vibrant … a bit headstrong … no, much headstrong … but that was her. They were walking together in a park of some kind, and oddly enough it seemed very clearly to be autumn, for the passing breeze blew red and yellow leaves from the trees. She put her hand in his and her shoulder against his own, and then she said—again, very clearly and right up into his ear—Help me.

Yes, he’d answered in the dream. I will, I promise it.

And there in his dream before them was a small pond of shining silver, calm and unrippled even as the breeze blew past. As they stood together at the pond’s edge, the pond itself began to rise up from the earth, to elongate and change shape, until it was standing upright and reflecting both their figures. It had become a mirror, and as both Matthew and Berry looked upon it something dark and terribly dangerous—something hideous and vile—began to stir in the glass, began to loom larger and larger, to spread wings and grow the wart of a head, and amid streaks of lightning that shot through the glass and wound about the reflections of Matthew and the woman he loved like the tentacles of Professor Fell’s man-eating octopus, Matthew saw that the grotesque figure wore a raven’s-wing coat and had the face of Cardinal Black.

He wasn’t sleeping much.

He walked through the snow, the sun upon his face and yet the cold bracing and in its own fashion exhilarating. How lucky he was to be alive, after all that. How Fate had smiled upon him—or, at least, had offered him a chance for success that he had to risk taking. Returning to Fell’s village with the book and the chemist … looking back, it had seemed impossible. And Julian? Without Julian it would have truly been impossible. Without a bad man guiding the way … impossible.

In the middle of a snowy field where the footprints were his alone, Matthew sent up a prayer for Julian Devane. He did not linger on it, because if someone were listening his heart had already been heard. It seemed to him that maybe a bad man needed a prayer more than the good. So there it was, and after standing for a while with the sun as warm as summer on his face and his shadow still in winter he turned about and retraced his steps.

As the afternoon progressed, a rider dismounted his horse in front of the Flying Dragon and tied his steed to the hitching post. He was a young man, bundled up in a new woolen coat and an equally new woolen cap, both Christmas gifts from his mother and father in Whistler Green. He took from a saddle bag a leather cylinder, approached the front door and rang the bell.