On the one table in the living room is the thing I’ve been ignoring since I stepped in here, a large wooden box with hinges at the top and sides allowing each side to unfold. Each unhinged side has a small latch. Best to get my bearings before I fuck around with any magical artifacts I’m not on a first name basis with. There are no markings, no sigils. It was designed to be as ignorable as possible. So I continue to ignore it.

After checking the bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, all fully functional, the beds even made up all professional-like, there’s only one thing left.

I undo the top and front latches of the box, slowly opening each panel to lie flat on the table. I look at the contents from different angles, close-up, from across the room. As near as I can tell it’s a bottle.

I mean, it’s a pretty bottle. It’s fairly short, about the height of a fifth of Jack, but it’s fat and curved. It hurts a little to look at, actually. It’s not square, it’s not round, and yet it is. One moment it looks about twice the width of a baseball, then no larger than a flask. But at the same time it doesn’t seem to change at all.

Instead of being made from one continuous piece of glass, it’s a collection of multicolored glass panels bound together by thin bands of brass. Each pane has sigils engraved in its surface. Different languages, some I recognize—Hebrew, Arabic, Phoenician—others that look like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Even the thick metal-and-glass stopper is covered in runes.

The ones I can read, and I’m assuming the ones I can’t, all amount to the same thing. They’re binding spells. This thing is designed to keep inside whatever goes inside. It is not fucking around.

Unlike the nuclear one back in the storage unit, this one isn’t labeled. No THIS END TOWARD ENEMY simplicity to it. Sure, these things look simple, open the bottle and pull in whatever you’re pointing it at, but spirit bottles are rarely that easy. If I’m lucky there’s a manual around here somewhere.

After a minute of looking I find an unlabeled envelope slid beneath the wooden case. Newspaper clippings spill out when I open it. L.A. Times, Herald Examiner, Evening Herald. Nothing big, certainly not front-page news, but in a couple of them there’s a photo of a man who, just like Miriam said, looks a whole hell of a lot like me. He’s standing at the edge of a scaffolding over a pit, holding something wrapped in cloth in his arms. He doesn’t look happy that someone’s taking his picture.