The voice intones only guttural nonsense syllables. It is like listening to a garbled television submerged in a fish tank. I must not look into the mirror.

“Julian.” Without shouting, I raise my voice—what I think of as my teacher’s voice. It echoes through the basement like a slap.

The only way to change the future is to understand it, but I’m starting to wonder, the longer I wait in the dark, how much more there really is to understand. I keep hoping to see a sliver of humanity in him, something to reach out to, but what if it isn’t there?

I think of the way he brought the rock down on Constance: deliberate, unemotional.

A door in front of me—one of the doors to those flooded tunnels that snake through the damp earth—creaks slowly open, exhaling with it the black stench of death. Now I cannot take my eyes off the doorway, even though I am blind to whatever lies within. I must watch. I must not look into the mirror, but in its surface the face opens its mouth as if to laugh, and a low slithering voice emerges. How long will you wait before you stop him?

Now I can sense something in the tunnel, creeping down the throat of earth toward the basement on its hands and knees, or on many legs; I can hear the slosh of water, sucking feet in mud; yes, something is coming.

Will you wait for him to begin mutilating animals?

The candle fights to maintain its potency, but its flame flickers in the damp air moving in from the tunnel.

Will you wait for him to begin murdering children?

I can almost see a figure now, in the darkness, pressing against the doorway, but it is only my imagination conjuring him up. The distant sounds of the tunnel might be nothing at all—might be rodents or frogs or only my imagination. I cling to this belief, wanting nothing of whatever might live in those dank underground passages.

Will you wait for him to grow into a man?

“No,” I say to the voice in the mirror, a sharp crack, a command that stays the invisible figure beyond the doorway. “Who are you? You’re not him. Who am I speaking to?”

Cold, sick air blows in from the tunnel and caresses the candle flame.

You are speaking to yourself.

Unable to stand it any longer, I turn my head to look into the face that has been mocking me from the fringes, and with a start I see only my own face staring back—my own face, my own eyes, my own mouth, but all is strange and unfamiliar, like the face of a stranger. As if it isn’t my face at all but only the house, replicating me.

“I am speaking to myself,” I murmur, and then laugh wildly. Thank goodness Elizabeth and my mother are asleep and not here to witness my foolishness. And it will serve them right, I think spitefully, when they realize, at last, what Julian is. What he really is. Elizabeth will never believe, until she sees it with her own eyes, that she could create such a monster in her womb. Create something terrible out of her own flesh.