Intuitively, Timothy's eyes darted about the room. The strewn gin glasses, the wine, the orange peel not quite on the plate, the video box—and Ruth. Smelling of his mother's perfume, barefoot, red in lip and nail. Black as night of eye.

"Oh, Christ. Oh, fucking shit—"

Feet on the steps.

A rumble of voices.

The key in the lock.

"Timothy?"

CHAPTER 2

KNEELING IN CRIMSON ARMOR BEFORE his shield was a knight. Beside him ran a blue glass stream, at his back lay an emerald wood where a tower burned. The window was more like a tarot card than anything. It reflected all over the polished, deeply scratched round table that stood below. The scratches spelled out a word, but not in English.

The house was quiet and full of heat. And if she closed her eyes, the effect of shuttered hot silence and colored light, the smell of dust and powders, beeswax, cobwebs, damp, evoked the first house.

And yet everything was changed.

Changed—and duplicated. Perhaps not too much. Perhaps only so far as was bearable, or necessary.

She had watched what they would do. She had been borne along by it. But she could not really say she had participated. She was still a spectator. That was her role. Witness to the Scarabae.

Rachaela stood in the dark room under the blue, red and green window, and listened.

The sound came, just discernible, the firm summer breeze tossing the tall pines and oaks of the common. Almost, but not quite, like the sound of the sea…

Then a car noised dimly by, passing along the road two hundred feet below the house, where the common ended. There was not much traffic. Sometimes, people went that way, and usually stared at the house between the trees. It was quite large, with curious balancing architecture, turrets, and all the stabs of the stained-glass windows. Every one of the windows was of stained glass. All the outer doors were doubled, like air locks. There was a conservatory, and a walled garden. Like the first house. On three sides, the common spread away.

But down beyond the road there was a scatter of big houses, and then clusters of smaller ones, and next one of those villages of London, with its pubs and shops, library, and civic buildings. The steeples of churches sprang from the landscape. On Sundays the bells rang in the distance and an ice-cream van was just audible, playing "The Thieving Magpie."

Michael and Cheta did their shopping in the London village stores, perhaps classed as an eccentric foreign couple.

Books were brought from the library, and punctually returned. Also tapes and discs for Eric's machine. Tapes too were carried from Bonanza Videos. They liked the videos, particularly horror films and thrillers. These they watched with straight moral faces, reminding her of gray hamsters thinking.