How did he do his traveling? Was he like a giant spider skittering at lightning speed over the spokes of the visible web that united us all, or did he fly blind towards the heated or throbbing pulse of another consciousness? He wouldn’t tell me. And every time I asked, I had the uncomfortable perception that he didn’t understand the question. That’s what disturbed me more than anything else—the things he didn’t seem able to understand.

Most of his long silences were the result of his inability to understand my questions, and his need to think about all aspects of what I was asking him.

I was wondering so many things about Amel that I couldn’t organize my thoughts. But of one thing I was certain. He wanted to see those spirits close at hand, and that’s why he’d pushed me to come here. And he wanted me to go to New Orleans later on.

“I know you have some evil motive of your own,” I said aloud as I stood there in the snow. “But just be quiet for once and let me do what I want to do.”

I walked up the snowy drive. Lantern-style lights burned beside the ironbound double doors.

“Evil motive, evil motive, evil motive…,” he sang. “What nonsense, evil motive! You are a fool. If you neglect these monster spirits, they might turn on you.”

“And then what?” I asked.

Gremt, Teskhamen, and Hesketh claimed to have founded the Talamasca over a thousand years ago. No one doubted their word on it, or that they still acted as guardians for the Talamasca today. But the human Talamasca knew nothing of its monstrous foundation, and the human Order carried on as it always had, studying the psychic phenomena of the world with scholarly respect.

I heard Amel laugh bitterly inside me, the voice no one else could hear. “Just remember. Spirits lie, and they lie, and they lie. And don’t bother to knock. They ‘heard’ you thirty miles off. Teskhamen is in there. Teskhamen is a blood drinker, and if you don’t think I’ve been inside Teskhamen of late surveying this place from stem to stern, you’re an idiot.”

“Okay, so now I’m an idiot and a fool in the same contentious breath,” I said.

The doors opened. I was standing in a flood of warm light, and the air was warm too and fragrant with the scent of wax candles, old wood, old books.

Gremt stood there, looking as always as solid as a human being. Short neatly groomed black hair, smooth symmetrical face marvelously eloquent of human courtesy and apprehension. But there was none of the gracious generosity in his expression that I had seen in the past. His long priestly thawb or soutane was of dark heavy blue velvet, and he wore a dark gray cashmere scarf tucked inside the simple collar, as if he could feel the cold.