Someone had been in here, one of those quiet, strange mortal servants of Armand’s who went about the house like obedient somnambulists—and this one had dusted and polished, and laid out a soft green silk cover for me, over the back of the darker green damask couch.

The two small lamps burned on the desk.

I turned on the computer long enough to confirm at clear volume what I already knew. Benji was broadcasting vigorously. No Burnings anywhere on the planet. No word of the Voice from far and wide. No calls coming in from desperate victims.

I shut off the machine.

I knew he was with me. That subtle touch, that embrace of invisible fingers on the back of my neck.

I sat down in the largest of the leather wing chairs, the one in which Viktor and Rose had cuddled together last night, and I looked up at the great mirror over the mantel. I was pondering the hallucinations the Voice had once created for me in mirrors—those reflections of myself which he had so playfully ignited in my brain.

Those were hallucinations, surely, and I wondered just how far he might take such a power. After all, telepathy can do infinitely more than invade a mind with a logical string of words.

A quarter of an hour passed during which I considered all these things in an unguarded way. I looked dreamily at the giant mirror. Was I longing for him to show himself as my double, as he’d done before? Longing to see that clever impish face that wasn’t my face and had to be some semblance of his intellect or soul?

The mirror reflected only the shelves of books behind me, the polished wood, the many differing volumes of varying thickness and height.

I became drowsy.

Something appeared in the mirror. I blinked, thinking that perhaps I was mistaken, but I saw it more clearly. It was a tiny amorphous reddish cloud.

It was swirling, growing bigger, and then shrinking and then expanding again, indistinct in shape, swelling, fading, growing ever more red, thickening again.

It began to grow larger, giving the illusion that it was coming closer to me, traveling steadily towards me from some point very far away, deep in the world of the mirror, where its diminutive size was an illusion.

Steadily towards me, it moved, and now it appeared to be swimming, propelling itself by the writhing work of myriad red-tinted tentacles, gossamer and transparent tentacles, moving as if through water, as if it were a sea creature of innumerable translucent arms.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It seemed the mirror was just a piece of glass. It was traveling towards me from a vast dark and cloudy world in which it was purely at home.