“I hope it isn’t anything . . . ?” Keith says. A tactful man, a gentleman, he keeps his distance; stands in the doorway; allows Monica her privacy.

Monica says, “It’s a wrong number. It’s nothing.”

She breaks the connection; dials Sheila Trask’s number; discovers that the line is busy, indeed the line is busy, the receiver is off the hook at Edgemont as she had suspected. . . .

“Nothing,” says Monica lightly. “A prank.”

Next morning, early, before seven, Monica telephones Sheila.

The receiver is raised at once, on the first ring, but Sheila explains—swiftly, rather coldly—that she can’t talk at the moment: there has been a minor household emergency: poor Siegmund was out all night and now he’s sick, vomiting, very likely someone poisoned him, one of Morton’s old enemies in the neighborhood, she’ll have to drive him to the vet’s.

“I’ll call you later,” she tells Monica, then, about to hang up, adds, “I hope it wasn’t anything crucial—?”

8

Ariadne’s thread has snapped, and now the poor creature is wandering in the labyrinth,” Sheila said, yawning and stretching. “But she’ll emerge. One day soon. She always has in the past.—Otherwise she’ll starve, she’ll suffocate, to hell with her.”

“If there’s anything I can do . . .” Monica said hesitantly.

Sheila laughed. Then she said, soberly: “You’re so kind, Monica. But thank you, no, I don’t believe there is anything you can do. Just be.”

Sheila was in one of her ecstatic high-flying moods, Sheila was in one of her dull-eyed stupefied moods, exhausted, grainy-skinned, not very attractive. She spent her mornings driving about on country roads, she spent her mornings on the telephone, suddenly there was a houseguest at Edgemont (a relative? a cousin of Sheila’s?), suddenly she turned up at Monica’s, carrying a bag of groceries, goat’s-milk cheese and Norwegian rye crackers, that very same country pâté she loved to gorge on, and two six-packs of imported German beer. God she was hungry!—famished!

Another thing too: the way the days passed, spun, a sun and a moon and a sun again, zip and it’s through: you get to the point where you sit hypnotized by the clock, any fucking clock, watching the hands move, forgetting to breathe.

Did Monica understand?

And there were the mirror-ghouls, the mirror-leeches.

“Sisters” of a sort. Whom you don’t recognize though they seem to recognize you.

Did Monica understand?

Or was it simply subterfuge, like “Mary Beth”?

Monica had been planning to spend the week after Christmas in Indiana, visiting her family; but now she worried about leaving Sheila alone.

Not that Sheila wanted to celebrate Christmas with her, or to exchange presents: she detested Christmas, she said, and she detested ceremonial presents.

She detested the very time of the year . . . the taste of the air, the texture of the light. The old, old eclipse of the soul. . . .