At the end of the last century he had visited a medium, planning to take her when the lights were out. But just as her fingers twisted down the gaslight something awful happened. With a sound like a tearing curtain dozens and dozens of different faces appeared in her face, like a crowd at the window of a burning house. All were known to him—his victims. The medium screamed, her eyes rolling, head lolling.

He had run from that horrible place, literally staggering with fear. A day later the New York Evening Mail published an item to the effect that the body of Mrs. Rennie Hooper had been found in her parlor. Her fingers were still on the key of the gas lamp. They assumed it was heart failure. Miriam insisted there was no touch with the dead. But she wasn’t human, she didn’t know anything about the relationship between a man and his dead.

The dead world glowered forth at him. Suddenly, an image of the whore exploded into his mind’s eye, her flesh blackening in the flames.

His stomach twisted until it felt as if it were ripping out of its body and he clamped his fists to his eyes, willing with all his strength that the vision of death before him, of deliverance into the hands of his victims, would dissolve. But it did not, rather it focused and confirmed. He realized that the demons of hell were not demons at all but the men of earth without their costumes.

To Sleep in safety, Miriam had gone to her attic room. John might well be able to penetrate the security system around the bed. She huddled on the hard floor fighting a nightmare. But it came relentlessly on, bursting through the Sleep like fire through straw, grasping her mind, forcing it to see:

A foggy morning near Ravenna. She had come here with the other citizens of property, when the Emperor fled Rome fifty years ago. Dew lies on the marble sill of her bedroom window. From deep in the fog comes the singing of rough-voiced Vandals on their way to raid the Imperial Palace. They move slowly through the mist, marching along just beyond the herb garden, their horned helmets making them look enormous. They will not pass this great house without plundering it, not even on their way to the palace of Petronius Maximus.

Keeping her voice steady, she calls Lollia. The girl comes swiftly across the marble floor, her slippers hissing on the stones. Miriam does not need to speak. “It is finished,” Lollia says. “He hasn’t made a sound in hours.” Miriam takes Lollia’s white face in her hands and kisses her full on the mouth, feeling the trembling fervor of a kiss returned. “My love,” Lollia says softly, “the barbarians—”

“I know.”