Curiouser and curiouser. The mirror was still there, and it was still a mirror, but inside the room in the mirror it was snowing—blowing snow, bordering on a real blizzard. It was starting to drift on the floor, the towel racks, the rim of the sink. It settled on her hair and her eyelashes. But only in the mirror: reflexively she touched her hair, but it was dry. The snow wasn’t real. Quentin appeared behind her.

“Eek,” he said.

Clearly this was affecting them in different ways.

They strolled through the house, lord and lady of their uncanny new domain. Everything was there, more or less, except when it wasn’t. The furniture, the drapes, the silverware, the glassware. The doors were ordinary doors. But there were no computers and no phones. The books were there, but the pages were blank. No toiletries in the bathroom, no clothes in the closets. Nobody lived here. Water came out of the taps, but cold only. They disagreed over whether one of the oriental rugs was left-right inverted—Quentin was sure it was—but Plum remembered it differently, and neither of them felt like going back and checking the original.

Fatigue and disappointment were giving them both a slightly hysterical edge.

“It’s like a giant closet,” Plum said. “We could store stuff in here. We’d have more closet space than anybody in New York City.”

“We’re not going to store stuff in here.”

“Put a couple of flat-screens in here, Xbox, easy chair: man-cave!”

They’d made their way up to the top floor again when they heard a heavy clunk from the floor below. Her bedroom.

“I guess that’s the other shoe,” Quentin said. “Wands out, Harry.”

Plum snorted—charitably, because she was a good person—but she took his point. She went defensive: a nice hard blocking spell. Charge it up and you could hold it back till you needed it; it would just take a gesture to release it. Whatever Quentin was prepping, it gave off a high rising whine.

But when they got there the bedroom was empty, except that Plum’s desk chair was now lying on its back, its little feet in the air, like it was playing dead: ah—they got me! Slowly Quentin lifted it up and set it on its feet.

“The chair fell over,” he said brightly.

“All right, all right.”

It was like they were daring each other to be the first to lose their nerve. They tromped downstairs to the second floor. Another thing: color photographs had faded to black and white.

“I wonder—” But Quentin was cut off by that same clunk as before, from over their heads now. The chair again.

“Huh.” Neither of them wanted to look. “I wonder what’s outside?”

“I don’t,” Plum said. “And I dare you to not look.”