Once she was out of view he stood up, waited five more minutes, then stepped through the door. Everything was just as it had been. There was the same deep muffled quiet. No wind from outside rattled the mirrored windows. Nothing moved. Or almost nothing: there was an unnerving flicker at the corner of his eye, like a television left on without the sound. It was the mirror in the bathroom, where flakes of snow were still drifting down.

He stood at the top of the stairs, swung his arms and bounced on his toes. He had not even a glimmer of a plan. How did you turn a monster back into a person? It took a long time for Alice to appear again, and he was starting to wonder if he should call her name when he heard a muffled, fumbling clatter in the room below, like somebody kicking something small and heavy across a rug. A minute later that thin blue radiance came filtering up the stairwell. Whatever he’d been about to do or say or cast exited his head, and he got up and walked stiff-legged back to the door. He couldn’t stop himself. It was like his legs were bionic and somebody else was controlling them.

That was what it was to fear for your life. He stopped himself in front of the door, breathing hard, not quite going through, not yet. What was he going to do? He wanted to shout at her: Wake up! Remember who you are! I need to talk to Alice! But the thing about monsters was, you couldn’t talk to them about it, because they wouldn’t admit they were monsters in the first place.

She came rising up right through the floor. Quentin bounded away from the door, out of the room and down the stairs like an athlete. He heard laughter, creepily familiar. It was hers, but cold, musical, mechanical, somebody tapping on a wineglass. She came floating down the stairs after him, and he backed away into the mirror-version of Plum’s bedroom. He caught a glimpse of her—she wasn’t quite Alice, not exactly. She blurred out for a second, a low-res hologram of herself. Her hair floated weightless around her head.

And she never stopped smiling. Never. Blue lips, blue teeth. Maybe it was fun being a niffin. Maybe everybody had the wrong idea about it.