Quentin didn’t wait around for the ending. He could see where this was heading. Ceding the field of battle, he stepped back through the doorway. Let her follow him if she could, but she couldn’t. It was hard and smooth as glass to her. She mushed her face and her breasts against the barrier, like a kid squishing her face against a window, and looked at him with one antic eye, blue on blue.

She was daring him, baiting him. Come on! Quit moping around! Don’t you want to have some fun? When she opened her mouth it was bright inside, like in a photographic negative.

“Alice,” Quentin said. “Alice.”

He closed the red door. He’d seen enough.

—

She was the madwoman in the attic. It was weirdly intimate, this one-sided duel, just her and him, one on one. Not like sex, but intimate. He was like a free diver trying for greater and greater depths, forcing himself down, lungs bursting, then kicking frantically for the surface with his puny human flippers, the big blue nipping at his heels.

Quentin kept records of his trips in a spiral notebook: where he went, where she went, what he’d done, what she’d done. There wasn’t much point to it, because the performance went more or less the same way every time, but it helped him fight off sadness. And he did notice one thing: Alice liked to herd him toward the front door of the house, like she was daring him to open it. That seemed like a dare he’d be better off not taking.

But if there was nothing else on offer? Their little dance was like the endgame of a disastrously bloody chess match, just a queen chasing a beleaguered king around an empty board, sadistically refusing to checkmate him. It was difficult to know what if anything was going on in the queen’s mind, but one thing was clear: Alice was better at this game than he was. Apart from everything else she knew him better than he knew himself. She always had.

So that night, close to midnight, when Plum was safely in bed, he reversed tactics again. Alice wanted him to open the front door? He was going to head straight for it. Give her what she wants, see what she does with it. He still didn’t know what he was looking for, but maybe he’d find out what she was looking for.

He prepped a couple of spells in advance, and cast the first one as soon as he’d stepped through the door. It created a reasonably lifelike image of him in every room in the house.