I went back into the dining room. There was no silver or china in the glass-doored cabinet. But certainly there had been silver and china last night. I went into the hallway. There were no paintings on the walls. I checked the living room. No Picasso, Jasper Johns, de Kooning, or Warhol. All gone. Even the photographs of the ships were gone.

The Chinese sculptures were gone. The bookshelves were half empty. And the rugs. There were precious few of them left—one in the dining room, which had almost caused me to kill myself! And one at the foot of the steps.

This house had been emptied out of all its true valuables! Why, half the furniture was missing! The little bastard wasn’t going to return! It was never part of his plan.

I sat down in the armchair nearest the door. Mojo, who’d been following me faithfully, took the opportunity to stretch out at my feet. I dug my hand into his fur and tugged at it, and smoothed it, and thought what a comfort it was that the dog was there.

Of course James was a fool to pull this. Did he think I couldn’t call on the others?

Hmmm. Call on the others for help—what a perfectly gruesome idea. It did not take any great feat of imagination to guess what Marius would say to me if I told him what I’d done. In all probability he knew, and was smoldering with disapproval. As for the older ones, I shuddered to think on it at all. My best hope from any standpoint was that the body switch would go unnoticed. I’d realized that from the start.

The salient point here was that James didn’t know how angry the others would be with me on account of this experiment. He couldn’t know. And James didn’t know, either, the limits of the power he now possessed.

Ah, but all this was premature. The theft of my money, the looting of the house—this was James’s idea of an evil joke, no more, no less. He couldn’t leave the clothes and money here for me. His thieving petty nature wouldn’t allow it. He had to cheat a little, that was all. Of course he planned to come back and claim his twenty million. And he was counting on the fact that I wouldn’t hurt him because I’d want to try this experiment again, because I would value him as the only being who could successfully pull it off.

Yes, that was his ace in the hole, I figured—that I wouldn’t harm the one mortal who could effect the switch when I wanted to do it again.

Do this again! I had to laugh. I did laugh, and what a strange and alien sound it was. I shut my eyes tight, and sat there for a moment, hating the sweat clinging to my ribs, hating the ache in my belly and in my head, hating the heavy padded feeling of my hands and feet. And when I opened my eyes again all I beheld was this bleary world of indistinct edges and pallid colors …