Funny, Harper thought sleepily. Storm probably hadn’t even known that it was all run-of-the-mill German Expressionism. She could see that he’d thought he was paying some sort of hommage to “Black Annie.” There were the shape of the ruins, the repetition of the sound—clang-clang—the two men descending the stairs. But in fact, the look of the picture—the ambience of it—came directly from the old Universal Studio monster classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. And these had been fashioned by the German Jew Carl Laemmle along with his stable of emigré directors. Hollywood and his own inclinations, in other words, had somehow furnished Storm’s mind with the German Romantic imagery of Rhinehart as it mutated into the pre-Fascist Expressionist celebration of Terror and Will. He too, in other words, was part of the story trail.

Which, so far, was about the only interesting thing she could think of to say about the film. The rest was cliché piled upon cliché.

She leaned on her stick and watched. Down and down, by roving torchlight, Prendergast and Hedley went. And now there was the body of poor, dear Sergeant What’s-His-Name dangling from the wall.

“Poor devil,” said Dr. Prendergast.

Poor devil, by Jove, thought Harper Albright.

The eerie music swelled—as eerie music will—and the two caped heroes moved out into a great underground chamber. There was Jacobus, the archvillain, bedecked in his pentagram robe before the blanketed altar. And there was the heroine, of course, writhing on the wall in her seductively torn blouse. Her wrists chained, her mouth gagged—all very appealing, if you went in for that sort of thing. The poor girl did her level best to deliver the lines, “Mmf, mmf,” with some sort of conviction. And her name, of course, was Annie.

And the villain was Jacobus. Harper lifted one gray eyebrow. Jacobus seeking immortality. Well, that was something anyway. If you thought of Iago watching the film twenty years before. You could imagine him—still reeling from the destruction of his cult, seeking desperately for a sign of his cherished destiny. You could imagine the hairs on the back of his neck bristling at even this minor coincidence.

But it was not enough. Not enough to draw him onto the trail. How could he have known to go from this ridiculous thing to “Black Annie” and the other stories?

Then the answer—a possible answer—began to take shape in her mind. A spilled soda. She had forgotten that. Hadn’t Iago said something about a spilled soda, back in the church of the Templars? A spilled soda, and the next stage was given to me. Yes, that was it.

Harper felt a twinge of fear—her first real fear for the life of Richard Storm.

“Why, Dr. Prendergast, I’m so glad you could make it,” Jacobus said from the TV.

And the doorbell rang.

Harper blinked, looked around her, momentarily confused by the intrusion of reality.