“You’re just in time to bear witness to my final apotheosis,” Jacobus said from the television.

The doorbell rang again.

Harper stood up in a flurry. The doorbell. It might be the police. It might be word of Bernard. It might be Bernard himself …

She dithered before the television, trying to decide what to do, how to proceed. If she turned the TV off, the tape might keep on playing and she would lose her place. If she tried to turn the tape off … well, she really hadn’t the faintest notion of how to do that anyway.

The doorbell rang again. Reluctantly, Harper backed away from the set, edging around the bed.

The voice of Jacobus trailed after her, tinny from the set’s small speaker.

“Poor Prendergast. That you ever thought to defeat me. Could you not see that I am the agent of an immortal power?”

The doorbell rang again, insistently. Harper knocked against the bedside table, the stack of books. She caught it before it toppled over, steadied it. Then, with a last glance at the show, she bustled towards the corridor.

“In such incarnations as this, I travel through the centuries,” said Jacobus. “I feed on the marrow of time.”

Harper stopped. She had her hand on the doorframe. She was about to leave the room. She looked back at the television set. I feed on the marrow of time. That was just what Iago had said to her in the Temple Church. And with a straight face too. She had thought at the time it was a little overwrought …

She stared at the screen. A close-up on the evil genius. A close-up on the grim detectives. The struggling girl: mmf mmf. Jacobus.

“I was here before the oceans turned black with life …”he said.

“And when the deserts are white with death,” Harper said along with him, “I will remain.”

The doorbell again. Jacobus went on.

“The petty hindrances you have put in my way have only served to amuse me. But that’s all over now …”

And with that, the cinema hunchback came chuckling forward. With a magician’s yank, he pulled the blanket from the altar and there …

Harper felt cold sweat beading on her forehead. Felt all her fears—for Bernard, for Storm, for herself now too—coalesce into one churning anxiety. She stared at the TV screen.

And there, as she stared—there, of course, was the baby. Of course. The baby on the altar. Jacobus with his sword raised above it. The gagged woman screaming from the wall.

Good God, of course: it was all exactly as it had been in the jungle. Exactly what she had seen as she had peeked through the branches and seen the awful truth about the man she’d loved.