He stepped across the threshold, engine gunning. On a mission, clearly. For Storm felt good again, felt new even, reinvented. The reaction to his seizure had dwindled away. The physical weakness, the gape-faced shock, had dwindled. And his moral strength had returned to him in their wake—a reaction to the reaction. Thus, in the days since his last meeting with Harper—since he had fled from The Sign of the Crane, from the judgment he thought he saw in the old woman’s eyes—he had been locked alone in his measly room. He had been warring there with the inner demons of his death. A cast of thousands. An epic, bleak and bloody spectacle, forty years in the making. Day after day, he had flailed in the ravening clutches of his mortality. Night after night, he had scorched his cheeks with tears. Tailor-legged on the carpet. Streaming eyes lifted to the ceiling. Life, oh life, he had cried out to the gods.

And then it had ended. Only hours ago really. As he slumped exhausted just that morning. The answer he sought had suddenly come to him, had suddenly risen before his eyes like a thunderous dawn. And the answer was: Irv Philbin. Or, that is, the immortal words of Irv Philbin, who just happened to be the best goddamned movie publicist between the Canyon and the Coast. It was Irv, seven years ago, who had rescued Storm’s worst film, Castle Misery, who had slam-dunked the brain-dead spook show down the public’s throat with one of the great ad campaigns of all time. And it was the words of that campaign that dawned before Storm at this critical hour, the very words that were once emblazoned across the Castle one-sheet in every multiplex lobby in America. These words shone in Storm’s mind through the forest of doubt; at the exit of the valley of shadows they shone:

In the battle between Love and Death, there can be only one Survivor!

Storm was here to find Sophia.

Now, at the front of the room, a man in blue overalls was adjusting the easel canvas holders. Now he was stepping back. There was the panel, displayed: the ruined abbey, the broken window, the winter trees, the shadows, the cowled, ghostly figures gliding by the base of the chapel. Hanging from the ceiling above it, an enormous electric toteboard reset itself to zero. Pounds, dollars, deutschmarks, yen—all zero, straight down the column. The glimmer of it caught Storm’s eye. He heard the riffle in the seats as the buyers resettled. They crossed their wrists in their laps, focused their blasé regard on the Rhinehart.