Callahan nodded. “It was like looking at Rowan, only with long blond hair and breasts. His twin sister. And she laughed. She asked me if I thought I’d seen a ghost. I felt…surreal. As if I’d slipped into another of those other worlds, like the real one—if there is such a thing—but not quite the same. I felt this mad urge to drag out my wallet and see who was on the bills. It wasn’t just the resemblance; it was her laughing. Sitting there beside a man who had her face, assuming he had any face left at all under the bandages, and laughing.”

“Welcome to Room 19 of the Todash Hospital,” Eddie said.

“Beg pardon?”

“I only meant I know the feeling, Don. We all do. Go on.”

“I introduced myself and asked if I could come in. And when I asked it, I was thinking back to Barlow, the vampire. Thinking, You have to invite them in the first time. After that, they can come and go as they please . She told me of course I could come in. She said she’d come from Chicago to be with him in what she called ‘his closing hours.’ Then, in that same pleasant voice, she said, ‘I knew who you were right away. It’s the scar on your hand. In his letters, Rowan said he was quite sure you were a religious man in your other life. He used to talk about people’s other lives all the time, meaning before they started drinking or taking drugs or went insane or all three. This one was a carpenter in his other life. That one was a model in her other life. Was he right about you?’ All in that pleasant voice. Like a woman making conversation at a cocktail party. And Rowan lying there with his head covered in bandages. If he’d been wearing sunglasses, he would have looked like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man.

“I came in. I said I’d once been a religious man, yes, but that was all in the past. She put out her hand. I put out mine. Because, you see, I thought…”

Six

He puts out his hand because he has made the assumption that she wants to shake with him. The pleasant voice has fooled him. He doesn’t realize that what Rowena Magruder Rawlings is actually doing israising her hand, not putting it out. At first he doesn’t even realize he has been slapped, and hard enough to make his left ear ring and his left eye water; he has a confused idea that the sudden warmth rising in his left cheek must be some sort of cockamamie allergy thing, perhaps a stress reaction. Then she is advancing on him with tears streaming down her weirdly Rowan-like face.