Someone had been in here, one of those quiet, strange mortal servants of Armand's who went about the house like obedient somnambulists--and this one had dusted and polished, and laid out a soft green silk cover for me, over the back of the darker green damask couch.
The two small lamps burned on the desk.
I turned on the computer long enough to confirm at clear volume what I already knew. Benji was broadcasting vigorously. No Burnings anywhere on the planet. No word of the Voice from far and wide. No calls coming in from desperate victims.
I shut off the machine.
I knew he was with me. That subtle touch, that embrace of invisible fingers on the back of my neck.
I sat down in the largest of the leather wing chairs, the one in which Viktor and Rose had cuddled together last night, and I looked up at the great mirror over the mantel. I was pondering the hallucinations the Voice had once created for me in mirrors--those reflections of myself which he had so playfully ignited in my brain.
Those were hallucinations, surely, and I wondered just how far he might take such a power. After all, telepathy can do infinitely more than invade a mind with a logical string of words.
A quarter of an hour passed during which I considered all these things in an unguarded way. I looked dreamily at the giant mirror. Was I longing for him to show himself as my double, as he'd done before? Longing to see that clever impish face that wasn't my face and had to be some semblance of his intellect or soul?
The mirror reflected only the shelves of books behind me, the polished wood, the many differing volumes of varying thickness and height.
I became drowsy.
Something appeared in the mirror. I blinked, thinking that perhaps I was mistaken, but I saw it more clearly. It was a tiny amorphous reddish cloud.
It was swirling, growing bigger, and then shrinking and then expanding again, indistinct in shape, swelling, fading, growing ever more red, thickening again.
It began to grow larger, giving the illusion that it was coming closer to me, traveling steadily towards me from some point very far away, deep in the world of the mirror, where its diminutive size was an illusion.
Steadily towards me, it moved, and now it appeared to be swimming, propelling itself by the writhing work of myriad red-tinted tentacles, gossamer and transparent tentacles, moving as if through water, as if it were a sea creature of innumerable translucent arms.
I couldn't take my eyes off it. It seemed the mirror was just a piece of glass. It was traveling towards me from a vast dark and cloudy world in which it was purely at home.
Suddenly it resembled nothing so much as a reddish Medusa's head but with a tiny dark visage, tiny, and with writhing red serpentine arms beyond count. They had no serpent heads, these arms. And the entire image retained its ruby-red-tinged transparency. The face--and it was a face--grew larger and larger as I stared at it amazed.
It became the size of an old silver half dollar as I watched, and the countless translucent tentacles seemed to elongate and become ever more delicate, dancing as they did so, dancing, reaching outward beyond the frame of the mirror on either side.
I stood up.
I moved towards the fireplace. I looked directly into the mirror.
The face grew larger and larger and I could now make out tiny glittering eyes in it, and what seemed a mouth, a round mouth of elastic shifting shape, a mouth seeking to be a mouth. The great mass of crimson tinted tentacles now filled the mirror to the very frame.
The face grew bigger, and it seemed the mouth which was only a dark cypher stretched into a smile. The eyes flashed black and filled with life.
Bigger and bigger grew the face as though the being were indeed still moving towards me, moving towards the barrier of this glass that divided us, and the face slowly grew to be the size perhaps of my own.
The dark eyes expanded, took on the human accoutrements of eyelashes and eyebrows; a semblance of a nose appeared, and the mouth had lips. The whole mirror now was filled with the deep pellucid red of this image, a soft elusive red, the color of blood suffusing the tubular tentacles and the face, the slowly darkening face.
"Amel!" I cried out. I gasped for breath.
The dark eyes grew pupils as they looked at me, and lips smiled as the opening had smiled before. An expression bloomed on the surface of the face, an expression of unutterable love.
Pain fused with the love, undeniable pain. The expression of pain and love so fused in the face that I could hardly bear to look at it, aware suddenly of a huge pain inside me, inside my heart, pain blooming in me as if it were unstoppable, out of all control, and would soon be more than I could bear.
"I love you!" I said. "I love you!" And then without words I reached out towards it. I reached out and I told it that I would embrace it, I would know it, I would take into myself its love, its pain. I will take into myself what you are.
I heard the sound of weeping only it had no sound. I heard it rising all around me the way the sound of falling rain can rise as it strikes more and more surfaces around one, pattering on streets and roofs and leaves and boughs.
"I know what's driven you to these things!" I said aloud. I was crying. My eyes were filling with blood.
"I would never have hurt that boy," whispered the Voice inside me, only it was coming from this face, this tragic face, these lips, this one looking into my eyes.