'Take it easy, honey.' He looked at her in a kind of critical horror. 'You're moving around like a sleepwalker and your eyelids are falling shut. You get some sleep now, before Joe gets here. It's as good a time as any.'
Angie tried, taking off her shoes and stretching out on the sofa in the day-bright living room. But she still kept waking up with a start of terror every time she started to doze off. Between them they decided that John had better take the first nap.
At a little before nine o'clock, a brisk tap came at the door. Angie, slumped in an armchair in a state between sleep and waking, jumped up, but she couldn't make herself go to the viewer. She hastened to wake John, who was lying on the sofa fully clothed, snoring heavily.
The tap was repeated, urgently, even as he awoke and hurried to switch on the viewer. In a moment his shoulders slumped with relief, and he was opening the door. 'It's Joe,' he said.
In another moment Joe Keogh, wearing a topcoat, was in the room. Angie had met him a couple of times, briefly, over the last few months. Joe was about forty, his fair hair beginning to be streaked almost invisibly with gray. Of average size and sparely muscular, he couldn't have put on more than a few pounds since his days as a Chicago cop. Today his tough-looking face was set in a grim expression.
John did not waste a second in barring and chaining the door again behind him.
Joe looked quickly around, while in the process of pulling off his topcoat and tossing it on a chair. He was wearing a sportcoat now and an open-collared shirt. He nodded to Angie and gave her a smile calculated to be reassuring. 'How you doing?'
She was sitting in a chair, feeling weak in the knees.
'Better, now that you're here. You must think we're crazy, but—'
'Oh, no. I know better than that. John and I have both been through this kind of thing before. How's the old man doing?'
'No change,' said John. 'Still the way I described him to you on the phone.'
'Let me see him.'
In Uncle Matthew's bedroom Joe, frowning, bent over the bed and inspected the patient without touching him. He could only shake his head afterward. Angie observed that he looked more worried now than when he'd entered the apartment. 'Damned if I know. I've never seen anything like it.' He studied Angie. 'I suppose Johnny's been explaining a few things to you?'
'I don't know if I can make myself believe what he's told me. I keep thinking we ought to call the police.'
The ex-cop shook his head. 'No, John's right, that wouldn't be a good idea.'
Johnny interrupted to ask their visitor, 'Was anyone watching the place when you came in?'
'No. But that doesn't mean they're not around. Angie, tell me more about this guy who calls himself—what? Valentine Kaiser?'
Angie repeated in more detail the story of her phone call from Kaiser, and her coffee-shop meeting with him. Joe, who hadn't heard any of this before, listened with intense concentration.
When she'd finished, John contributed his own description of the man, as he had seen him briefly standing in the hall. He added: 'No doubt about
Joe was nodding slowly. 'I think I could tell. Hell, I know I could. And you should be able to tell better than me.'
'After what I went through eleven years ago, there was no doubt in my mind. I don't have any trouble recognizing one of them when I see one.'
Joe was suddenly sounding like a cop. 'Is this Kaiser one of that bunch who were involved in your kidnapping?'
'No. I'm sure he's not. I never saw him before. But I can tell what he is.'
Something else was beginning to bother Angie, bother her more and more, and she decided that she was going to take care of it. Maybe she couldn't do much for the old man, as Joe called him, but at least she would wipe the blood off his face. While the men talked, she went into the adjoining bathroom to wet a towel.
While in the process of doing this she discovered that in this bathroom there was no mirror over the sink. A flat, glassy screen of the proper size and shape was there. But it reflected only dully.
The screen was built right into the wall, and wouldn't open when Angie tugged at a corner—no medicine chest behind it. And just above the screen, angled down to aim directly at her, was the glassy end of a dark cylinder, recognizable as the eye of a video camera
Wondering, Angie observed and touched a switch beside the screen. Extra vanity lights came on, and in a moment her own image had appeared, in color and close-up, on the screen that took the place of a mirror. The picture had something odd about it, and Angie needed a moment to realize that this was not the reversed image that an ordinary mirror always presented. When Angie raised her right hand, the right hand of the young woman in the electronic picture, not the left, went up.
Leaving the video turned on, she finished wetting her towel and came back out into the bedroom. 'John? Did you see this?'
Following her gesture, he went into the bathroom and looked at the camera and screen. Joe, who tagged along, grinned faintly and shook his head as if in admiration. 'Kind of unusual, huh?' But in fact neither of the men seemed especially surprised.
Back in the bedroom, Angie bent over the man in the bed and gently wiped the dried gore from around his mouth, his chin, and his bare chest. His eyes blinked once. Despite everything, she found much that was attractive about his face. Then, shuddering just perceptibly, she threw the towel into a laundry basket.
Speaking about the video arrangement, she said, 'I've never seen anything like it. But I can see there are advantages. You see yourself the way you are, I mean not reversed.'
The men looked at each other. John drew a deep breath. 'Honey? The real point is that Uncle Matthew doesn't care for mirrors.'
'He doesn't—?'
'No. And they don't do him any good anyway. I'm only surprised that some of the other rooms, like the one we slept in, do have them. No, I guess I'm not surprised. He likes to be courteous to his guests.'
Angie was thinking aloud 'It's almost like he's—disfigured somehow. Though of course he isn't, he's very handsome. I mean, about the mirrors, and being a recluse—' But no, she wasn't thinking straight at all. If you wanted to avoid seeing your own disfigurement, how would a video camera be any better than a mirror? Of course you could leave it turned off—
Joe cut in. 'Angie, you haven't got it yet.'
'I haven't?'
Joe looked around the room. 'Have you got a small mirror? In your purse, maybe?' He sounded calm and deadly serious.
Without asking any questions Angie went out of the room and came back in a moment with her purse, from which she extracted a small mirror, holding it out to Joe.
'Don't give it to me, hold it yourself. And take a good look at him. In your mirror.' Joe gestured toward the man on the bed.
She tried, and blinked, and rubbed the compact glass. She tried again, from several angles, and in several intensities of light. There were the upper bedclothes, cleanly visible, but they were mounded up over nothing but hollow invisibility. And there was the lower sheet, with its crackling plastic envelope of earth beneath it, pressed down as if under the weight of a solid body. But if there was a body there, the mirror was letting her look right through it. She needed a minute to convince herself that the image of the being she had been calling Uncle Matthew was not going to appear as a reflection.
Once having achieved this understanding, she turned a helpless face to Joe.
'Don't ask me why or how,' he said. 'I've heard of the laws of optics and all that. Maybe there's really an image there in your mirror, but the human brain just won't see it.'
And that of course was no help at all.
Angie still had had no sleep to speak of, and in her present state of exhaustion she was turning abnormally suggestible, likely to accept almost anything without an argument. Now she began to fear hallucinations. But reason and fear were both losing the struggle against sleep. At last, on a sofa, in the security of as much daylight as the apartment afforded, she succumbed. Her slumbers were beset by dreams, dreams of pale anonymous faces that came drifting in the night outside the windows of the apartment, mouthing pleas and threats. In her dreams she
