corridor's end.
This is it, he thought, and suddenly there was a strange crawling in
the pit of his stomach.
'I...' he began involuntarily.
'What?' Reynard asked, hope glittering in his eyes.
'Nothing. '
They stopped at the end of the hall, stopped in the twilight gloom.
There seemed to be no electric light. On the floor Wharton could
see the still-damp plasterer's trowel Reynard had used to wall up
the doorway, and a straggling remnant of Poe's 'Black Cat'
clanged through his mind:
'I had walled the monster up within the tomb...
Reynard handed the trowel to him blindly. 'Do whatever you have
to do, Wharton. I won't be party to it. I wash my hands of it.
Wharton watched him move off down the hall with misgivings, his
hand opening and closing on the handle of the trowel. The faces of
the Little-boy weathervane, the fire-dog gargoyle, the wizened
housemaid all seemed to mix and mingle before him, all grinning
at something he could not understand. Go away from here ...
With a sudden bitter curse he attacked the wall, hacking into the
soft, new plaster until the trowel scraped across the door of the
East Room. He dug away plaster until he could reach the
doorknob. He twisted, then yanked on it until the veins stood out in
his temples .
The plaster cracked, schismed, and finally split. The door swung
ponderously open, shedding plaster like a dead skin.
Wharton stared into the shimmering quicksilver pool.
It seemed to glow with a light of its own in the darkness, ethereal
and fairy-like. Wharton stepped in, half-expecting to sink into
warm, pliant fluid.
But the floor was solid.
His own reflection hung suspended below him, attached only by
the feet, seeming to stand on its head in thin air. It made him dizzy
just to look at it.
Slowly his gaze shifted around the room. The ladder was still
there, stretching up into the glimmering depths of the mirror. The
room was high, he saw. High enough for a fall to he winced - to
kill.
It was ringed with empty bookcases, all seeming to lean over him
on the very threshold of imbalance. They added to the room's
strange, distorting effect.
He went over to the ladder and stared down at the feet. They were
rubbershod, as Reynard had said, and seemed solid enough. But if
the ladder had not slid, how had Janine fallen?
Somehow he found himself staring through the floor again. No, he
corrected himself. Not through the floor. At the mirror; into the
mirror . . .
He wasn't standing on the floor at all he fancied. He Was poised in
thin air halfway between the identical ceiling and floor, held up
only by the stupid idea that he was on the floor. That was silly, as
