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clock on the nightstand. Twelve-fifteen. I had slept for almost two hours.
    I sponged my face again at the washbasin, then went downstairs to find my stepmother. I knew that I had not gambled, had never gambled, and I wanted my cards back.
    Usually at this time my stepmother would be in the parlor, doing needlepoint, or up in the guest room taking a nap.
    The parlor was empty.
    I climbed up the front stairs to the guest room. Its door was at the top of the landing, opposite the door to William’s room.
    In the air was the smell of lilacs—my stepmother’s favorite scent—and it was mingled with another smell, this one heavier, metallic, vaguely remembered but for the moment unidentifiable.
    The guest-room door was open and she was lying on the bed.
    The eye can see, and the mind understand, only what they already know. (This is of course the principle upon which magic is worked.) Confronted with a thing which is new, a thing which is impossible, they will perceive it as something else, something with which they are familiar.
    And so at first I thought, absurdly, that the thin dark striping that covered her heavy body was a piece of netting, of the kind the local fishermen used, and I wondered what she was doing with it. And then I saw that her face was quite literally falling apart. Her forehead was sliced open, pink brain showing through the bloody rent, and a flap of skin hung loose from her cheek, exposing the white bone of her skull. Her left eye was gone and her right stared sightlessly upward. And I saw that the striping that covered her was, in fact, her own blood, and that it was everywhere, the walls, the ceiling, the bed. The pillow beneath her head was black with it, soaked through, and this was the smell that hung in the air behind the smell of lilacs, the stench of blood, and, backing out of the room, I could no longer breathe that thick dreadful coppery reek, my throat had closed against it.
    I tottered down the stairs and unbolted the front door and went reeling from the house. Numb, my vision narrowed to see only what lay directly before me, I staggered across the lawn, seeking out the one person nearby who might help me. Seeking out Miss Lizzie.

TWO

FOUR
    MY RECOLLECTION OF the next few hours is a jumble of images, some so clearly defined that the outlines of things, of people, of furniture, of the everyday realities of matter, seem sliver-edged, sharp enough to slice open flesh; others so dim and gray that they might have been seen from afar, through a window rimed with frost. Time, during this period, no longer moved in sedate measured intervals; it lurched and wobbled, leaped and stumbled; occasionally it altogether stopped.
    I remember Miss Lizzie standing at her doorway in the white glare of sunlight, her mourning dress as black and starched as a nun’s habit. I remember her wide smile of greeting fading away as her large gray eyes widened in concern. “Amanda?” she said, and in her voice was an uncertainty like that with which we greet long-ago friends now barely recognized. And then, more insistent: “Amanda, what is it ?”
    â€œDead,” I said, the words uttered by some other, distant, self. “The blood. Everywhere.”
    There was no slow dawning of comprehension; there was not even an instant of bafflement or disbelief. Her eyelids shut and she rocked back as though slapped. She must have wished desperately, I believe, to flee this stricken creature on her doorstep and the horrors that all at once she represented. But she opened her eyes, took a deep breath, firmed her mouth, and reached forward to touch me, her fingers steady, and steadying, along my upper arm. “Who, Amanda?” she said softly. “Where?”
    â€œUpstairs,” I said. “Mother.” This was the first time in my life, and it was to be the last, that I called the woman by that name.
    Miss Lizzie took another deep sharp breath, almost a hiss, and then her plump arm