The mouse was as good as dead.

The coffee dripped its rich brown juices down into the carafe. The heady aroma wafted high up to the fifteen-foot ceiling of the kitchen and beyond the appreciation of the mouse and the man.

Charles carried his coffee into the front room and set it down beside the bulky manuscript. He cleared his mind of all but the task at hand.

One thing became clear to him in the first twenty pages of text: if Amanda Bosch was the female character, she had no capacity for self-delusion. He ceased to speed read and slowed down to a human pace, for this was very human material – Amanda awaking from a bad dream and finding it there beside her in her bed.

The male character of the novel seemed not to know or care about the rules between men and women when they became lovers. The woman wondered why he came back time and again. He showed so little interest in the affair once the conquest of her had been made.

The excuses he gave to explain his infrequent need of her were insulting. Yet she did not end the affair, telling herself it was better to be touched by this cold and dispassionate man than never to be touched at all. This, she realized, must be what it was like to feel as a man did when he separated the act from the partner. She never asked about his wife, fearing that he had never felt anything for her either, nor for anyone. He could make love to a woman better than any man she had ever known, yet he did not like women.

When they were together, in warm weather and cold, the bedding would always be soaked with sex and sweat. They went swimming in the fluid off their bodies, plunging down and rising up in the water that streamed off their flesh. He would make her come first, insisting on it, manipulating her body. And when she came, he took a technician’s pride in this job well done. There was a perverse coldness in the very heat of the act.

He would be dressed when she came out of the bathroom, where she had been emptying out his sperm and flushing it away to the sea. She would watch his back as he walked to the door, reciting the litany of excuses, not turning to say goodbye, and never a kiss, as though to teach her not to set too much store by this attachment which was detachment.

She would strip the wet bedding off the mattress and lay it out to dry in the air – the heat of July the first time, and the winter now. It was better than nothing, she told herself, knowing it was not.

Charles looked away from the manuscript to a clear place on the wall beside his chair. Eidetic memory called up the photograph of Amanda Bosch which Riker had shown him only once. His vision was a perfect reproduction, even to the smudge and crease at the upper left-hand corner of the print. Her sad eyes stared at him. The expression was in the very shape of her eyes, a sadness fashioned in her mother’s womb.

He felt that he knew Amanda Bosch so well, he might have had a dialogue with her and predicted the answers to nearly every question.

If he only had her back to life for a minute’s work.

But only Malakhai could have pulled off that stunning trick – to blend the device of dialogues and the illusion of a woman with uncanny, unerring faithfulness to life.

He had often thought of Malakhai over the years, the elderly magician and his strange creation. What a mad idea.

And yet.

The manuscript did promise an exquisite problem in mental construction. It could be done. The manuscript’s narrative was no mere imitation of life, it was Amanda’s mind at work. With only the manuscript and the photograph, the old man could have done this. But the old magician was insane, and far from here in mind and body.

It was a lunatic idea, and he must let it go.

He turned back to the manuscript, but the face of Amanda would not leave him. Eidetic memory had called it up, and his mind’s eye could not send it away. It swam over the text. His thoughts ran strongly with Malakhai now, as he stared into Amanda’s eyes.

Oh, Malakhai, how do you like your last days, old man? Are you still in love with Louisa? Still crazy? And does that dead woman share your bed tonight?

He stared at the telephone. With one call he might have an audience with the greatest magician who ever lived. Cousin Max had said there was none better, cracked brain or no. What would he say to Malakhai? ‘Excuse me for presuming on family connections, but I have a small problem with a dead woman of my own. How do I go about becoming as mad as you are? Or am I half the way gone already?’

He shook his head slowly from side to side. This was no kind of dabble for an amateur in the art of illusion. He must not forget what the mental construction of a succubus had cost Malakhai, who was a master. He turned back to the manuscript. It was that time of night, he supposed, when mad ideas seemed the most wonderful.

He was an hour into his reading when a noise called his attention away from the pages. He was unaccustomed to company at this hour. He had forgotten about Nose. Now he watched the cat a scant few inches from his slippers.

The fact that Nose was declawed had hampered the animal only slightly. A small brown mouse had wriggled free of the clawless paws only to be captured more firmly in rows of sharp white teeth. Charles silently rooted for mouse. The cat’s teeth crunched down on small bones. The mouse cried. It was not a squeak; the tiny animal was crying.

The cat looked up at him, very Mallory in the color and the aspect of its eyes.

He reached down with the good intention of taking the mouse away to kill it quickly. The cat emitted a low warning growl, and the tail began to switch and threaten as his hand hovered near the mouse.

Back off, said the cat’s eyes. It’s my toy, not yours.

Angel Kipling gathered the quilted silk of her robe closer about her person, as though the room might be cold. It was not.

She sat before the computer, transfixed by what was written there in the personal message file. She could see her husband in the reflection of the dark screen behind the green letters. A tiny replica of Harry floated toward her from deep inside the box of glowing letters. Now she could feel the heat of him standing close behind her chair.

‘Angel, what’s wrong?’

‘Oh nothing, Harry.’ She continued to stare at the screen. At last, she said, ‘It’s a personal message. I think it must be for you.’

She rose from her chair and walked slowly in the direction of her own bedroom, where she slept alone. She turned to see him bending over the computer monitor, reading the message which filled the scrolling screen and repeated endlessly: YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR…

He only wanted to be where the cat was not feeding on the mouse. He unlocked the door of the office across the hall from his residence, and at the touch of a button, the reception room filled with soft colored light from antique shades of stained glass. The ancient woodwork of furniture and tall arched window frames gleamed and lustered.

He wandered into the back room which was Mallory’s office and another planet. The wall switch filled this room with harsh light, bright as day, and brought him rudely and solidly into the age of electronics. Machines gleamed and stared at him with dead gray terminal eyes. The beige metal knights of the New Order formed a row of perfect symmetry. A wall of manuals faced a wall of equipment, and no speck of dust dared alight in this place for fear of Mallory the Neat.

The corkboard which lined the rear wall was an even more ruthless departure from his own world of antiques and all things civilized. If murder be Mallory’s religion, the ghastly collage of this wall was a shrine to Amanda Bosch, a Madonna without a child.

When had Mallory accomplished all of this? Did she never sleep?