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myself for foolishness: it was no wonder that I was suffering nightmares, after the day I had had, and probably I was feverish, from the dog’s bites, maybe, or from catching a chill.
    I told myself that the dream’s dreadful realism stemmed from its echoes of my experiences earlier that night. I had sensed a dark tale behind that hastily hidden purse that my dreaming mind had transformed into deadly portents. So I comforted myself, noting that the storm wasn’t so violent now; I must have been asleep for some time. Only a few more hours, and I would be out of here. I settled myself down and once again fell rapidly asleep.
    I dreamed that I was in the room in which I now slept, standing on the floor between the bed and the wardrobe. The gray light of dawn filtered through the grimy window, lending every object in the room a faint luminosity. I knew that the door was locked and that I couldn’t get out. For reasons I couldn’t trace, I was filled with increasing apprehension, rising to panic: some dreadful event was to occur later that day, although I couldn’t remember what it was.
    Then, with the illogic of dream, I was in my own study at home in the city. With an intense sense of relief, I sat down at my desk and picked up my pen, a new one I had purchased just before I left for the North, and began to write a poem which had suddenly occurred to me. But the ink was a strange color, and kept clotting. I knocked the pen impatiently on the blotter and tried again to write, but a hemorrhage of ink spilled over the page, and I realized then that it was not ink, but blood. As I stared at the spoiled paper, the blood began to pour impossibly from the nib of the pen, an increasing stream that collected into a red puddle and began to drip onto the floor. The sound of its steady drip was, I remember, particularly dreadful. I lifted my hand to my eyes and saw that it was covered with blood; then I realized that it was my blood, and that I was bleeding to death.
    Again I woke in a sweat, all my limbs trembling. For a horrible moment I thought I was back in the nightmare: dawn-pale light was leaking through the shutters, giving the room the same ghastly luminosity that it had possessed in my dream. It was very quiet, a silence which seemed sinister until I understood that it was because the storm had blown itself out.
    I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat with my face in my hands until I stopped shaking. I feel incapable of conveying the peculiar horror these dreams invoked in me: my entire body felt chilled through, the hair crept on my scalp and neck, and nausea crawled in the pit of my stomach. This house, thought I, is infected with more than the sheer unpleasantness of its inhabitants: some sick wizardry was at hand here. I checked that my protective ring was still on my finger; it was. I wondered, with a shudder, what might have happened had I not protected myself in that way.
    My only thought was to get out of that place as soon as possible. I had had more than enough of it. Perhaps I had had enough of the North and should head back to the city . . . though even then, the image of Grosz’s mocking expression held me back from the thought of a humiliating return.
    I stood up as slowly as an old man — all my body ached as if with ague, and my bitten calf felt more sore this morning than the night before. I put on my coat and then leaned toward the mirror on the washstand, to check the no doubt lamentable state of my person. And then I was plunged into nightmare again, because the reflection I saw was not my own.
    It was the face of a woman who was perhaps in her twenties. She bore a strong resemblance to Lina but was less conventionally beautiful. The same thick black locks tumbled over her face, and she had the same high, chiseled cheekbones, but her face was thinner, more asymmetrical, somehow more wild. In the mirror I could see that she was wearing a nightdress that fell immodestly off one shoulder and