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“What?”

“It was all a distraction.”

Jeremy stopped scribbling. He looked up at Logan through his glasses. “A distraction?”

“Yeah. Like…” He paused, struggling with the words. “Like whatever’s up there was trying to lure me away. Like it wanted to draw me out. To get me back into the corridor.”

Kara considered the statement. Logan definitely wasn’t embellishing, or being dramatic. He looked a little troubled, actually. As if genuinely perplexed.

“It didn’t want me in that room,” he finished. “I’m sure of it. It wanted me anywhere else but there.”

Jeremy was scribbling again. “And you know this… how?”

“I just do.”

Kara jumped in before they could start challenging each other again. “But nothing happened in the room?”

“Not at first,” said Logan. “But then… I don’t know, the room somehow got darker. Or maybe it just seemed that way, because that’s when I noticed the glimmer again. The one in the mirror.”

He paused, giving himself a moment. No one else spoke.

“So the glimmer,” Logan goes on, “it gets brighter. More defined. And I’m looking at it, starting at it, and then suddenly I see it.”

“See what?”

“This.”

Logan’s finger was on the photograph again. This time, he was pointing to the scrying crystal.

“At first I thought it was a reflection,” he went on. “But it wasn’t. It was there. Inside the mirror. Only there were other things in there too. Things that swirled, and moved, and… shuffled around?” He shivered involuntarily as if the word — or the memory — creeped him out. “I don’t know for sure,” he continued, “but I could tell, these things were really there. There but not there, if you know what I’m saying.”

Kara knew what he was saying. But she still didn’t like it.

“So the crystal somehow ended up in the mirror,” said Jeremy. He no longer looked skeptical.

“Maybe because of something that happened during the ceremony,” Kara theorized. “During the ritual.”

They were working it out in their heads. Going through scenarios. Suddenly Jeremy snapped his fingers.

“And if the scrying crystal got transferred through the glass—”

“—maybe Rudolph Northrop did too,” Kara finished.

The three of them sat frozen for a moment, looking inwardly for answers as their food grew cold. Guests passed by, talking and laughing. Other sounds echoed — the clink of glasses, the clatter of silverware against ceramic plates. The world, going on all around them. It was Kara who finally spoke up.

“This explains everything,” she said. “Why the

ritual went unfinished. Why there’s no record of Rudolph Northrop after the date on the back of this photo.” She flipped it over for effect. “Whatever portal or gateway Northrop accidentally opened is still partly open. And the mirror is the key.”

“So is the date,” said Logan, pointing down at it. “This same week, every year. The winter solstice.”

Jeremy’s mouth was twisted in deep thought. He began cleaning his glasses again. “Well we know where everything else is,” he said. “But where’s the bell?”

Silence. Blank stares. Shrugs.

Logan and Jeremy eventually started talking again, but she could no longer hear them. A strange sensation had presented itself at the back of her neck. The feeling turned into a warmth that crawled quickly upward, sending a tingling numbness across the surface of Kara’s scalp.

Somehow she was holding the old photo again. Looking down into it. Peering through time.