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“Please,” he begged, tears in his eyes. “Please don’t kill me. I’ll do anything. We wasn’t gonna do anything to you.”

The woman didn’t even hear the man’s words. She approached him, holding the Book of Matter by her side, and recalling what the Black man had said, about filling her lungs with water or turning her blood to stone. The woman was interested in the idea of transmutation of a living being. She was interested in the terror that someone would experience as their very matter was changed into something else. So she tried it out. She decided to make the man’s cells liquid.

She squatted down again, reaching forward with her hand to placeit gently on the man’s leg. In her other hand the Book of Matter began to grow heavy and started to glow in the gloom, throwing colors into the corners of the cellar. The woman directed her will as the man on the mattress watched in horror. She wanted his cells to become liquid, and almost immediately she saw his face slacken.

She heard a gurgle and then the man’s skin started to drip away from his bones like a syrup. He gurgled something again and the woman realized that he was perhaps trying to say something, perhaps trying to scream in terror.

She pushed her will further and the man’s organs and even his bones turned to thick liquid, collapsing down in on themselves like a chocolate sculpture melting in the heat.

The thing that had been the man was now a pink frothy soup puddling on the old mattress and dripping off the edge onto the floor. The woman withdrew her hand and wiped the residue on the mattress while all around her color drained out of the world, the Book of Matter dormant again.

She stood up and inspected what she had done, as the soup trembled. She thought she heard another gurgle, maybe a final, despairing scream of terror from the puddle on the mattress.

Then she thought she heard another noise, or detected something else in the air, and the woman’s mind was suddenly silent. She looked to the stairs, to the other man swallowed by the concrete, searching for what could have disturbed the air. It had been an odd moment, something she had never felt before. But so brief... and then gone.

She frowned, staring into space, listening intently. But there was nothing there. Just the two dead men, or what was left of them.

The woman walked over to the safe in the corner. She unlocked it and withdrew the books from her purse, the three she had taken with her to the auction and the Book of Matter, a new prize to add to her collection. Then she closed the safe again and walked away. She pulled the cord to switch off the light and headed up to her room to wash off the smell of the city.

Reality, Again

Cassie fell back into reality, out of the light of nothingness and into the darkness of somethingness.

Not absolute darkness, though; there was a suggestion of light here. As she lifted her head and her eyes readjusted to reality she saw less darkness to her right, more darkness to her left.

The ground was soft beneath her hands and knees... soft and damp.

“Carpet,” she said, the word a dead bird falling to the floor in the flat acoustics of the room.

She was in a large space... and the light seemed more discernible now, off to her right. There was a doorway, and beyond that vague shapes were visible.

Cassie stood up on unsteady legs and stumbled backward against solidity. A wall. She reached out and felt a handle, a door. Smooth coolness... a mirror.

And she remembered, then.

She remembered the ballroom, and the mayhem.

And Izzy.

The memory punched her in the gut and made her gasp, and she fell to her knees once again.

“Izzy,” she wailed.

Her friend. Her beautiful friend who drank wine from mugs andslept in Cassie’s bed when she was cold. Gone. Everything she was, destroyed in an instant.

Cassie lay on the damp floor and made herself hollow from crying.

After an age, when she had no more tears left to cry, when she was numb with grief, she made her way to the doorway, and she could see light coming from nearby, a staircase with skylights high above. She found switches and tried them with her shaking hand, and lights flickered on behind her in the ballroom.

It was as she had remembered it. Large and square, shattered glass all over the floor from the mirrors and the chandelier. There was dampness in the air, and she remembered the mist that had turned into water. She saw black stains of mold, running along the bottom of the wall by the carpet, but there were no bodies. She had dreaded turning on the light in case Izzy had still been there, lying with her blank and shocked single eye. But someone had removed the corpses. Cassie wondered where Izzy now lay. Was she in some anonymous grave with the other bodies? Alone and forgotten for eternity?

She pushed those cruel thoughts away, unable to open her mind to such possibilities.

As she walked back to the far side of the ballroom, to the doorway she had just tumbled through, she wondered idly how much time had passed. She stopped and stared at the wall by the side of the doorway. This was where Izzy had fallen, she knew, but there was no blood on the wall here.

Cassie ran her eyes around the rest of the room. There were marks on other areas of the wall, blood from other victims, bullet holes. Whoever had taken the bodies hadn’t cleaned the room. The dampness in the carpet spoke to that. There had been no effort to tidy up and repair all the damage.

But why had Izzy’s blood been cleaned up?