Andrew Macafee, 1942-1957

CRARY MOORE is the pen name of a former Bostonian who has lived in Cambridge since her marriage four years ago. The Atlantic published her first short story, “Seductio ad Absurdum,”in May, 1952, and since that time several of her stories have appeared in our pages. This one, an account of a young prodigy’s obsession, is the product, she tells us, of the heavy intervals between chapters of a light novel on which she is now at work.

by CRARY MOORE

January 20
Night. The Quad is alive with lights, calling, scurry; emergency. When they run in the corridor, my door shivers. Four days to exams. My paper on the Sophists is two weeks late, and still I can’t work. My mind frays. Am I dizzy with lack of sleep or mad with essences? “Quibbles,”I began, “dichotomies, dilemmas, syllogisms: all the shallow toys of Athens. . . . What are these but vain little pails and sieves, abandoned at tidemark on the shores of Being? What is, and what is not? The cold void laps forever at the sand. There at the edge of the world stands Plato, for all time: a gray colossus, yearning seaward . . .”I can’t finish it.
Ultima Thule lies behind my skull. I shiver, and try to slip my mortal skin. I am not what I seem.

Late. Looking down at this page, I see that it was written by a stranger. Even my hand has changed.
They turn off the heat at midnight . My skull is tight with the cold. I have been pacing the floor to keep warm. If I get into bed before dawn I’ll dream, and I’m afraid of that. What has gone wrong with me? I can smell rank sweat. A reek of terror and estrangement. My shadow flits like a rag in the wind.
This book gapes wide. The mirror yawns like a vault. Is anyone here at all?

January 21
Evening. I’ve been on the mountain. When I left the campus it was already dusk. I stood on the peak in the last light and watched the evening creep upward from the valley like a tide. And then I went down the Chute, because it was closed. There was no one but me in the long tunnel of pines. I could hear the deep powder sighing behind me as I swept down to meet the dark.
Mine is the only track in the new snow. After exams, when the racers come, they’ll find it there before them.
At the end a great drift has formed over the barrier, and it projects in a cornice out beyond the drop: a silver crescent like the rim of earth.
I checked. There was no wind; the pines were hushed. And then I swung around, and down into the blackness under the rock. Orpheus. I burst into a world of lights, and heard the chapel bell.
But it is this place that is the underworld.
The stairs were bad. I slipped up quietly, between the antic shadows and the voices, holding the sense of the mountain in my mouth like a stolen egg. No one spoke to me, but they stared.
I stared them down. Great red-faced sweating cretins. Their eyes flinched from mine, but as I turned the corner there was a whisper: “Funny little kid, but what a brain . . .”
It caught me like a vise.
What a brain! Yes, and this skull you see is to keep the dust off it; these funny little legs are to move it around; this face is the north side. It was invented fifteen years ago, and its name is Andrew MacAfee. Queer sort of thing to have around here, but the Dean seems to like it. Mrs. MacAfee (coinventor and chief patentee) has garnered many handsome testimonials from educators of greater note than his. From far and wide they came, to behold it whirring away on its test stand, in Mrs. MacAfee’s small but tasteful parlor.

I am still sick with rage.
I am going to fail. I have known it for clays.

I hear the bell in the chapel tower: five. No lights across the Quad now, no sound. They are all asleep. There is a world only because there is my eye: greedy, wakeful, like a telescope. Existence flashes in the mirror cup; aspects cross and fuse. Down to the lens a single image falls; I blink, and cancel earth. What’s real now? Time for the mirror.

My reflection blurs with nearness. I repeat, Andrew MacAfeo, Andrew MacAfee . . . I will not blink. There is only a long hollow face at first, fatuous, with dark distended eyes and wild hair. I am impelled to laugh, to say inanities out loud. Baby Ruth! Perth Amboy! Kangaroo! Aroooo! But slowly, gradually, I begin to detect something . . . condensing like breath on the glass . . . vigilant, focused, powerful.
On the threshold, vertigo. A moment more . . . but my throat begins to tickle. Oh Grandmamma, what big eyes you have. The floor is icy as I go barefoot down the hall for water. I hear snores, mutters, a deep even breathing: the doors are thin. All those prone bodies, hapless, dense as lead. My footfall’s light. Essence has leached out my bones.
Do they stir in their sleep as I pass? Do I flicker, in some mask, across their dreams?
No. Even waking, though they stare, only my shadow is reflected in the void behind their eyes. And when I fail?

January 22
The same dream.
High in a round tower I wake, in a deep bed of furs. I rise trembling with cold, and go along a shaft of moonlight to the lancet window, and peer out at a pristine world. Never a house nor a road nor a light: only the endless black forests, lakes of steel, and the white arc of mountains at the rim.
I look down; and with terrible desire I see the tower diminishing, darkening, toward the snow. A long way down. The wind roars. I lean out . . . farther . . . my palms join like a diver’s . . . and I wake once more, to daylight and a sense of shame.
The morning mirror shows me nothing at all: a nondescript boy with vacant eyes. We have met before, but we shall never be reconciled. He looks pasty, hateful, sick. Now bleeds the crimson pimple, now the white.
Through the thin door I hear shouts and tramping feet and the bells that scream all day, and the same mindless drone beginning in the classrooms.
I’ll go out and get lost. I’ll have amnesia. I’ll just fly off the wheel.

Hello, hello? This is MacAfee speaking. Andrew MacAfee. Are you there? Dico, ergo sum. Testing, testing . . . one two three . . . I sound like a damn parakeet. But there’s something else. I’m not stammering. I must have been in rotten shape. It got so I couldn’t recite at all.
It seems incredible now. My eyes feel washed clean, and I bask like a fat man in Florida. This is what it used to feel like, to be me: at home, say, on a sunny morning, smelling fresh coffee and hearing roller skates on the sidewalk. It’s fine. Everything’s fine, now I have this machine; and I am an excellent patient. I just talk to myself all day. When I hear their gumshoes squeaking outside the door I do it in two voices. Punch and Judy. They think Mr, MacAfee is mad as a March hare, but at least he can’t get away. Not till spring.
There’s been very little pain to distract me, though half my bones are broken, and I somehow managed to gouge one leg with the tip of a ski pole. You’d think that would at least tickle, but it doesn’t. All I can remember is getting on the lift.
It was a crazy thing to try the cornice. I guess I just wanted to do something big and clean and fine. Like washing an elephant.
Joe Nevill came in today to bring me some textbooks. I guess they didn’t realize I couldn’t hold a book. I wonder what’s happened to my scholarship. I was due to lose it if I flunked. Mother would have been driven to hara-kiri. Well, I won’t worry now. . . . Funny thing, Joe is quite a pleasant guy. When he was leaving, he said how odd it was we’d roomed next door to each other and never really had a conversation. “Kind of a shame,”I ventured. He nodded. Suddenly we both grinned. Contact. As easy as that.
He said they’d all thought I was headed for a nervous crack-up or something. (This with some awe. Great minds have these classy ailments.) I said “Oh hell no,” in just the right voice, and didn’t try to explain. I couldn’t have anyway. But I wish I were free right now to start over.
Too bad I can’t read. I’m not out of the woods yet. At first I kept twiddling my three fingers, all I can move, and tore my thumb bloody. The nurse held up a gory sheet. She looked like a reproachful horse. “I fouled my little white nest,”said I. And crescendo, “Filthy, filthy, FILTHY!" She squawked and fled. Funny, but it won’t do.
Then I got the idea of sending for this ingenious gadget. They’re good souls here, and visit me all they can; but apparently they’re badly understaffed, with all this season’s skiing fractures. Patients who aren’t sick but have to stay in bed.

Some kind of acoustic tile, I suppose. I mustn’t let it bother me. The squares are honeycombed with minute holes, not in any regular arrangement. I’ve counted them over and over. Is it a human instinct, I wonder, or is it just me . . . never to be satisfied with raw appearances?
Well. I can just be myself, in this place, not the sum of my differences. College intensified them like a burning glass; maybe Father was right, about a big university with all kinds of students. If I can’t yet be myself, I can find myself. Plenty of time and solitude. I think self-consciousness used to put my brain out of gear.
I am going to get very sick of the same ceiling. Obstacle to reflection. And routine will make a fool of me. I can feel the whole hospital quickening at those hours, and myself vibrating with expectation. I will not salivate on cue like a dog in a laboratory. Today, though, I was asleep at lunchtime; that’s something. God! I am dependent . . . I have to be fed with a spoon.

Three little knobs at my finger tips. Record, Play Back, Off. Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. I sound all right as I talk, but the playback is disturbing. My voice sounds false, my phrases are stilted. The machine doesn’t reproduce what I mean, and I become obsessed with the discrepancies.
MacAfee-in-the-machine. MacAfee-in-the-bed. Resolved: not to play it back until I’m well.

Between ministrations, there’s nothing to anchor my thoughts. No realities but the lamp, and murmurs in the corridor, and my own mind that swings like a spider for incredible distances. No printed page to hook my spinnerets, no changing sights and bodily states, few appetites, very few desires . . . yet on spins the filament of consciousness.
I wonder how long I’ve been here. I don’t like to ask. I don’t want them to know how softly I’ve drifted. It is wrong to be too happy in this place.
How long since I’ve seen a mirror? There is only one reflection here: at night, in the double glass of the storm window, I see two interlocking globes. The white lamp. I can’t turn my head to see what is lower in the panes.
I think, however, there is quite a large mirror in this room, facing the window. Sometimes I see brightness, like a paper dart but unmoving, on the ceiling over there. I could ask the nurse to bring a hand mirror, but I won’t. She is just waiting for something like that.

I was simply not ready to ski over the cornice. Not ready, because, too late, I quailed. If I had really wanted to, I could have brought it off. One instant of perfection. Mind and body all one. That was absolutely all I meant by it, and I told the doctor so, though he had no business asking. “ Tell me more about yourself,”he said. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “Truth, I said. His face drew in. “You’ll see when I’m well.
The surgeon is preferable anyway. I know when he has come by the rush of the door. Then his face swims into my field of vision, leaning earnestly, somehow distorted by the odd angle, as if I saw it through water. It is young and pink, and it smells agreeably unchemical.
So long as there are bones to saw and nurses to tease, he’ll never demand much. He is enthusiastic about my multiple fractures.
“Nine hours on the table!” he says, jubilant. “What a marathon!”
“You’ll see,” he said one day, “I’ll make you good as new.”
“Better,” I said, “but I shall have done it. I shall be new.” I was pleasant but firm. “It is a question of self-discipline.”
He was taken aback. Then I could hear his brain tick out “ patients-have-odd-fancies.” “ Well, well,” he said, “the will to win.” I almost laughed in his face. “You’re a model patient, I’ll admit that.”
The accolade. He beamed generously, until his small bright eyes disappeared.
Why waste my steel on him? But I must resist. All of me is parceled out: even my moods, which seem to be cyclic as the day creeps round, and are in the keeping of nurses. I like the way they crackle; but their noses are porous and full of hair. One has a son just my age; I do not speak to her any more. She brings me pills in various hues, to soothe or stimulate. I have thought of refusing, but it seems too trivial.

My eyes are shut. I am recalling the little holes to mind. But when I look again they will not be there. I have succeeded several times in this simple exercise. But the while lamp is still insistent.
I oblige the nurses to leave it on at night. I can permit myself a few foibles.

My mind grows continually sharper. A great sense of lucidity and power. I have decided to take up numbers again. They used to assail me like gnats, but I can command them now.

A few of my classmates have come in. I see now, there’s nothing behind the interchangeable masks most people wear; they have to clothe themselves in the Spirit of the Thing. Here by my bed they fail to achieve it. Disapproval, like a ludicrous tie, plucks at the face of Solicitous Concern. (Another of MacAfee’s crazy ploys, fooling around on a closed trail. Just asking for it. Lucky they found him at all.) So they don’t know how to behave with me. They never have. Now I prefer to be found asleep.
They bored me; that is why I tried conclusions with the cornice.

The doctor annoys me. He has much, of course, to his credit: a lifetime’s discipline. Impatience suppressed, fatigue disregarded, sympathies flogged to their limit. He’s tired, gray, polite . . . the very image of the Healer. Oh yes, a person to reckon with . . . but nonetheless dependent, for by now the mask is himself. He’s a blown egg. Could he live a single day without the sustenance he draws from the eyes of his patients?
I am not ungenerous. Without traducing myself, I can let him feel that I need him.
He was insistent about the television set. “I sense your concern,”I told him, “and it is very helpful.”
“ You must have some distraction.”
I was final. “The operations of a detached intelligence,”I said, “have enormous value.”
But I don’t trust him. He kept glancing at the machine. “You might as well indulge me,” I said. “I can’t get away.”Check. I caught him off guard. “Oh not at all,” he said hastily, “not at all . . .”

Today I achieved a real thing. As follows: I count up, ad libitum, from one by ones. I cube these numbers and add the cubes. Strangely, the square, not cube, root of that sum is the sum of the original sequence.
For a long time I worried at this paradox. Suddenly I had it! It went off in my mind like a flare, and by its sudden brief light I glimpsed a vast new country. I can’t remember the reasoning, but it is the sense of revelation that counts.
And when I look once more into a mirror?

I know that I know that I am Andrew MacAfee. I know that I know that I know . . .
Do I feel that I feel the nurses’ hands? I don’t feel the plaster any more, as one doesn’t feel still air.
Without language, would I know that I know, would I feel that I feel? People are trapped in sentences. But I can close my eyes and banish thought. In perfect silence and timelessness, lying inert in my plaster cup, I feel as though the silt of commonplace perceptions were settling. Even my name drifts down and away, and at last there is only the bright unclouded fluid of pure awareness.
I did not have to speak at all yesterday, either to the nurses or to myself. The surgeon did not come, and I must have been asleep during “rounds.” So the whole day passed in ceaseless contemplation, on a serene deep swell of expectancy and joy.

No, it’s no use! The least thing, and I am a dribbling animal again! The nurse read me a letter from my parents. They want to come here. They said in Easter vacution. When’s that? I won’t ask. I won’t know what today is. I will be detached.
But its hopeless . . . I am bored, I look everywhere for distraction, I long for meals, I talk to the nurses whom I had reduced to shadows. Anything, not to think of my parents. How on earth to stop them? Where they are, all the air is busy with love, like motes in a sunbeam. My mother would come rustling in with a thousand parcels, and fiddle with window blinds, and make frantic efforts not to interfere too much. Her eyes would implore me to want something. Hospitals subdue Father. He would try to keep his shoes from squeaking.

I don’t need anybody on this earth!
My back itches horribly and gives me no peace.

Ah. I said nothing to the doctor. But to the surgeon I said, “Tell my parents not to come; they won’t believe a letter from me. But I must look frightening, all in plaster, and it will distress them. They are quite old, you know. Tell them I am doing well and in no pain.”
He looked admiring but doubtful. “The journey would cost them a month’s salary,” I said. “My father’s a schoolteacher.” He understood that. His letter will stop them; they always do as the experts say. He was wax in my hands. I had only to mention money.

Father would never have reproached me about the scholarship. I hate to think about it, and can’t stop. Kindness makes me ugly; I have none to give. I can’t spare anything.

The benzoin kettle when I had croup, the black wing of the piano, the scar on my mother’s palm . . . I can almost feel it now, against the nape of my neck. Last year I found the little green book where she had recorded my earliest precocities. I made a scene. She wept.
Will I never have quiet again?
“ Who do you think pulled the covers up? People don’t just vanish,” my mother said. “Even when you’re asleep.”
Once I summoned up faith to fly off the barn roof. They spoke from below. “You are not able.” And, shivering there on the ridgepole, I knew they were right.
“Ultimates belong to the mathematicians nowadays, my father said. “Make friends of your own age. Drink milk. Mens sana, eh? Stay away from the dark side of the moon.”

Frantic today. Incidents, faces, trivial dreams. Memory is inane. Only conditionally real. None of it true. But how remorseless! It waits till the small hours and hits you when you’re down, until you want to bite the pillow and scream for shame.
That girl, at the picnic in the woods. She picked a buttercup and held it under my chin, to see, she said, if I liked butter. I took it from her . . . and now I see my hand, more real than the insistent lamp, moving outward, toward her neck. How white and moist the skin was! And suddenly I was overcome. Above my hand, on the green-shadowed throat, there bloomed a pale gold reflection. “Do I?” she said, very coy. “Can you tell?”
Our eyes caught. It was like a tremor underground. It shook me for an instant’s mortal awe.
“Everything!” I said wildly. “I can tell everything about you! I know you!” And it was true.
She ran away squealing. Everyone saw.
She was a cretin! She was hideously ugly!
At school, under strange eyes, I did not know myself any more. My true face hid behind a seemly mask, preparing its last betrayal: the adult’s compromise, the modus vivendi that falsely reconciles what you seem with what you are. It fits over the eye like a lens and seems to mend the split image, until at last you forget . . . until, in fact, you take a poltroon’s pride in getting along so well.
If that is growing up I will not do it! Like the arduous salmon, I remember the place of my birth.
It is all upstream now. At first I thought that if I should meet a girl . . . seize the idea of God . . . intuit abstract truth . . . oh, even if I could ski over the cornice! . . . somehow I could leap above seeming, smash through the crust, be transmogrified, know . . . But nothing has worked.

Delirium. Twilight in my mind. Hallucinations: a book in my hand, and I must, I must keep turning the pages. As if I could move!
If I could just get a good night’s sleep. My mother used to sing me “The White Seal’s Lullaby.”The comfort of it: “asleep in the arms of the slowswinging seas . . .”I want to give up.
They’ll know. I can’t wipe it off. . . . Oh, I . . . I just wish I could blow my damn nose.

They offered me sleeping pills. IIow did they know? . , . I refused. It s too cheap.
I look at the white lamp, and say my name, and try to remember nothing.

Appearances! I have resolved to close my eyes every time I hear the door.

I need every resource of my will. So long as I don’t ask for a mirror, I am still my own man. Does it show in my face?

I know her step. She still wants to read to me.
Over and over I said with my will, “You shall not come in.”She did not. I let the machine run. When the time comes to play it back, I’11 hear my audible will. Tonight I’ll keep the doctor out.

I kept him out.

This morning the doctor asked to borrow my machine. He was very sly and intent. I said, “Certainly. I don’t need it any more. But you might just take the tape out and put it under my hand.” His face fell, but he obeyed.
Now I have shucked off the last vestige.
I forbore to laugh as the doctor went out.
And then I closed my eyes against the white lamp and drowsed. And then came the shock of dropping, and the fright, and then my great dream. It comes often now. I am in a furious battle. I don’t know his name. We are instantly at grips; I batter him blindly, and he is always there. A deep ferocity swells in me, my temples burn, I clamp my teeth till my neck is rigid, my shoulders are heavy with rage as I hit — and suddenly he falls away like a door swinging, and light floods in where he was. I go on through pastures of light, I bound in air on soft feet, I laugh, deep in a honey throat.

Silence, courage, abnegation. I swear not to speak aloud for two days. I solemnly swear. Now.

Lips move, teeth glint, cheeks crack in their appointed wrinkles. I hear, a little out of phase, like an old movie, “do-you-want-anything-before-I-gooff-duty.” I had already known. I whisper it, though, to be sure, and the face makes “now-nowMr.-MacAfee.” Déjà vu all the time now.

I never understood until now. It is all a scheme, and it was there all the time. What blazing certainty! The clue was imaginary numbers. Quaternions, square roots of minus one. They have been used, all unawares, to describe actual things . . . vectors and so on. So! A mortal mind can pluck Not-Being from No-Place and use it like so much clay.
The universe, people, everything . . . what are they, then, but impossibilities summoned from NotBeing, fished from the void by what unknowable hand? I won’t tell them they are mere analogues of what is real. But I must get word to Father.
The wind calls. Come through. I am not afraid.

The walls, thin as paper; beyond them, no sound or being; below me, no floor, no bed, no sheet, no plaster shell. I can make the ceiling recede. The walls shiver like backdrops in a draft. They move away from me. I can close my eyes and know that when I open them again only the white lamp will draw near. . . . I willed these things myself.

The small hours. The extremities cold, the blood slow and thin, the world still and numb in its long tidal sleep. Only the self burns like a thin wire.
Down, fur down, lies the plaster shell, tiny, with its little white kernel. I hover enormously in the night, and keep him centered in my round eye. I rest on the wind that rocks me, and from far up I see him like a lone match-flare on the ground.

The white lamp never sleeps.

And someday I’ll go through, I’ll know, and have all my power.
I shall never be harsh.
I’ll enclose all the world in tenderness like an egg. I’ll overshadow all the people until they fall silent, until their heartheats slow like a fledgling’s vaulted in my hands. Hush. Sleep.
I shall not sleep, I shall watch over you. How little you are, how soft!
I tried, but my mouth would not work until he was out the door. “I am not quite ready,”I wanted to say, but it would not come out. I willed him to stop, and he disregarded me.
My God. I should have kept count.
“In three days,”he said, “we shall take off your plaster. You’ll have to learn to walk again. It won’ be bad.”

It must be very late. I can see nothing. Only a plane of paler dark — the top of the window — against the blackness. I think I have been asleep. Wasn’t the lamp on before? But it is always on, they promised. If I can see the window, surely I can see the lamp? My eyes are staring wide . . . there are specks like confetti that quiver. . . . No lamp. NO sound.
I can’t see the corners, as if the walls had melted into the night. All I can hear is my own voice, speaking very fast. What a very dark night it is, to be sure. . . . Try for a deeper note.
If I scream “Bring me a mirror!" will there be anyone to hear? I need it now. Nurse. Lights Help.
Did I only whisper? My words vanish as soon as uttered. It is close.
Andrew MacAfec, Andrew MacAfec, Andrew MacAfee . . .

Something’s been jolted loose. I can’t focus. When I open my eyes suddenly, to catch it, the walls fade in, trembling. What was it that happened last night ?
Not-Being stalks me like a wolf.
I can’t push it away. The light’s going. It will be dark soon. I have to talk a great deal.

Night again. The lamp is odd. Two small white globes, not quite concentric . . . but so small.
It is merely an illusion. I am keeping my voice down. It is down. I am still on this side. I will not go through. I am not afraid.
I am obliged to grip hard. I won’t crack. My eyes are closed against vertigo. I press hard: fulllength, full-stretch. It is slippery, perpendicular, no toe-holds anywhere. It wants me just to give up and let go, to fall out and down, down through the crust.
Hold on, hold fast. When I go, it will be of my own will, at the proper time. The so-called world may splinter, but not I.

Morning. Victory. When I call, “Andrew MacAfee!” the white lamp moves obediently closer, swelling as it comes. My will did this.
Tomorrow, the mirror.
I have won. When I look into the mirror I shall see my true and powerful essence, armed with my will, erect behind my skull.
Tomorrow the window as well. I shall be standing up tomorrow. They have kept me down long enough, and I am ready.
How joyful I am, and light! And it is only a foretaste. Tomorrow they will come with saws, and cut away the plaster, and rub me to make my blood move, and wash away dead skin — I shall see the detritus of my own flesh that has renewed itself. And then, when I am fresh and clean, I shall wait without a word until they are all gone, and then I shall rise up like a fountain, and stand.
I shall stand between the window and the mirror. I’ll look out. Trees, hills, the mountain: but they are only the crust.
And then I’ll look in, to the mirror.

When they went out I heard whispers: “Oh no, he’ll be much too weak to do ... in ease he stick around . . .” They may be just outside.
It is all as 1 knew it would be. I have seen my body again, washed clean. The skin is very white now. and wrinkled as if damp from the cocoon. Curious, the whorled hair on my legs.
I am standing. I don’t remember if it was difficult; my will is a coiled spring.
I am full of pain, from the blood moving once more, and I feel the floor pulling. My head swims. How strong my hand is, warming the bed’s cold iron. It is an ugly little bed. The floor is far off.
Out the window it is spring. Over the thin crust the hills are downy, and the lake a tender blue film. Far below. The hospital must be very high, and I at the pinnacle. The mirror is right behind me. I don’t quite want to turn.
I had thought it would be a holy and honorable terror.
How warm the floor is. Uncalloused now, the soles of my feet tell me of minute scratches, and a joint, between tiles. I feel gross and actual . . . and dizzy with fear.
I must look soon. The walls are overpowering. I cannot stand up to them much longer. Melt into me! the room says, and Let me in! says the sun on my shivering thighs. Breathe me! say the lilacs below, and the hot tar of the parking lot. Stroke us, murmur the downy hills. We are so, you are part of us. Rest on me, says the tender lake, I know how to hold you up.
They will devour me if I don’t turn soon. I hear feet in the corridor and someone laughs. It is dangerous. It wants to fold me in, to overpower me again. When I look in that mirror, surely the rest will recede, and aspects part, to let me through? What’s that on the floor? Tears, mine. It is only because I’m weak. I’ve been very sick. Haven’t I? Terribly sick. Terribly. Perhaps tomorrow . . .
My knees are trembling. I must turn.
Oh no . . . I know him. He can’t fool me.
So it wasn’t the mirror.
My last chance. . . , Horribly afraid.
Turn again, MacAfee.