MAUDE STOOD in the doorway, as pale and distant as the moon. “It seems I’m interrupting,” she said, her voice small but resonant, with a touch of something angry and hard in it. Henry wondered how long she had been there, and what she had heard.

“Not at all, my dear,” said Win cheerfully. “We were just sparring. Bethel enjoys punching above his weight.” Win came around the desk and brushed past Henry as if he’d just dismissed an underling.

“Everything satisfactory? Do you require anything?” he asked Maude as he approached her.

“I require much and have little satisfaction, Mr. Stevenson,” Maude replied in a tone that brought Win up short. He paused, rocking back on his heels slightly. “But I am quite grateful for the kind arrangements you’ve made for my welfare and safety,” she continued.

Win’s smile returned like a lizard to its favorite rock. “Your thanks are unnecessary,” he said. “I would do the same for anyone in such a predicament.”

“Particularly one you staged managed yourself,” said Henry, barely under his breath.

Win ignored this as he walked to the door, saying, “I believe you two have some matters to discuss. Please use my office while I attend to other matters.” He bowed as Maude moved aside to let him pass, and then it was simply the two of them, standing there.

Henry sat back down. “Coffee?” he asked, gesturing to the tray.

“I never developed a taste for it,” said Maude as she crossed the room, her long gown trailing over the floor. She eased herself into a chair by the window a few feet away from Henry and gazed out over the emerald expanse of the golf course to the red rock ridges that cupped it. There was a long silence.

“Maude I’m—"

“Henry, please—"

They laughed. “You first,” Henry said in a gentle tone.

“Allow me to beg your forgiveness,” said Maude. “You have been a rare—you don’t know how rare—companion these past weeks. You have given generously of yourself and asked for nothing in return but the truth, and I… have hid the truth from you.”

“The satisfaction of helping someone in trouble was enough,” said Henry. “And the great pleasure of your company was an unexpected boon.” As he said this, he understood that they had tacitly retreated to the warm but self-protective formality that had characterized their friendship, and he knew instinctively that this was a relief to them both. “But you’re right,” continued Henry, quietly. “I need to know why you’re in danger, Maude. I need to know who Mangopoulos is, and why he’s trying to kill you and Stephanie and Europa. I need to know why he calls you a witch.” Henry paused, choosing his words carefully. “And I need to know what we can do to bring this to an end, Maude. Too many people around you have died, it seems, at the hands of these people.”

Maude turned her face away, letting out what seemed like a sigh—oddly, Henry thought the sound that escaped from Maude was exactly the sound of a deflating tire. Without looking at Henry, she said, “Henry, Mangopoulos is simply a man doing what he believes he has been directed to do by divine revelation.” Her voice was low, and a little hard. “His followers are less responsible than I for anyone’s death. Far less responsible.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “And the only end to this is my true death.”

A chill settled between them as surely as if the sun had winked out. “I won’t accept that outcome,” Henry said. “And I won’t accept you taking the blame on all of this yourself.” Maude remained silent, and Henry, staring at her profile, the sad downward turn of her face—she suddenly looked old—blurted out “Maude, are you a witch?”

She started, and laughed, a deep, bitter, throaty chuckle, and Henry laughed too. “Sorry, I know it’s absurd,” he said.

“No, no… I suppose I am… but I come by it honestly,” she said, smiling ruefully. “That’s how Mangopolous refers to me, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Henry. He paused. “Were you a part of his cult, Maude?”

And now Maude laughed like one of the damned, a sudden, shrill, mirthless laugh that sent an unexpected shiver up Henry’s spine. “A part?” she gasped at last. “Oh, Henry… I’m the very object of his cult!”

Henry stared. “I don’t understand.”

Maude’s expression turned fierce, imploring. Her eyes seemed to burn from behind their emerald shields. “Henry, listen. I want… want to show you something. But I want you to answer one question. Before I… show you, before I make you understand, I want you to reveal yourself to me.” She stood up and walked toward him with a quick, violence of motion, and knelt beside him. The suddenness of it unnerved him, but he faced her, and clasped her gloved hands in his, staring into her wan face.

“All right,” he said, after a moment. “I have hardly any secrets worth revealing, Maude.”

“Not true,” she said, emphatically. “You have one. It’s defined you for some time now.” Her mouth was pulled into an odd rictus. “Tell me why you stopped writing, Henry. Tell me why you abandoned your art.”

Now Henry laughed. “I was a critic, Maude. That’s hardly an art.”

“Nonsense,” said Maude. “What did one critic say? The criticism is the writing of little works of art about big works of art?”

“John Crowe Ransom,” said Henry, bemused. “And of course he said that, he was a critic.”

“And a poet,” said Maude.

Henry nodded, and paused. At last he let go of her hands, and stood up, walking to the window. It was a fair question, he thought, if seemingly irrelevant to the thousand more pressing mysteries swirling around them. But his answer would unlock Maude’s own secret. It was an answer he knew well. He’d known it for some time now. He spent a long moment, considering, before he turned to look at her.

“It’s simple,” he said at last. “I wanted to be a poet, Maude. When I was young I filled page after page of notebooks with poems. And it was all garbage. Well, perhaps not garbage. It was skilled enough, I guess. I got just enough praise from teachers and friends to keep at it. But after I while I could see that it was mediocre at best. I didn’t have whatever spark that true poets have, that way with the language that makes it seems as if you’re uttering something no one has ever uttered before.

“So I stopped, and channeled the impulse into prose, into writing about art, which I loved and excited me like nothing else. All sorts of art, too, at first, music and theater and film… and then as I got good at it—far better at it than I’d ever been as a poet—I focused more and more on visual arts. I made a name for myself, found a job with a newspaper. I met a girl, and got married, and did just well enough to have what everyone wants, or is supposed to want: house, car, wife, some measure of status, success…

“And after a time I came up empty. I didn’t notice it at first, but Jill did. And when she tried to tell me, I denied it or, far worse, blamed her somehow. I just went deeper and deeper into my own little world, one that admitted no one and wouldn’t admit to itself that there was nothing at its core. And then one day she left.

“And I realized after she was gone that I was lonely, Maude. That I had always been terrifyingly, stupendously lonely. That loneliness had been my true state ever since I could remember. That writing had never chipped away one ounce of that loneliness—that it had, naturally enough, enlarged it. And I lost all passion and interest for any art that didn’t deal with loneliness.”

Henry had paced slowly around Win’s office as he spoke, not looking at Maude, until he had reached that huge photo of Win and Sinatra on the wall. He looked up at it.

“A writer once observed that loneliness was Sinatra’s only true subject as an artist,” said Henry. “That his songs were either a cry from the wilderness of that loneliness, or a joyous exaltation of relief from that loneliness. Either your Angel Eyes ain’t here, or you make me feel so young. I stopped writing, and found myself doing nothing but listening to old records. I’d always been a collector, and I even had some connections to the family—I once wrote a pretty generous review of Frank’s career as an amateur painter for a catalog, free of charge. My bank account was dwindling, and all I could summon the energy for was to listen, again and again, to that tension between loneliness lost and loneliness regained. It was a short step from that to trading Sinatra memorabilia on eBay to make ends meet. And why not? I wasn’t a critic by that point, but simply a fan. I wasn’t even a writer anymore. I was just loneliness, personified and refined to the point of acceptance. I was simply a Sinatraist.”

Henry stopped, and sat back down in front of Maude, who had not moved. She regarded him impassively for a moment, and he stared back. A slight, rueful smile crept at last onto her face.

“Oh, Henry,” she said in a whisper. “You cannot escape from who you are. None of us can. Believe me, I’ve tried. For centuries, I’ve tried.”

Henry smiled, sadly. “Years can feel like centuries, can’t they?”

Maude shook her head. “No, Henry. Centuries feel like centuries.”

Henry leaned forward, before he quite understood what he was doing, and raised his hand tentatively to her cheek. He expected her to flinch, but she did not. He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand before turning to gently stroke it with his fingetips.

“You’re so cold,” he whispered, tenderly.

He imagined he could see her eyes shining behind those terrible shades. He imagined she trembled. He imagined…

“Henry,” she said in a strangled, but resolute voice. “Please… don’t.”

His hand dropped away, and he looked at the floor as he felt whatever would have happened drop away as well. Smiling sadly, he said, softly “I know… I know.”

Neither moved for a moment.

Finally, he said, “Fair is fair. You have something to show me now, I think.”

She stood up, slowly, and looked around the room.

“Henry, I want you to stand up and walk over to the right side of the doors,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice that fairly annulled the moment before.

Henry gave her a questioning look, but stood and walked over to the doors. On the right side of them stood a large mirror in a metallic frame.

“Now,” said Maude, “I want you to stand in front of the mirror, but just to one side, so you can see the room behind you. All right?”

Bemused, Henry did as instructed. “All right,” he said. Small and gray, Maude stood several feet behind him in the reversed image.

“Now, Henry… this is very, very important…” She lifted her hands to her cowl… “I need you to promise me—I want you to swear—that no matter what happens, you won’t—"

But Maude’s words were cut short as Win Stevenson burst back into the room, with Tell and several other men behind him.

“Sorry to cut short your little tete-a-tete, but I have some news I think you’ll both want to hear,” he said, grinning like a cat. “My security forces have just notified me that they’ve found Mangopoulos.

“He’s dead.”