He turned to head for the house, but there was that trail in the snow, and her footprints had not reappeared. He couldn't go back yet. He would take a few moments to collect himself. The world had to return to normal. He had to get a grip on reality. He thought of those old tire ads where fingers grew out of the treads to snatch at the asphalt of the highway. He was skidding along, skipping over things; had to turn into the spin and control it, like driving a car on ice.

He began walking among the stones in the graveyard, looking at the names so that he could get his mind off what was happening to him. Of course there wouldn't be any Cryer names here. The house had been in Madeleine's mother's mother's family, and he had no idea what their name was. There was such a mixture of names on the stones, none preeminent. But the first names were recognizable enough. Families naming new babies after older family members, and the first names passed down generation after generation. There was a Jude. A Stephen. No Athena, but that wasn't her real name, was it? Ah, here was a Minerva. And off in the corner, even a Simon.

But Simon wasn't in the family, was he? So of course it was just coincidence that his name had a match in the graveyard. He looked closely at the stone:

SIMON WISTER

UNKNOWN — FEB. 2, 1877

"I WAS A STRANGER, AND YE TOOK ME IN."

The heat of blood rushing to his face came even before the thought entered his conscious mind. Simon was a visitor who stayed. And here was a headstone belonging to a Simon whose birthdate was not known, and whose epitaph was to a stranger who was taken in.

Well, Quentin, he thought, as long as you're losing your mind, why not throw in some dead people walking around and eating breakfast with you?

He went back to the Minerva headstone.

MINERVA MUELLER

1 JUNE 1866 — 12 JULY 1918

BELOVED OF ALL

WISDOM IN SIMPLICITY

Summer 1918 would suggest that this Minerva was carried off in the flu epidemic. At age... fifty-two. Wisdom in simplicity. Could this be a kindly way of referring to dimwittedness? If the Aunt Athena he had met this morning were to keel over, could he imagine a more appropriate inscription than this?

But they sat at table and ate with him. They talked with him and with Madeleine. They were real.

"Everyone here who is actually real, please raise your hand."

Uncle Simon's words came back to him with painful clarity. Everyone had ignored him, of course, as if he were a madman. But then, no one had raised a hand, either.

COL. STEPHEN ALAN FORREST

DEC. 22, 191O — DEC. 24, 1951

HE DIED IN DISTANT SNOWS

IN SEARCH OF PEACE

ON HIS GRAVE THE LILY GROWS

PURE WITHOUT CEASE

THE LILY KNOWS, THE SOLDIER KNOWS

HOW SHORT IS LIFE'S LEASE

His military bearing. Someone—Madeleine—said that he had served in the Korean War. But he was not old. Forty-one, the age of the Stephen buried here, that was a good approximation of the apparent age of the Uncle Stephen at breakfast. But even an 18-year-old who fought in Korea, if he was alive today, would be sixty at the youngest. And Uncle Stephen did not look sixty, not with that dark beard, that ungraying hair. Maybe he dyed it. Or maybe he was dead.

Cousin Jude's namesake, Philip St. Jude Laurent, was born in Yorkshire in 1799 and died in America in 1885. Hadn't there been a hint of some kind of accent when he spoke?

No, no, this was madness.

He did not know Grandmother's name, and so he could not look for her headstone, if she had one here.

The only Paul in the graveyard had died as a baby, not a man of forty-five, as Madeleine had said Uncle Paul was, or of thirty, as he seemed to be.

And without admitting to himself that he was looking for one, he found to his great relief that there was no headstone for anyone named Madeleine.

Names ran in families, that's all. Names and family lore. Mad was goading them, introducing them with links to names from the graveyard whose stories they would have known. She was being a brat this morning, that's all, and he was simply the only one who didn't get the joke. The others would all have known about these headstones.

But there were no footprints here in the snow except his own.

He walked out of the graveyard, but instead of returning to the back portico, he walked around to the front of the house. There were the tire tracks from the limo, coming around the driveway. Here's where the car stopped and the driver got out and walked around to the right side and the left side of the car, to open doors for them. On the left side, where Quentin had been sitting, his own footprints dutifully appeared, showing how he walked around to the trunk, where he stood as he took his bags from the driver, where he walked as he headed around the other side of the car to walk on up the front stairs of the house.

But there were no footprints at Madeleine's door except those of the driver as he shuffled to open it for her. There were no footprints where the servant had stood. And only one set of prints, Quentin's, led up the front stairs to the door.

If this is a hallucination it's awfully selective, thought Quentin.

He was rather proud of how calmly he was taking the clear evidence of his own mental breakdown.

Somewhere inside that house was Madeleine. She would help him sort this out. She had married him in sickness and in health, hadn't she? Didn't they say that in the old church wedding vow? She would get him to a shrink and they'd get this under control and life would go on.

He climbed the steps, adding only the second set of footprints to break the snow, opened the front door of the house and stepped inside.

It was not the same house.

Oh, the rooms were arranged the same. Even the furniture was in the right place. But dustcovers were on all the major pieces of furniture, and the floor was half an inch thick in dirt and dust, except where his own peregrinations of last night and this morning had carved paths in it. Every step he took stirred up dust clouds and in only a few moments he was sneezing and coughing. If he had come through here before, why hadn't he sneezed and coughed before? Or had he? He had vague memories of wondering last night if he was coming down with a cold. Or was he merely inventing that memory to try to make these things make sense?

He opened the library doors. The windows had had several panes broken out, and snow had drifted across the cloth-covered table. Hundreds of books had been scattered across the floor. The room was freezing cold. His footsteps alone marked a passage across the floor, to what was obviously the only chair that had been moved and sat upon in many years. The others were tied to the table and floor and each other by cobwebs and spider webs. Even the chair he had used was bewebbed and dusty, and now he looked down at his own clothing for the first time and realized that strands of web and patches of dust were drawn across his jacket, his trousers. He brushed at them, and they came away; how could he not have noticed them before?

I am not going through a psychotic episode right now. The certainty grew even as he framed the words in his mind. This morning I was seeing things that were not real. People at breakfast. This room clean, this furniture lustrous. The footmen bringing perfect food here—not a single footprint led from the butler's pantry to the table. What did I eat, then?

The answering churning in his stomach told him that he had eaten nothing. The dryness in his mouth told him that he had drunk nothing. Not since yesterday in the limo, the Icelandic bottled water he had poured for himself and Mad. Had she drunk it? Was there anyone there to do the drinking? Had there ever been anyone there?