This new house still feels empty to its occupant. No need now for hired servants, or all the other fleshy, messy complications of old. Lights come on instantly, water runs clear, and abject loyalty and grovelling deceit have never come at a cheaper price. Even that alleycat whore, who should surely have known better than most that this city offers nothing but traps and delusions, had come meekly by subway to this very chamber, not only readily, but desperate to see, and to know. And, of course, to please. At least, until she began to scream. But some things never change, and sacrifices must always be made.

Sibylla. The first Sibylla. The glimpsed gleam of yellow hair in the eternal shade of that faraway forest by the shores of the Black Sea. Impossible not to follow such a creature to that ancient grove of fallen stone, where she crouched, laughing, on grubbed knees, while the dark mouth of the cave she served breathed its secrets at her back, and a bright blade of a scythe lay close by. Priestess of the black moon. Mistress of memory. Speaker of a forgotten god.

Perhaps the thing which now inhabits this chamber’s core was once the snakelike beast curled in the roots of the Earth which the Greeks named Typhon. That, or some cousin of the creature said to dwell inside the fumed cave at Delphi. In medieval times, it would have been called the Dragon of the Bottomless Pit, or perhaps even Satan himself. Now a man named Freud claims that all such things arise from within men’s dreams, although any modern, movie-going New Yorker would probably say it came from outer space.

The source. The bloodline. The sacred well. That, or just a foul, contagious mulch of old bones. Of course, a god can be all of these things, and many more, but perhaps Sibylla hadn’t believed any of them enough in the long twilight of her vigil, when the true secret is always to believe too much. A miracle, that enough of the contents of that cave have made their way to the heart of this modern building in this distant time and city, yet still resonate with a little of that ancient power.

Sibylla and Sibylla and Sibylla. Three times down here, but reflected many times more in all the surrounding mirrors. She hangs, floats, hovers, in these portraits. Young, old, and dead. Crude things, really. Intimations of obscene mortality. But no doubting that that stubborn Strasbourg craftsman had possessed skill. And now she exists again, right here in New York, and her scent still lingers on this seagreen headscarf that the occupant grasps before it flutters down to join with what little is left of Daisy Thompson and all the other voices in the craving, endless dark.