THE VOICES WENT AWAY FOR A FEW DAYS, THEN LATE ONE night as I lay in bed, I heard Sandrine whispering for me to rise. A soft, lone whispering that brought no alarm or unease. I found it in fact to be rather soothing, and rather welcome: an emollient of sorts, an opiate tincture for my troubled mind. The return of a familiar.

She whispered that I tarried, that I must be on with it. She whispered that I knew this. She whispered that the turmoil of voices that had beset me were all merely trying to tell me this, and that among the assailing voices had been my own, descending upon me with the others, telling myself what the others, and she herself, had been trying to tell me.

The manner in which she spoke was different from what it once had been, in life. Her voice, too, had about it a more dulcet tone. I felt it to be somehow beatific. The voice of Sandrine, yes, but the voice of Fra Angelico’s Angel of the Annunciation, too.

I asked her about this business of tarrying, this business of getting on with it. She whispered to me words that were my own:

“To betray one’s nature is to be betrayed in turn.”

And then she whispered more:

“The entranceway. You must pass through it. You await yourself on the other side.

“There, as one, you will find change. There, as one, you will find repose. True change. True repose.”

I saw things in my mind: abominable, unutterable, and worse.

She was in me, seeking revenge, seducing me to wreak it for her upon myself.

Fra Angelico’s angel was tempera and gold leaf on a piece of poplar wood. And it was sometimes better not to look too closely at such things. Had not art restorers recently uncovered the image of Satan lurking in the hallowed clouds of a fresco by Giotto in the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi?

No, this was no Annunciation of any kind at all. It was a trap, a damnation, a snare.

“Trust me, my love. Trust me.”

I could feel myself glaring. I stood and paced forward on the floor, my forefinger extending and waving in anger at her who was not there.

“Trust you!” I growled aloud. “Trust you!” I cocked my head to one side, menacingly. “You fucking bitch. You dirty rotten little fucking bitch. I killed you once, I’ll kill you again.”

“Yes, my love, yes.”

If only she were really there. If only I could kill her again. Oh, how I wanted to kill her again. And again. Kill her over and over, again and again, forever and forever.

“Yes, my love, yes. Now, my love, now.”

There were knives everywhere, all sorts of knives. The Walther in the closet. The capped black iron pipe. Oh, Christ, how I wanted to kill her again, fuck her corpse, jerk off on her dead fucking face, then kill her again; murder and desecrate her again and again as she said those words through a bruised and swollen mouthful of blood, broken teeth, and ebbing breath:

“Yes, my love, yes. Now, my love, now.”

I took a step back, took a few breaths, each calmer than the last.

“I put you here,” I said, tapping my head and lowering my voice, to her, who did not stand before me and was not to be seen. “I put you here, and I can take you out of here.”

I felt suddenly strong, not with anger but simply stronger, as if with the weightless armor of tranquility.

“For no one has power over me.”

There was something then like the trace of a whisper—no more, probably, than the cold wind entering through the slight opening of the kitchen window—and then there was nothing but the familiar and faint shrill ringing in my left ear.

That was the end of the whisperings, the end of the voices. But the things that I had seen in my mind, abominable, unutterable, and worse, they stayed with me.