The body looks oddly familiar.

Martin sucks in a hard rasping breath, women shreik, not Jinna. She gags. I sit immobile. Too many things are going through my mind . . . too many images . . . too much that just doesn't fit, as if a stiff dead body literally springing forward as if by magic, is something that can easily be explained.

The scene before me is like an old-time movie, moving, in a blur, and terribly out of order, from frame to frame. Or like a piece of a large puzzle that fits into the shape of the last available empty space, but that puzzle piece is of a wrong pattern and of a wrong color.

I know it . . . I see it in my mind . . . a foreign language I don't recognize, but yet note . . . there it is.

It doesn't fit at all.

I sense, rather than actually hear or feel, Martin get up and leave, fading away behind us through the dark shadowed opening to the dining room.