"This is Tansy Saylor. I want my soul." He was almost there. The wailing sound had swiftly risen to a squeal, but mixed with it was an intermittent windy whirring. He reached out to take the phone. But at that instant the phone twisted like a stumpy black worm, whipped tight to the skin, and dug into chin and neck just below the ear, like a double-ended black paw. The squeal became a muffled sucking. If you tore that away, you would tear the face with it. He knew. He dropped to his knees and ripped the cord from the wall. Violet sparks spat from the torn wire. The loose end writhed like a wounded snake, whipped around his forearm, tightened spasmodically, then relaxed. He stood up. The phone had fallen to the floor. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it now. Tansy was still standing in the same place. Not an atom of fear showed in her expression. With the unconcernedness of a machine, she had lifted a hand and was slowly massaging cheek and neck. From the corner of the squeezed lips a few drops of blood were trickling. The rack, he was thinking, would be too good for that woman. Or the scourge, or the wheel. So foully to attack a mere empty creature was an ultimate, unspeakable viciousness, like crushing a kitten under your heel. Perhaps the Boot, or the Funnel-- Swiftly the phantasmagoria of the Inquisition faded from his mind, as his first surge of anger spent itself and settled down to a steady hate. "What did she say to you?" he asked evenly. "She kept saying, 'Who is this? Who is this?' That was all. Then she stopped and the noise began." "How did she sound?" "She sounded very frightened." "Good!" He smacked his fist against his palm. "Magic works," he said grimly. "We'll make it work better. She'll be more frightened after we begin." "Perhaps you have already begun." He did not understand at the time the significance of that toneless reply. XII. The rhythmic rattle and surge of the train had a soothing monotony. You could hear the engine puffing lustily. The wide, heat-baked, green fields swinging past the window of the compartment, drowsed in the noonday sun. The farms and cattle and horses dotting them here and there, looked equally somnolent. He would have liked to sleep, but he knew he would not be able to. And as for--She apparently never slept. "I want to run over some things," he said. "Interrupt me if you hear anything that sounds wrong or you don't understand." From the corner of his eye he noted the figure sitting between him and the window nod once. It occurred to him that there was something terrible about an adaptability that could familiarize him even to--her, so that now after only a day and a half he was using her as a kind of thinking machine, asking for her memories and reactions in the same way that a man might direct a servant to put a certain record on the phonograph.