ac
possessed me. I trotted to the cafe to get my bag, and when the train
pulled out I was on it.

* * * * *

There's little more to tell. In Chicago once again, I spent a most
exasperating two days trying to inform the F.B.I., the police, or anyone
who would listen to me. My fingers couldn't dial the correct phone
number, and at the crucial moment each time I grew tongue-tied. My last
attempt was a letter to the F.B.I., which I couldn't remember to mail,
and when I finally did remember I couldn't find it.

Then the express package from Sumac came. With fingers that visibly
trembled I took out the two framed pictures, one of Aunt Matilda in the
process of dusting the front room. All of her pictures that she had
hidden from me were back in their places on the walls. While I watched
her move about, she went into the sewing room, and there I saw a picture
on the wall that looked familiar.

It was of me, an opened express package at my feet, a framed picture
held in my hands, and I was staring at it intently.

In the picture I was holding, Aunt Matilda looked in my direction and
waved, smiling in the prim way she smiles when she is contented. I
understood. She had me with her now.

I laid the picture down carefully, and took the second one out of the
box.

It was not a picture at all, it was a mirror!

It couldn't be anything except a mirror. And yet, suddenly, I realized
it wasn't. The uncanny feeling came over me that I had transposed into
the mirror and was looking out at myself. Even as I got that feeling I
shifted and was outside the mirror looking at my image.

I found that I could be in either place by a sort of mental shift,
something like staring at one of the geometrical optical illusions you
can find in any psychology textbook in the chapter on illusions, and
seeing it become something else.

It was strange at first, then it became fun, and now, as I write this,
it is a normal thing. My portrait is where it should be--on the medicine
cabinet in the bathroom, where the mirror used to be.

But I can transpose to any of the copies of my portrait, anywhere. To
Aunt Matilda's sewing room, or to the museum, or to Lana's private
collection. The only thing is, it's almost impossible to tell when I
shift, or where I shift to. It just seems to happen.

The reason for that is that my surroundings, no matter in what direction
I look, are exactly identical with my real surroundings