There's a maid standing in front of me, but I can't see her. No, not like that. I see her, but I don't perceive her. The world is shaking, squirming, shrinking, folding like a book whose pages I suddenly remember. Like a red-hot nail, an insight fshes through my mind, and the rust of oblivion crumbles away, revealing the bde of truth.

  Ganser syndrome!

  I leap from my seat. The corridors of the mansion squeezed me like snake holes, but I raced forward, toward Longford's office. The door, already broken, was smashed to splinters with a thump of my foot, and the books flew off the shelf like birds startled by a gunshot. One of them is not a book. I pull it towards me.

  A click. A muffled rattle. The ticking of time intensifies. There was a rustle behind me. Mary stood in the passage, peering at me worriedly.

  The bookcase gave way, revealing the entrance to the secret room. Whiteness crashes down on me, pure, unadulterated, inhuman. I know this pce - the operating room. Two beds. One spotless, the other a body imprint. The past has not dissolved here, it lurks, awaiting my return.

  I sank down on my bed. Memories came flooding back, merging with reality.

  Inhale. The smell of sterility. The smell of metal. The rotten smell of truth.

  Exhale. My throat constricted as if someone had tightened a belt around my neck.

  Something inside resisted, clinging to the cozy darkness of the lie where I hid like in a mother's womb. But the mind never forgets anything, it only hides in the lithospheric sbs of our unconscious. But now my continents had come into motion, and the end of the existing world was irreversible. My pulse beat in my temples with the dust of time, my blood hummed like a distant Fog, my skin's sense of space felt the salty melody of the white room.

  They put on the belts. The eyelids flutter. The clock ticks. The voice. The voice I know. Familiar, like an old scar I've stopped noticing.

  A rejuvenated Dr. Graves in a white coat is leaning over me. In his hand was an object - something like a key. Not a key. A needle. A lobotomy needle.

  "This is your chance," Graves said, preparing the instrument.

  I recognize it. I recognize it too well. I've gotten to know her much more intimately than I'd like. It stormed my gateway to my soul.

  "Who else will pay all your debts, Mr Rains?" Graves continued with the same zy intonation with which he might discuss the choice of wine for dinner.

  Money. I was indebted to fate and serious people because of my addiction. I'd agreed to be a b rat. Psi abilities transfer. It went the same as always - I almost died receiving and signing psi scars, and the memories of it were cemented into the sarcophagus of my subconscious.

  Longford. He was afraid of death. To the point of madness, to the point of obsession. He tried to transpnt his trembling consciousness into the bodies of his children. Probably broke their psyches, Henry's definitely a broken toy. When that didn't work, he remembered his old rat from this room. That I was once part of his experiments. I'm his st hope.

  We still had a mental link, and Longford had taken advantage of it - a week ago, he and his retinue of psi-hunters had penetrated the dead mind, trying to kill my "self" and take possession of my body. Not the healthiest and youngest, but better than an old man who had already seen the setting sun. I killed him there, amidst the fog he so feared. Woodsworth and Graves carried the body from here to his office, and summoned me, not knowing who would come to them, me or their master.

  It all coalesced into one nasty blur of realization. Fregoli delusion!

  The killer is a detective.

  Me.

  The case solved.