“Don’t you know yet, John?” The stranger reached the porch, and slowly came up the steps. The overhead light suddenly made his identity very clear.
Breton — transfixed by a vast and inexplicable fear — found himself staring into his own face.
II
Jack Breton discovered a slight shakiness in his legs as he walked up the steps towards the man called John Breton.
It could, he decided, have been caused by crouching in the draughty, conspiratorial darkness of the shrubbery for more than an hour. But a more likely explanation was that he had not been prepared for seeing Kate again. No amount of forethought or preparation could have cushioned the impact, he realized. The sound of her voice as she said goodbye to the visitors seemed to have flooded his nervous system with powerful harmonics, eliciting new levels of response from his being as a whole, and from the discrete atoms of which it was composed. I love you, whispered every molecule of his body, along a billion enzymic pathways. I love you, Kate.
“Who are you?” John Breton demanded abruptly. “What do you want?” He stood squarely in Jack Breton’s path, his face a deep-shadowed mask of anxiety in the light from the globe that hung above his head.
Jack Breton fingered the automatic pistol in his overcoat pocket, but — hearing the uncertainty in the other man’s voice — he left the catch in the safe position. There was no need to deviate from the plan.
“I’ve already told you what I want, John,” he said pleasantly. “And you must know who I am by this time — have you never looked in a mirror?”
“But you look like…” John Breton allowed the sentence to tail off, afraid to walk where the words were leading him.
“Let’s go indoors,” Jack said impatiently. “I’m cold.”
He walked forward and was rewarded by the sight of John at once moving backwards, floundering.