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The eyes put her in mind of Child, watching her. She turns to see what Child does in her wake, but finds that she cannot see her, somehow. She thinks perhaps that Child has melded into the paintings like a book of hidden pictures, and she strains to separate the Child’s eyes from the paintings’ eyes, and she cannot. She feels, for the first time in a very long time, lonely. She feels another thing too, and she tells herself that it is not fear. That it’s not the same thing that had set her to trembling in the strange fields outside the city where the flowers had not, in some way she did not understand, been flowers. She squares her shoulders. The paintings are whispering to her now, and they are telling her that she will have her wish granted. That the thing in the next room--for she knows that this is where she must go--is benevolent and all-powerful. Perhaps, before she had begun following the red string, she would have laughed in the teeth of such a strange adventure and readied