A short while later, Janet stood up and put on her jacket. "It's almost five. Go home, girl, and forget about the dead until tomorrow."

Samantha yawned and rubbed her eyes. "All right." She slid her chair back from the desk and crossed over to the coat rack where she'd hung her jacket that morning. She glanced towards the doorway and saw that Janet was already gone; she hadn't waited.

Samantha sighed and shook her head. What did she expect? A slap on the back? A round of applause? After the way she'd passed out in the dead woman's flat that morning, she needed to prove herself more than ever. But how?

The only way she could think of was to keep working.

She crossed back to her desk and started sorting through another mound of paper. There were several letters from someone named Pamela — no surname — with a return address in Paris. She printed off one of their standard letters and put it in the "out" tray. Sending the letter made her feel as if she'd finally accomplished something, even though there was little hope of getting a reply — the most recent of Pamela's notes was dated 1975.

She found several black and white photographs of a man in a military uniform. She turned one over and saw the words: "Terry, home on leave, 1943." Husband? Brother? Lover? She had no way of telling.

She put the photos into an envelope for safe — keeping, then picked up the notebook she'd seen on the old woman's table that morning and started flicking through it again. Nothing but page after page of handwritten verses. Completely useless.

She was about to put it down when the neat script of the previous pages suddenly gave way to an almost illegible scrawl.

Must hurry! Memory fading. Like dream, one moment so clear, the next, gone forever. Saw a girl. Room with black walls. Something written in red paint, letters backwards. Spelling? No, too late, already forgotten. The girl: blonde hair, eyes pale blue, wide open and staring. Rope around neck. Hanging from a pipe? Not sure. So young, so sad. Wearing jeans, I think. Getting vague now.

Just looked at clock. Lost four hours! How? Seems like minutes. Something is wrong. Room seems strange, everything strange.

Feels different. Can't say how. Knew a minute ago, but it's gone now. Whatever I thought I knew, gone.

Samantha put down the notebook, shivering. Something was nagging at the back of her mind, something about footsteps and a beam of light. She shook her head and forced her attention back to the notebook.

The old woman's writing reverted to her original precise hand.

11 June.

I just re — read the above and freely admit it sounds like the ravings of a madwoman. Yet twenty — four hours have passed and I am still unable to shake the feeling that I am in the wrong place and I don't know how I got here.

12 June.

I now know what has happened and I think I know how to fix it. I told Anna everything...

Anna had to be the woman Marcia Anson had seen with Eleanor.

She not only believed me, she understood. We talked for hours about choices and probabilities, the physical and the mental and infinite numbers of universes. Then I brought her back here to see the psychomantium...

"The what?" Samantha said out loud.

...and she confirmed that it was hers.

My only hope now is to go back the way I came.

The rest of the book was blank.

Anna nodded to the seat across from hers. "Sit down," she said quietly, "and maybe I'll tell you what you want to know."

Samantha sat. "Eleanor Burdon wrote in her notebook that she'd talked to you about your psycho... something."

Anna picked up a salt shaker and tossed it from one hand to the other, giggling. "Psychomantium. Never heard the word myself 'til I met the old woman."

"Well, what is it? What does it do?"

Anna emptied some salt onto her palm and licked it, glancing sideways at Samantha. "It's a mirror used for contacting the other side."

"The other side? You mean the dead? Eleanor Burdon was trying to contact the dead?"

"Well, she was that age, wasn't she? Not so long to go herself, wanting to know who or what was waiting for her. And it worked, of course. She did contact the dead. Only trouble was, the dead person she contacted was me."

Samantha threw up her hands. "Well, thank you for your time."

Anna put the salt shaker back on the table. "No, you don't understand." She pulled back one of her sleeves, revealing several scars across her wrist. "I've been out of hospital almost six months now; they closed my ward. I've got these pills I'm supposed to take, but they make my tongue swell up..." She shrugged and rolled the sleeve back down.

"Anyway, about three, four weeks ago, I found some rope in a rubbish bin. I imagined myself with it wrapped tight around my neck, my face bloated and purple, my lifeless body swaying in the breeze. I even imagined my soul, plummeting into hell. I saw myself writing a sign in big letters so everyone would know where I'd been all these years and where I was going. It would be so easy, I thought, so easy...

"But I didn't do it; I only thought about it, right? And then I guess I started walking. I don't remember where I went or what I did, but it felt like I'd been going in circles for hours. And then I get back to the place where I've been staying and it's been done over! Everything I own is gone, including this full — length mirror on a metal stand. A few days after that, some old dearie comes up to me, claiming she's seen me in this mirror she bought off a market stall. She said she'd been sitting in the dark, waiting for spirits to appear in the glass, when suddenly she sees me, hanging dead from a rope. I was gobsmacked. She gave me a perfect description in every detail of something I had considered doing but hadn't actually done.

"It was then I started to notice the way the old woman kept shifting in and out of focus, and I soon found that if I stared at her hard enough, she became almost transparent." Anna raised her pale blue eyes to meet Samantha's. "Just like you."

Samantha looked down at her arms and saw they were covered in goosebumps. Somewhere in the distance, she imagined she could hear the sound of buzzing insects.

Samantha sat on a folded blanket in the middle of a bare concrete floor. The room was dark and almost bare of furniture. A large pipe ran from one corner of the floor, up a wall and across the ceiling.

Anna lit a kerosene lamp and placed it on the floor before her. "Welcome to my place."

"I've been here before, haven't I? In a dream. I remember it from a dream."

Anna didn't answer.

"But the room was different then. The walls were painted black — there was something written on them, but I couldn't make out the words. I heard a window being forced open and then I heard footsteps. It was a dream, wasn't it? Or am I dreaming now?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me. I don't understand where I am. I don't understand what's happening. The last thing I remember is looking in a mirror..."

Anna sat on a wooden crate, her face hidden in shadow. "How much do you want to bet there's at least one universe where you're the one who's dead, not me? Must be at least one, don't you think?"

"Universe?" Samantha repeated. "What do you mean, a parallel universe?"

"It's all about possibility, isn't it? I saw something about it on TV while I was in hospital. Every possibility has to happen somewhere. So sometimes I'm dead, sometimes you are, sometimes neither of us, sometimes both of us. And sometimes one of us is a ghost, trapped inside a mirror."

Samantha thought back to what Janet had said: that trapped spirits reached out to grab the living. "Are you saying I'm stuck inside a mirror?"

"I'm saying you're stuck inside a universe. Where that universe is, I don't know."

Samantha thought back to the last line in Eleanor Burdon's notebook: My only hope now is to go back the way I came.

She must have tried to go back through the mirror.

And it had killed her.

"Sorry, love, you'll have to clear off now; I'm locking up."

Samantha looked up to see the man in the apron standing over her. The cafe floor smelled of ammonia, the table had been wiped clean and the seat across from hers was empty.

"What happened to Anna?"

"She left about ten minutes ago, don't you remember?"

The sign outside the local library said that they were open until eight o'clock on Mondays and Tuesdays. Samantha glanced at her watch — nearly a quarter past seven — and hurried up the stairs to the reference section.

She found what she was looking for in a book on folklore and superstition: The reflection in the mirror mirrors the soul. If the glass holding your reflection should ever be broken, expect seven years' despair and misfortune, for seven years be required for the renewal of the soul.

To break the cycle and release the soul, the broken pieces must be collected together and buried in the earth.

It was after midnight when Samantha opened the door to Eleanor Burdon's flat and walked through to the bedroom, carrying a hammer and a sheet.

She wrapped the sheet around the mirror, lay it down on the floor and attacked it with the hammer, shattering the glass. She put on a pair of gloves before she picked up the sheet full of jagged splinters and carried it downstairs, placing it in the boot of her car.

Then she drove to the nearest park and buried all the pieces.

Samantha went into the office early the next morning. She picked up the dead woman's notebook and started going through it page by page. Nothing but twee little rhymes.

"Hello, Sammy," Janet said brightly when she came in half an hour later. "Quite the early bird, aren't you?"

Samantha sighed. "I'm still trying to find an address for Mrs Burdon's daughter, but so far, nothing. Not even a clue."

"What are you talking about, you silly thing? We wrote to her yesterday; don't you — " She was interrupted by a ringing telephone. "Janet Hale," she said, lifting the receiver. She listened a moment, then reached across her desk for a notepad.

They went out on a new case later that morning: a former psychiatric patient who'd hung herself three weeks earlier.

Samantha followed Janet into a dark ground floor room with a bare concrete floor. The walls were painted black with the words: Gateway To Hell splashed across them in huge red letters. The room was empty of furniture.

Janet shook her head. "Can you credit it? They reckon somebody burgled the place with the poor girl's body still hanging from that pipe. I sometimes wonder what kind of world it is we're living in, Sammy, what kind of world."

"I wonder," Samantha agreed, nodding.