Sabrina York must have been attracted to the place, for her footprints showed that she had turned in at the gate, walked up the little path and let herself in the door.
They also showed that she had left by the same route, so there was no reason for Blake to linger. As a matter of fact, the fascination that had brought the place into being had been replaced by an illogical repugnance. But repugnance can sometimes be as compelling a force as fascination, and Blake not only lingered but went inside as well.
He remembered the living room distinctly—the flagstone floor, the huge grill-fronted hearth, the deeply recessed window, the rack of cups and platters on the wall; the empty straight-backed chair standing sternly in a corner, the bare wooden table—
He paused just within the doorway. The chair was no longer empty, the table no longer bare.
A man sat on the former and a bottle of wine stood on the latter. Moreover, the room showed signs of having been lived in for a long time. The floor was covered with tracked-in dirt and the walls were blackened from smoke. The grill-work of the hearth was begrimed with grease.
Whatever else he might be the man sitting at the table was not an image out of the past. He was too vividly real. He was around Blake's age, and about Blake's height and build. However, he was given to fat. His paunch contrasted jarringly with Blake's trim waist. His vaguely familiar face was swollen—probably from the wine he had drunk—and his too-full cheeks were well on the way to becoming jowls. His bloodshot eyes were underscored with shadows, and his clothing consisted of odds and ends out of Blake's past: a tattered, too-tight pullover with the letter "L" on the front, a pair of ragged red-plaid hunting breeches and a pair of cracked riding-boots.
Blake advanced across the room and picked up the bottle. One sniff told him that it came from a memory-image of a Martian wine-cellar. He set the bottle back down. "Who are you?" he demanded.
The man looked up at him sardonically. "Call me Smith," he said. "If I told you who I really am, you wouldn't believe me."
"What are you doing in my mind?"