The night was freezing; the children shivered in their beds and pulled the covers tight around them. As they slept, a white mist billowed into the house and settled against the floorboards, creeping along like a living wave, curling under doors and wrapping around corners like a sinuous snake. When the mist reached the door to Maude and Mary Jane’s room, it paused, then slipped through the narrow space beneath the door and twined its way up the bedposts of each of their beds. The air went cold as ice, and the girls' breaths became visible puffs of white as they breathed.
A tendril reached out from the mist wrapped around Mary Jane's bedpost and brushed against her cheek. Mary Jane, deep in sleep, shivered as it touched her bare skin and turned away from it. The mist followed, spreading over her body like a second blanket. Across the room, the mist covered Maude as well, but it slid off immediately and rejoined the rest of the mist on the floor. The mist that covered Mary Jane lay over her for a minute, then retreated as well, and the pool of mist that covered the floor began to withdraw from the room as though pulled by a string. As it slipped back out under the door, Mary Jane’s eyes opened.
Her eyes opened, but they did not see. They were hollow and dull, their light silver color turned almost translucent in the moonlight. Her movements were uneven and awkward as she put her bare feet to the floor and rose stiffly from her bed. She shuffled to the door and opened it, carelessly leaving it open behind her as, darkly dreaming, she followed the mist back through the hallway and up the stairs to the attic. There, in the attic, the mist had settled in a thick cloud around the mirror, which pulsed with a faint white light.
Had she been awake, Mary Jane would have seen in the mirror Devorian’s night sky, with its hundreds of stars and bright round moon shining high over the sleeping forest. And she would have seen that the mist came from within Devorian itself, welling up through the barrier between the two worlds like water from a spring. But she was not awake. Mary Jane smiled dreamily and reached her hand out to the mirror. It passed through easily. Then she stepped through, and the mist retracted completely back through the mirror, leaving no trace of its presence in the house at 321 Baker’s Row.