0002 — THE IVORY MAN.

The Ivory Man is standing in front of city hall. He’s a judge. I think. I have the sense that he’s a judge. Or maybe he’s a criminal. Yes—I have the sense he’s a criminal. Or maybe he’s not necessarily a criminal, but he’s there for a reason. Not a good reason, that is.

He has his back to me. I can see his hair slicked back, dark and shiny. He’s wearing an expensive coat and a scarf. He’s a thief, I suddenly seem to remember. I knew this. He’s been brought here to see the judge. Right—he’s been caught doing something and summoned the way they sometimes summon people when they catch them doing something bad, but not bad enough to keep them in jail. They just send them home, and then they make them come back to talk to a judge. It happens. I know it happens.

He starts to slowly turn toward me. He’s handsome, but he makes me feel uneasy. You can tell just by looking at him that he has ulterior motives, the way a predator does. A reptilian predator, with cold, dead eyes, like black mirrors hiding an impossible stratagem behind them.

I remember now. He’s a mastermind. A criminal mastermind. A hypnotist thief, indeed. I’ve always known this.

As he keeps turning toward me, his gaze incrusts itself more and more into my eyes. He smiles, and his grin becomes wider and wider, showing only his clenched teeth. He’s now fixated on me and has started to approach. And I know he wants to know whether I’m going to testify against him in front of the judge.

But he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. Or maybe he does in a telepathic way—definitively telepathic, because his mouth doesn’t move, even though I keep hearing thoughts—his thoughts—as his grotesque grin keeps widening.

And so, without words, the Ivory Man tells me he doesn’t want me to do anything, or to say anything. He wants me to forget. To stay quiet. To stay still.

His face begins to twist in on itself, turning upside down while still gazing at me—his eyes now where his mouth should be, his nose inverted, his grinning mouth displaced onto his forehead, smiling. Always smiling.