Teaser V(ii), creeping closer to the mirror – for Rohan Quine’s “The Host in the Attic”

He strides through the hallway into the bathroom and flicks the lights on, ineffectual though they are. Taking care to avoid appearing in the mirror at all, as yet, he holds the laptop up beside his own head and stabilises his grip on it, with the hologram on the other side of the keyboard from himself.

Then he sidles closer to the wall-mirror, cautious and crab-like, with terror mounting in him.

By degrees he creeps and agonises nearer to the point where he starts to see, reflected in the mirror, first his own image, looking murderous … and then the laptop … and then, very slowly, the hologram.

The head inches painfully into view, staring straight at Jaymi where it hovers in the spotlight. Jaymi’s eyes bore into it, caressing its face with minute, probing flicks across its width and height…

And there’s no avoiding it. The face is still beautiful, but there’s an unmistakably increased touch of cruelty in its lineaments.

There arises the echo of his unheeded utterance in the Mainframe conference room when the hologram was first presented: “And there I am, immortal…” This is followed by another, much more recent echo: “You have disappointed me.” And like a thunderclap comes the third echo at last, as the horror of truth slides into place: his urgent wish, “If only the hologram could assume all signs of my future loss of beauty, and of my sins, forever.” With vertiginous fear and fascination, he understands that this is indeed now happening: the look of the prototype hologram is changing, according to his own behaviour.

As he stares at the little head, a soft streak of pity for it flickers through his own face—and then is gone.

For more about "The Host in the Attic" by Rohan Quine, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/the-host-in-the-attic/

For some great reviews of it, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media/

To watch the complete chapter from which this little teaser was excerpted, or to find any of the nine chapters that constitute the novella’s video-book format, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/t-h-i-t-a-video-book/the-host-in-the-attic-chapter-v-video-book/

For links to all of these short teasers, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/t-h-i-t-a-video-book/short-teasers-for-the-host-in-the-attic-video-book/

And to pick it up from whichever retailer you may prefer, the retailers’ links for the audiobook are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-host-in-the-attic-novella-audiobook/

and for the paperback are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-platinum-raven-and-other-novellas-paperback/

and for the ebook at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-host-in-the-attic-novella-ebook/