The woman spoke again in that false, inhuman voice, “Stranger still that on both occasions, you should be at the heart of things.” The black eyes of the doll on the throne shifted to look at me, narrowed only a fraction. “Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footsteps of doom?” She said this last in Classical English, and I recognized the phrase. “Tolkien,” I said. Was that a smile on the corpse’s lips?
