Your white fingers are stained with the black ink as you push your journal away. The gaslights have started to go out, and now it's only the fireplace in the plush room, lighting up the malicious faces of the masks you acquired in the travels of your youth, the dusty silver you inherited, the old furniture you would just as soon see burn. Of course he is gone, and not to be found. You were a fool to think you might find something to distract you from this, someone, rather, but a fool has always been your true nature. As it was then, so it is now.
You touch a bitter white powder on the back of your tongue, sniff a bit of it, but feel next to nothing. The murderer is in your mind, enjoying your distraction, smiling silently at your distress at what he has done. You cannot but think of the woman dying in her bathing chamber. That a single person would have so much blood, you knew, as you too have murdered, but never with an absence of anger, of fear. Never the satanic enjoyment of pain.
There is not much left of your soul. A few months ago you would have said that it was all paint and lies, but now you feel it. You feel it stained with the murderer's victims, and you feel it every time you are alone in your study. And now you are alone. You are well and truly alone.