He feels it like bumping up against glass and he wants to jerk back from it — because Konstantin, too, doesn't like looking in the mirror, and what he's seeing pushing up against the other side of that glass is a reflection of himself. Of death (the desire to die), of guilt and a child's sweet face and a want to end it. He doesn't have fangs but when he looks at his own reflection, Konstantin sees monster.

somethin' that happened to me, Louis says, and even with this, Konstantin feels the ripples of another truth tucked up beneath those words. Feels it and knows it and understands it. The creature was something that happened to him, but he believes deep down in his soul that it happened because he deserved it (and the thing chose him; there was another man there, another throat to slither down into, and it chose him). This was punishment. He might as well have signed across the dotted line, made it happen.

"No. It happened when I was... on a mission. Space mission. The fucking thing came from outer space." He knows how it sounds — crazy — except is it any crazier than talking to a man who became something with eyes the colour of poison?

"It can't survive on Earth without a host body. So it lives in mine now." ... "Something changed you? Infected you?" He remembers Louis's burned skin, agony, cries. "There was no help for it back in your world?"