“ ‘I had dinner with the Mayfairs,’ I said. ‘I went over at two p.m.’ I stopped. But what was the point of holding back? I had to tell Aunt Queen everything, didn’t I? She had to know the full measure of what I felt. And so I blurted it out:

“ ‘I saw a ghost while I was there. I spoke with him. I talked with him for twenty minutes or more without knowing he was a ghost. It was the ghost of Julien Mayfair, and he told me he had conjugal knowledge of Grandfather William’s wife, and I’m descended from him.’

“Aunt Queen sighed. ‘You are stark raving mad.’

“ ‘Not raving,’ I said. ‘I became a bit heated, yes, at the effrontery of that creature, but not raving, not really raving. That’s a far worse state, wouldn’t you say?’

“ ‘What do I do?’ she asked.

“ ‘Let me call Stirling Oliver. Maybe he can vouch for my sanity. He sees Goblin. He was at dinner tonight. I must see him and talk to him. I must tell him my feelings as regards that creature! I must talk to him. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel anyone is safe from that creature. He’ll help you to understand.’

“ ‘And you think I’m the one,’ she asked, ‘who needs the understanding?’

“ ‘I don’t know, Aunt Queen. I want to kill that creature, that’s all I can say. And there’s something very vile and awful about the being. It isn’t merely that it’s a hermaphrodite, that I could well endure and find fascinating. It’s something else. Goblin senses it. Goblin calls it evil. I tell you the creature frightens me. You must understand, at least that I believe what I’m saying even if you do not.’

“She wouldn’t look at me.

“I went into the bathroom. I was sick. After a while I was able to drink a paper cup of water. And then I came out. They were all there, in the same state of shock as when I left them. I apologized to everyone.

“ ‘But you have to see it,’ I said, ‘from my point of view. You have to understand what my experience of this creature was. And then I come home and find him with my Aunt Queen.’

“Nash made the kind suggestion that perhaps I ought to go to bed. I looked very tired indeed. I agreed to it immediately, but I couldn’t let it go without stating that the stranger, alias Petronia, was no great respecter of my being in or out of bed.

“But when I bent down to kiss Aunt Queen, she was loving to me, and I was as tender with her as ever, and I told her that I had really told the truth.