That muddling fool Derek, zonked out on even he didn’t know what. “No,” I say, “I think he got it a bit twisted…” And then I think, maybe it was I who got it twisted. What could I lose, exploring the possibility of feeding a rack of goofballs to the sentry, Abdul, Grady? “Have you got some kind of knockout drops?”

“For a sleep? A long sleep or a short one? Or the sleep that does not end?”

“One that lasts a day or so.”

We speak—I haltingly—in her dialect. My usage is both blunt and fragile, without subtlety, the pronunciation abominable, lacking the correct stressses and the requisite sound shifts. Still, she understands me, for she nods sympathetically. Her bedside manner is impeccable, although she’s pretty close to nodding off—a healer who obviously dips into her own nostrums.

“How much do you weigh?” she asks. “In stones?”

I hesitated. How many pounds to a British stone? About fourteen? I wasn’t sure.

“I have to know,” she persists, gently, “if you do not want the sleep that never ends.”

“It’s for two smaller men,” I say. “Maybe one hundred and sixty pounds. Almost twelve stones. And a larger one.”

She stiffens. “Not for you?” she asks dubiously.

I’ve said something wrong. “What difference does it make who it’s for?”

Her tranced eyes are on me, as if I were a dangerous child playing a deadly game whose rules I don’t fathom. Slowly she gathers up her philters and replaces them in the pouch.

“A man cannot force a journey on someone else.”

“Why not?”

“Our lord and leader does not allow. We have the new ways, now that we are modern.” The tone of her ancient voice rather than the words of homage spoken make it clear that she equates modernity with derangement.

“When I was a girl,” she says, “just starting to learn The Mysteries, then we served the people well, providing for their every need and comfort. If a patron wanted riddance of a foe, I’d take half a gourd of water a corpse had been washed in and mix it with swine snout. I made figurines of mud and pitch to induce boils. Chalk and fresh-fallen wood of a lightning-struck tree would with a few well-chosen words cause sickness and the witherings. Crushed river stones sprinkled with the finest rat oil and lit with a sacred flame would bring on the trembles and the madness.” She smiles sadly, reliving the triumphs of a golden age. “Then everything was possible. But today…”

She gets to her feet. We’re being watched by a fat squirrel at the window; he looks like a poorly animated Japanese teapot. How had a squirrel climbed seven stories to my cell? Why? I must be unhinged, I think, invoking the metaphysical why to shed light on the locomotion of a squirrel.