“Voluntary. We have certain associates, culled from academic ranks, who believe in our cause, who think of us as a… a lighthouse on a stormy night. Still, it’s all very irregular,” he added wistfully. “Sometimes they forget their pledges altogether. And now we’re really up to our hilt. The house is mortgaged, the bank has threatened to foreclose…”

So he embroidered his poverty-stricken project, while I tilted with more practical issues like where would I live? I had a sneaking suspicion that I wouldn’t be able to afford a room in a skid row scratch house. How would I get to work? There was no bus line within miles of Chatterton’s laboratory. I couldn’t even cough up a down payment on a bicycle. Hell, if he gave me the use of a car, which was highly unlikely, I couldn’t drive it. At fifteen I couldn’t qualify for a license. As for Valerie, how often could I expect to see her? And on the rare occasions when I did, what was I to expect, other than a fresh chapter in my bitter book of wounds?

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t know how I’d manage…”

“The same way we do,” he said. I’d wondered about that—Chatterton and Valerie and Gorelik and God knows who else, garrisoned in that Moorish keep with the defective electrical wiring and the crumbling widow’s walk—how did they live? On the old man’s harvest of peanuts?

“Somehow we get by,” he intoned. “You’ll break bread with us and live under our roof. I think you’ll find it stimulating.”

Under a roof with Valerie—stimulating indeed.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it a whirl.”

“Splendid.” The hairball levitated, balanced precariously on two shabby house slippers. “Come on—away to shed some light.”

He led me down the ill-defined corridor, floorboards creaking under us like a wooden ship in a storm. “Remember,” he said, “the trick is, open all your valves.”

We climbed the stairs. My foot caught twice in the frayed runner. He threw open a door and we were in a small room, no cozier than Chatterton’s, but darker and louder with the wail of the wind. A gauzy sheet of rain pushed against the only window, and beyond it the wintry trees bowed in a slow demonic dance. Out there somewhere was my father. Where had he gone, what was he doing, did he ever think of me?

“Here we are,” Chatterton said. “Settle down and air the corridors of your mind.” And he was gone.