Who were these people? Ichthyologists? Ornithologists? Lepidopterologists mured in a convalescent home for declining academics? They droned on, sipping their vile coffee, Gorelik chain-smoking his long, mud-colored cigarettes, holding them like a mittened ape, and Baker smiling, smiling, smiling. He had a smile for every occasion, an unending variety of smiles. His round, defenseless eyes, presumably the mirror of his soul, relayed nothing, but that smile ran the gamut of passion. He could beam a smile of excessive intimacy, a rictus of ferocious ill humor, a melting simper of benevolence or rumpled self-effacement, a smirk of wry mockery, an insinuation of mysterious complicity. Yet each smile was incongruent with whatever he said, so that his words always sounded banal or frivolous.

I tried picking up on other conversations in the huddle around the inglenook, but they seemed to be nothing more than trivia, however exotic. There was about the group a kind of conspiratorial affinity, as if they were all fulfilling a need, but what it was I didn’t know. Nor would any of Chatterton’s accomplices tell me. My presence among them as time went on was acknowledged from meal to meal, certainly not with relish but with a timid waif of a nod from George Desmond, a fubsy piglet of a man (he seemed afraid of offending anyone), or the gimlet eye of Ridgeway Mainwaring (who seemed to enjoy offending everyone). Mainwaring’s brief survey would spear me for only a second or two before it passed on to a vista more alluring.

One positive corollary of being ignored: nobody asked me my age or evinced the slightest interest in my past. If indeed they had questions about it, they thought it best for whatever reason (the foremost being total uninterest) not to pursue them.

That first morning their talk drifted on, hushed and aimless and in a miscellany of accents I’ll not attempt to reproduce. I nodded off, exhausted from my Homeric debauchery with the girl of my dreams.

I willed myself to think of Valerie—oily, priapic fancies—but some dark undeniable compulsion wrenched her from my grasp and death took over. I saw myself slightly out of focus, in that kind of iridescent light we associate (thanks to motion pictures, I suspect) with the supernatural. Whatever the hell, there I was in shiny black leather, a hangman hanging myself, with an ugly knife in one hand and a darkly gleaming gun in the other. A shot rang out with the blast of a sonic boom, and a voice from an echo chamber said, “Murder. It’s sheer murder,” and I woke, instantly alert and cringing.

Karl Gruenfeldt sneezed again; it had been his first sneeze, I realized as the clutch of the nightmare subsided, that I had mistaken for the gunshot or sonic boom.