It was the first week in January before the pale, sickly sun reappeared. The soggy earth settled under it and the house settled into the earth and I settled into the house.

I huffed and puffed on my tuba. I gedankened, more or less. My days seemed pointless and overcharged at the same time, posing twin, unsettling questions. What was Chatterton up to? And what was I doing, chugging blindly along with him? A yoke of crepuscular companions shared my snuggery: Tedium crouched in a corner, while Horniness occupied my bed.

To escape my roommates I prowled that wreck of a house, its fathomless shadows and its funky air. Furtively avoiding my confederates, searching mostly for books but willing to settle for anything, I found nothing. Not even a map. But the expenditure of energy did me no harm.

I might add that my colleagues afforded no relief. They were at best fugitively visible, other than at meals. I heard Gorelik’s fipple flute now and then, and other sounds which in their convoluted passage through the house were less easy to identify. A muted metal clangor, as if a pair of steel dice were being clapped together like castanets. The sostenuto of what might have been the vibrations of a tuning fork. The reedy shrill of a pitch pipe, or was it a boatswain’s whistle? The tinkle of arrhythmical bells and the sudden, unnerving anguish of a siren. And always the confrontational blast of Chatterton’s a cappella mood music bullhorning across the stage, flogging his tonsils over some balls-up which was never made clear. He roared like thunder but he struck like lightning and, so far as I was able to determine, with the same whimsicality. No one except Gorelik ever talked back, and their dialogue was unnerving. “You toad! You fart-infested camel!” Chatterton would yell, and, deep-voiced, as if from a rocky cavern, Gorelik’s borscht accent would bellow, “Tzadderdon, vy don’t you take a flying fug to the moon?”

Stressful, yes, but those brief and warlike exchanges did relieve the heavy consistency of my lassitude, and in their wake I would re-rouse myself and re-slink around the house looking for something, anything, readable, besides labels on bottles. I’d rattle along one dreary, unpopulated hallway to another, lurch up and down the stairs, wondering if she’d ever come back. I stood entranced before the door of Val’s room, trying to find some runic significance in the notice pushpinned on the door:

PRIVATE KEEP OUT
THIS MEANS YOU

(The majuscular print was slanted, slubbered.)

CURSED BE YE WHO EVEN
THINK OF ENTERING HERE
V.C.

Of course the door was locked. I put my nose to the keyhole and sniffed for perfume, but all I inhaled was the frowst of dry rot. There was, so far as I could determine, not one square inch of that infirm house which wouldn’t give you a cauliflower nose.