“Actually,” I said, picking up City of Saints and Madmen, “there was a passage in here that I found quite interesting. Not from ‘Dradin, In Love,’ but from this other story, ‘Learning to Leave the Flesh.’ You make a distinction in the introduction to that tale—you call it a forerunner to the Ambergris stories, and yet in your response to the other interrogatories, you say the story was written quite recently.”

“Surely you know that a writer can create a precursor tale after he has written the tales which come after, just as he can write the final tale in a series before he has finished writing the others.”

The agitation had returned to X’s features, almost as if he knew I was steering the conversation back toward my original objective.

“True, true,” I said as I turned pages, “but there is one passage—about the dwarf, Davy Jones, that interests me most. Ah, here it is—where Jones haunts the main character. Why don’t you read it for me?” I handed it to him and he took it with a certain eagerness. He had a good reading voice, neither too shrill nor too professional.

“Then he stands at the foot of my bed, staring at me. A cold blue tint dyes his flesh, as if the TV’s glow has burnt him. The marble cast of his face is as perfect as the most perfect sentence I have ever written. His eyes are so sad that I cannot meet his gaze. He speaks to me and although I cannot hear him, I know what he is saying. I am crying again, but softly, softly. The voices on the street are louder and the tinkling of bells so very light.”