The party would take up the ground floor, centered around the banquet hall, while the artists’ gathering/gallery would be located on the second floor, in a smaller room.

That night was calm but for a steady drizzle and drip of rain, the moon missing, but the streetlamps making up for it. A breeze blew into the reception area. It felt cool as I waited for the Four Ghosts of Lake’s Past to arrive for the party.

I stood in the doorway, smoking a Smashing Todd’s Deluxe cigar and nursing a glass of cheap red wine from the kitchen staff’s stock. I intended to enjoy my evening by indulging myself early on, so if things went hideously wrong, I would still have a memory to look back on with fondness.

I watched the night as it passed by me on Albumuth Boulevard, one of the last times I had a chance to just relax and observe, as it turned out. And yet, a feeling of peculiar intensity came over me. I saw it all with such precise detail, in a way that I cannot put into words. It was not that the world slowed down or that I saw anything hidden in it, although I knew there was more in front of me than I could see—I had the glasses in my pocket to remind of that. It was more that my gaze lingered for once. It lingered and held, as if I was parched for that little glistening of light off water in the gutter as a motored vehicle rumbled past. As if I was hungry for the exact way a street vendor cocked his head while rattling off a list of his offerings. The quiet syncopation of conversation half-heard and then gone as people walked by. The lamppost opposite the hotel, illuminating the facade of a closed bank door. The quick-low cry of a nighthawk circling somewhere above. The feel of the street through my shoes. The grit of the doorway against my shoulder as I leaned on it. The bliss of the cigar’s trembling surge of flavor, the biting smoothness of the wine.

I think I already knew then that I was not long for such sights.

The four artists arrive on time—two by an old-fashioned carriage, another by hired motored vehicle, a fourth on foot. Sonter, Kinsky, Raffe, and Constance were their names: a motley rabble of ragtag talent, and none of them had ever so much as scaled a small mountain of acclaim except through the long-ago benevolent influence of Lake’s hand upon them.