The thought disturbs him so deeply that by twenty past ten, Downing can bear it no longer, leaps from his canopied bed and travels downstairs to the kitchen for a bit of food. He removes from his pantry a pouch of crackers, a tin of some potted meat, and while leaning against the pantry door, nauseously nibbling his victuals, he hears the slow shuffle of a drunk outside his front door.
It is not the first time the drunks of Leamington have wandered away from the river. Grown men will, occasionally, sleep on his stoop under the buck heads, sometimes all the way through until morning, so Titus Downing listens, waiting for the sound of a man collapsing against his front door, the sound he’s heard often, but there is no such sound. The drunk man keeps walking. And the walking sounds odd, as though he is dragging something behind him, and a shiver travels through Titus Downing.
He listens as the walker grows distant, waits for the man to disappear completely, for when he disappears completely Downing will return upstairs to bed—so it is to Downing’s great unease that the sound does not disappear, and instead, grows louder. The drunk man, he gathers, has turned back around. In no time, he is walking again in front of the shop, and then again: silence.
What can Downing do in his little dark kitchen?
When the sound picks up once more, and it is a very distinctive echo of heel-sole swiping stone, he knows at once that he has heard it before, that this is no drunk; that whenever his friend departed this flat late at night there was always the door’s jingle of sleigh bells followed by this same music, and he is certain that Richard Ostlet’s footsteps are the footsteps he hears now, sweeping the streets in his leather Wellington boots, which he wore day and night, uneven in rhythm for his uncertain steps—it’s the eyes, nyctalopia’s to blame—and Downing, who has not for a moment forgotten what Rebecca told him about seeing Richard walking to and fro in front of their home on Gloucester Walk, is now frozen stiff in the pantry, his head low, his hands pressed against the closed wooden doors, and he is waiting for the apparition to tire of its walking and move on, and Downing will stay there all night if he has to, because: fear! In a flood at his throat!
He cannot make himself move or walk to the front of the shop and stand in the shadows of his stuffed beasts and see with his own eyes the ghost that he knows is there, its ethereal hands pressed against the windowpanes, its bandaged face affixed toward the back workshop because the door has been left open, and where, upon a workbench, a big stuffed Orycteropus afer is clearly visible, herself frozen in the walking position, her right hoof-claw lifted, her head hung low, her long ears raised and alert as she shows off her new bright blue eyes, shellacked to a shine!