Outside, Sir Richard Ostlet’s bandaged face has arranged itself in the center of the taxidermist’s shopwindow, positioned right in front of the vixen, and Downing, still in his workshop bent over the dog, cannot bring himself to acknowledge even the remote possibility that the being out there is otherworldly. For although he, like any educated man, has read his Voltaire and agrees that “everything in nature is resurrection,” and has even entertained the likelihood that he has been here, as Goethe declared himself to be, “a thousand times before,” and Downing, if asked, could repeat on cue from Moore’s famous poem Lalla Rookh: “From frame to frame the unextinguish’d soul / Rapidly passes, till it reach the goal!”—he too, like any educated man, well knows that reincarnation is not magic, the boundaries are set, the jiva is either samsara (trapped) or moksha (liberated), and though most souls are doomed to repeat themselves endlessly to shed their heavy layers of karma, the jiva, the soul, the what-have-you, the eternal life-essence?—it is not bloody magic, and Downing has utterly no patience for people who believe in ghosts, apparitions, and instead he believes that what lives on this cold Earth is everything, there is nothing more until death, at which point life, it may just return again as it seems to in taxidermy, and to be frank, Downing is rather looking forward to the whole aardvark business ending if truth be told, so the aardvark will become another man’s problem, so this “essence” might follow the aardvark to another town, chasing his eyes across another land, and Downing himself might close his shop, retire to his father’s farm in Northumberland, leaving Royal Leamington Spa to become what, deep down, Downing has always known he was: a simple farmer.

All of which is why Downing ignores the figure standing outside and sets his mind on tilling fields as he shapes the pink anus of the Schipperke, holding its tail, and it’s why, if he hears the sleigh bells jingle, he ignores them.

It is why he ignores the figure as it enters the shop, walks slowly toward the back room, and opens the creaking door, ignores it even as it stands—as it is standing right now—so closely behind Titus Downing, leaning its chest upon his thin, bird-like shoulder blades, breathing a human man’s breath, warm and wet, onto the back of his neck.

* * *

You cannot know that Brian Castle, Toby’s tech-billionaire father, is watching CNN when he sees his only daughter holding your arm, grinning and waving at cameras. You cannot know that upon seeing this, the ticker flashing CONGRESSMAN ALEX WILSON AND BRIAN CASTLE’S DAUGHTER ENGAGED, the man sits up straight at his desk and goes, “Shit.” That he picks up his phone. That he has been reading the news and knows all about your arrest, your illegal possession of a taxidermied aardvark, and he has never liked you, has never liked politicians in general, of any makeup or breed, and so he is going to put an end to all this immediately. All he needs is some dirt on Wilson and he cannot imagine that it will be difficult to find, and it is not difficult to find.