So it is that the taxidermist wanders his shop the morning of the Viewing in a happy stupor. The time, it is nigh, the aardvark is complete, he thinks, the shop is prepared until a knock comes at the door and enter Downing’s old roommate, noted prosthetic specialist Harold Skinner, who has arrived from London wearing the same tidy handlebar mustache he’s always worn, and who will act as the bid-taker.

Following him, enter the theater troupe, and they are six boys wearing pink-and-yellow stockings, papier-mâché rabbit ears on their heads, papier-mâché claws on their hands and feet, and the costumes don’t look a bit like the costumes Downing has drawn; the boys, who have arrived two hours too early and half drunk, haven’t taken it seriously and their long-snouted masks appear slipshod enough to be vaguely indecent.

Downing sends them outside to sober up, to practice, and the troupe does so laughing, making oinking sounds, extemporaneously spanking one another—and it is because of his exceedingly good mood this morning that Downing only fleetingly doubts whether the troupe really is up to snuff; whether these silly faux aardvarks might actually disrupt the particular mood of the actual aardvark, which Downing has set up in the center of his shop for the Viewing at precisely two o’clock, carefully positioned in the long beam of natural British sunlight which Downing well knows will appear.

In fact, over the next two hours, as the line of people begins to form outside underneath the twelve heads of stuffed deer buck, Downing’s mind, it is elsewhere: upstairs, with his blind lover who waits for him naked on the bed, lying face-down because it feels good on his eyes, slowly wrapping a fresh bandage around his eye sockets, which he had agreed to show Downing last night.

Downing had lit a candle and held it up to Ostlet’s face, which otherwise looked the same: there was his boxy hunter’s jaw, his nubby boy’s nose, his cheeks fat and round as ladies’ pincushions, but above which, in the flickering light, sat two new ghoulish vacancies, shocking in both size and color and reminding Downing at once of a moss-coated cave he used to explore as a child in Northumberland.

The cave, wet and dark, was in Pauperhaugh, found only by traveling the length of the riverbank away from his farm, into the woods, and resembled a boulder with its middle scooped out. Late one afternoon, after his chores were finished, the boy Titus had decided to hide there, as was his wont, with a book until dinner. He cleared moss from the mouth and crawled inside, but as he, candlelit, began reading, he sensed that he was not alone, he heard breathing, and the boy could not see it but suspected it was Animal as it smelled muddy-sweet, and when he lifted his light and peered into the darkness, the outline of a small girl appeared, mud-covered and squatting.

She was naked, her legs wrapped up in her arms, and she grinned strangely at Titus, as though she had never done it before. Then she blew out his light!