The last thing he saw was her hair, which looked like a bird’s nest had been glued to her head.

Titus, himself no dandy in his farm clothes, his little work boots, felt afraid in the darkness. Cold air chilled his legs. When he reached out a hand to make for the exit, the girl leaned forward, opened her wide, blackened maw, and she bit him. She got his right hand and did not let go, and it was a very deep bite between knuckles that drew blood—the uneven scar remains, though pale, on the taxidermist’s hand even today—and after she tasted blood she began to whimper, a whimper which set her off into a long, inhuman howl, and young Downing had never heard such a thing, like an animal trapped in human skin, and as he fled the cave, never to return, the boy’s ears rang, he felt a new, ripping pain in his hand, and it was one he would feel, on occasion, for years:

When he would finally leave Northumberland for Oxford; when he would awake at Oxford, finals looming, screaming out to Harold Skinner in the night; when he attended the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park, listening to Mr. Darwin explain the new art called “taxidermy,” a term, Darwin explained, for a beast’s “arrangement of skin.”

Once Downing set up his own taxidermy shop in Leamington Spa and arranged the twelve heads of adult deer buck outside his front door, he felt safer. He believed he had forgotten about the girl, but at the same time he did not really forget; she had simply moved from his hand to his heart, and if there is a secret to the talent of Titus Downing, it must be this: the girl is with him whenever he supplicates himself to his craft, looking for the raw, Animal feeling that will help him to re-create the jiva. She lives in him, and as he stared into Richard’s dark, carcass-colored eye sockets last night, Downing surprised himself when they resembled two great, gaping mouths and the girl returned to him once more—her black, open mouth, the cave’s moss-scent, the wet air chilling his legs—the old pain seized his right hand and so she, too, must be partly to blame for why the taxidermist cares so little about the drunk boys in the theater troupe who are, at this moment, belting out a tune they’ve just invented called “Cocks and Fox.”

“Get to work, aardvarks!” he shouts as more people arrive, and the boys start to prance in a frenzy, crouching down on all fours, throwing their snouts about on the cobblestones, looking nothing like aardvarks as the crowd bifurcates, forming two long lines, each beginning at the front door of 24 Victoria Terrace, at the intersection of Bath Street and the Terrace Leam.

* * *

It’s begun, which means that it’s over. Upstairs, the TV is shouting something about a photograph that’s just been procured, and CONGRESSMAN ALEXANDER PAINE WILSON OWNS A NAZI AARDVARK, and you don’t have to look at the television to know that Hermann Göring’s hunting lodge photo, the one with the aardvark, is everywhere, so you look at your phone where there are now 5063 unread text messages and 8292 unread emails, and you do not need to look further to know your Favorability Rating’s kaput.