The yellow sun is going orange. The river is moving. The boys are dancing, singing as they go, “Yet she never fails to please, yet she never fails to please,” and Downing closes the front door with a sleigh jingle. He locks it.

The eyes of all stuffed creatures follow him as he walks through his workshop, past the black furry skin of the unfinished Schipperke, and he is breathing in slowly the stink of the Bengal tiger skin. All has been abandoned. All is quiet. Hot, summery fumes of clay, of musk and vinegar, of arsenical soaps, of red pepper and tannin and bisulfite of lime hang heavy in the air. Above it all, the rosemary musk of camphor.

Titus Downing walks to the table where he arranged the skin of the aardvark and unseals a glass bottle. White pills tumble into his palm like little teeth, and he carries them upstairs, into his bedroom, where the artist lies down on his bed, where the warm, meat-scent of Richard Ostlet’s body is a ghost on the sheets.

* * *

Enter the coffin. The lights of the Viewing area behind the partition have not yet been turned on, but when the room divider divides, it reveals a great big shiny coffin, black and boxy, reminding you at once of your Tahoe. You place your hands on the wood and feel a shock of cold, like it’s been cut from a tree made of ice, and wonder what kind of wood the coffin is made of, and you cannot know that it is something called “Leadwood,” Combretum imberbe, one of the strongest woods on Earth, nor that it has been imported all the way from Namibia—but whatever it is, you think, the lid is heavy, requires two hands to lift it, and as you lift it, the rosemary musk stinking up the whole funeral parlor rises out from inside, and the word enters your consciousness: camphor, and you know that it’s camphor because Ms. Sline made you do a science project examining the role of camphor in the death of cockroaches, and you (or your ten-year-old self) put five roaches into a jar, poked holes in the tin lid, dropped in a white pill of camphor and watched as, over the course of two days, the roaches, one by one, turned onto their backs, arched their spindly legs into the air, and died.

Other than the cockroaches, you have never seen a dead body before, not up close, not in person, and while Greg Tampico’s body is certainly dead, there is also something strangely undead about it.

Looking at the body, you think, is exactly like looking at the body of a freaking department store mannequin.