Terrence shook his head. Stopped looking at the animals. His eyes fell on another cabinet, but this one contained a selection of shrunken human heads, many with bits of hair still attached. There was another cabinet full of skulls large and small, another containing masks with enormous noses, and yet another with jars full of the preserved forms of long-dead slugs and toads.

“Where do you get things like this?” Terrence asked.

“My travels.”

“How do you get them through customs?”

“I do not travel in the usual way, of course. Vodka?”

“Thank you.”

While Lady Tchainsaw poured Terrence a glass of vodka over black ice, he walked around the room, over various rugs with the heads of the animals they’d been made from still attached, taking in many dark oil paintings of women who looked very much like Lady Tchainsaw in the past, or in fancy dress. It was as if she had lived for a very, very long time. Were they her relatives? Probably. But where were the men? Wasn’t there a kind of spider that ate her mates? Maybe it was something like that. Terrence shivered briefly, and then forgot he’d ever had the thought.

There was a small set of ancient-looking bookshelves, with many leather-bound volumes. Terrence noted titles of those that were out on the ebony coffee table. Traveling to Other Worlds and Pedesis for Beginners, both by Thomas Lumas. There was another slim volume by the same author called The Flow. The Flow. Was that one of the things he was supposed to denounce? Or was it one of the things he was supposed to embrace? It was so hard keeping up with everything you were supposed to do as member of a diabolical secret society.

“What is the Flow again?” he asked Lady Tchainsaw.

He picked up the book and flicked through it. How strange: Someone had written all over it, changing words and erasing whole passages.

She visibly shivered on hearing the word.

“A vile thing,” was all she could manage.

“How do I resist it?” said Terrence. “And why?”

“Do you have inside you a desire to become a kaftan-wearing hippy vegetarian who thinks of others more highly than yourself?” she asked. “Do you wish to live the life of a philosophy-obsessed tramp, never again to taste live oysters or enjoy the delights of flesh cooked in cream? Or warm, fresh blood baked into a pudding, or even raw . . .”

Terrence didn’t know what she was going on about. “No” seemed the obvious answer to her questions, though. But did this mean he had to eat raw blood or not? “I don’t think so,” he said. “What’s exactly is a kaftan?”

“You silly man,” said Lady Tchainsaw. “You always miss the point of everything. In any case, the Flow is not going to exist for very much longer, if we have our way. It undoes what the norms call ‘evil.’ It cleanses the person who goes inside it of what they call impurities, but what I call intellect. It wipes out critical thinking and makes you love everything. Imagine how exhausting it would be to love everything! It is to be avoided at all costs.”