You sat bolt upright in bed, your heart pounding in fright. You waited for it to repeat, and became aware of the many bombers in the sky. Another knock. It was Thomas Gwenhidwy, come down all the way from London, with the news about poor Spectro. You slept through the loud squadrons roaring without letup, but Gwenhidwy’s small, reluctant tap woke you. Something like what happens on the cortex of Dog during the “paradoxical” phase.

Now ghosts crowd beneath the eaves. Stretched among snowy soot chimneys, booming over air-shafts, too tenuous themselves for sound, dry now forever in this wet gusting, stretched and never breaking, whipped in glassy French-curved chase across the rooftops, along the silver downs, skimming where the sea combs freezing in to shore. They gather, thicker as the days pass, English ghosts, so many jostling in the nights, memories unloosening into the winter, seeds that will never take hold, so lost, now only an every-so-often word, a clue for the living—“Foxes,” calls Spectro_E across astral spaces, the word intended for Mr. Pointsman who is not present, who won’t be told because the few Psi Section who’re there to hear it get cryptic debris of this sort every sitting—if recorded at all it finds its way into Milton Gloaming’s word-counting project—“Foxes,” a buzzing echo on the afternoon, Carroll Eventyr, “The White Visitation” ’s resident medium, curls thickly tightened across his head, speaking the word “Foxes,” out of very red, thin lips… half of St. Veronica’s hospital in the morning smashed roofless as the old Ick Regis Abbey, powdered as the snow, and poor Spectro picked off, lighted cubbyhole and dark ward subsumed in the blast and he never hearing the approach, the sound too late, after the blast, the rocket’s ghost calling to ghosts it newly made. Then silence. Another “event” for Roger Mexico, a round-headed pin to be stuck in his map, a square graduating from two up to three hits, helping fill out the threes prediction, which lately’s being lagged behind… .

A pin? not even that, a pinhole in paper that someday will be taken down, when the rockets have stopped their falling, or when the young statistician chooses to end his count, paper to be hauled away by the charwomen, torn up, burned… . Pointsman alone, sneezing helplessly in his dimming bureau, the barking from the kennels flat now and diminished by the cold, shaking his head no … inside me, in my memory… more than an “event” … our common mortality… these tragic days… . But by now he is shivering, allowing himself to stare across his office space at the Book, to remind himself that of an original seven there are now only two owners left, himself and Thomas Gwenhidwy tending his poor out past Stepney. The five ghosts are strung in clear escalation: Pumm in a jeep accident, Easterling taken early in a raid by the Luftwaffe, Dromond by German artillery on Shellfire Corner, Lamplighter by a flying bomb, and now Kevin Spectro… auto, bomb, gun, V-1, and now V-2, and Pointsman has no sense but terror’s, all his skin aching, for the mounting sophistication of this, for the dialectic it seems to imply… .