But orders are to let the Brigadier pass. The old man tiptoes by, breathing fast. Mucus rattles back in his throat. He’s at the age where mucus is a daily companion, a culture of mucus among the old, mucus in a thousand manifestations, appearing in clots by total surprise on a friend’s tablecloth, rimming his breath-passages at night in hard venturi, enough to darken the outlines of dreams and send him awake, pleading… .

A voice from some cell too distant for us to locate intones: “I am blessed Metatron. I am keeper of the Secret. I am guardian of the Throne… .” In here, the more disturbing Whig excesses have been chiseled away or painted over. No point disturbing the inmates. All is neutral tones, soft draperies, Impressionist prints on the walls. Only the marble floor has been left, and under the bulbs it gleams like water. Old Pudding must negotiate half a dozen offices or anterooms before reaching his destination. It hasn’t yet been a fortnight, but there is already something of ritual to this, of iteration. Each room will hold a single unpleasantness for him: a test he must pass. He wonders if Pointsman hasn’t set these up too. Of course, of course he must… how did the young bastard ever find out? Have I been talking in m’ sleep? Have they been slipping in at night with their truth serums to—and just at the clear emergence of the thought, here is his first test tonight. In the first room: a hypodermic outfit has been left lying on a table. Very clear and shining, with the rest of the room slightly out of focus. Yes mornings I felt terribly groggy, couldn’t wake, after dreaming—were they dreams? I was talking… . But it’s all he remembers, talking while someone else was there listening… . He is shivering with fear, and his face is whiter than whitewash.

In the second antechamber is an empty red tin that held coffee. The brand name is Savarin. He understands that it means to say “Severin.” Oh, the filthy, the mocking scoundrel… . But these are not malignant puns against an intended sufferer so much as a sympathetic magic, a repetition high and low of some prevailing form (as, for instance, no sane demolition man at his evening dishwater will wash a spoon between two cups, or even between a glass and a plate, for fear of the Trembler it implies… because it’s a trembler-tongue he really holds, poised between its two fatal contacts, in fingers aching with having been so suddenly reminded)… In the third, a file drawer is left ajar, a stack of case histories partly visible, and an open copy of Krafft-Ebing. In the fourth, a human skull. His excitement grows. In the fifth, a Malacca cane. I’ve been in more wars for England than I can remember… haven’t I paid enough? Risked it all for them, time after time… . Why must they torment an old man? In the sixth chamber, hanging from the overhead, is a tattered tommy up on White Sheet Ridge, field uniform burned in Maxim holes black-rimmed as the eyes of Cléo de Mérode, his own left eye shot away, the corpse beginning to stink… no… no! an overcoat, someone’s old coat that’s all, left on a hook in the wall… but couldn’t he smell it? Now mustard gas comes washing in, into his brain with a fatal buzz as dreams will when we don’t want them, or when we are suffocating. A machine-gun on the German side sings dum diddy da da, an English weapon answers dum dum, and the night tightens coiling around his body, just before H-Hour… .