Pointsman has been talking about paranoia and the “idea of the opposite.” He has scribbled in The Book exclamation points and how trues all about the margins of Pavlov’s open letter to Janet concerning the sentiments d’emprise, and of Chapter LV, “An Attempt at a Physiological Interpretation of Obsessions and of Paranoia”—he can’t help this bit of rudeness, although the agreement among the seven owners was not to mark up The Book—it was too valuable for that sort of thing, they’d had to put in a guinea apiece. It was sold him on the sly, in the dark, during a Luftwaffe raid (most existing copies had been destroyed in their warehouse early in the Battle of Britain). Pointsman never even saw the seller’s face, the man vanishing into the hoarse auditory dawn of the all-clear, leaving the doctor and The Book, the dumb sheaf already heating up, moistening in his tight hand… yes it might have been a rare work of erotica, certainly that coarse hand-set look to the type… the crudities in phrasing, as if Dr. Horsley Gantt’s odd translation were in cipher, the plaintext listing shameful delights, criminal transports…. And how much of the pretty victim straining against her bonds does Ned Pointsman see in each dog that visits his test stands… and aren’t scalpel and probe as decorative, as fine extensions as whip and cane?

Surely the volume preceding The Book—the first Forty-one Lectures—came to him at age 28 like a mandate from the submontane Venus he could not resist: to abandon Harley Street for a journey more and more deviant, deliciously on, into a labyrinth of conditioned-reflex work in which only now, thirteen years along the clew, he’s beginning to circle back, trip across old evidence of having come that path before, here and there to confront consequences of his younger, total embrace…. But she did warn him—did she not? was he ever listening?—of the deferred payment, in its full amount. Venus and Ariadne! She seemed worth any price, the labyrinth looking, in those days, too intricate for them—the twilit pimps who made the arrangement between a version of himself, a crypto-Pointsman, and his fate… too varied, he thought then, ever to find him in. But he knows now. Too far in, preferring not to face it just yet, he knows that they only wait, stone and sure—these agents of the Syndicate she must also pay—wait in the central chamber, as he draws closer…. They own everything: Ariadne, the Minotaur, even, Pointsman fears, himself. He gets flashes of them these days, naked, athletes poised and breathing about the chamber, terrible penises up mineral as their eyes, which glisten with frost or flakes of mica, but not with lust, or for him. It’s only a job they have….