This place, for example: the dank storage locker where I, Maximilian and the others have taken temporary refuge. Instinct instructed me that this city was a good place to stop and try once more to make contact.

*

You’ll likely recognize this regulation notebook I’m writing in. It is one of the dozens that I rescued from the ashes of your old schoolhouse. I have stained their leaves with the details of my lavish nightmares, and of the awful waking deeds I’ve committed. (A curious development: I can no longer discern which entries are recollections of my dreams, which the record of my worldly actions.)

Do you know that I carry with me a charred fragment of the lectern behind which you once preached, Professor? This blackened splinter is reticulated and warped, and perhaps this is apt. Each night I swaddle it inside my jacket, which doubles as my pillow. I do not sleep well upon it.

Sometimes my fitful slumber is banished by the sound of a school bell. Although I am aware that it is only a passing siren or a car horn or a distant scream, I still instinctively bolt up, thrilled by the possibility that your class is once again in session, that you have returned with fresh teachings from the perimeter.

Perhaps—may I be forgiven for any hubris—I can teach you some fresh lessons as well. For example, how you would have relished the trip Maximilian, his entourage, and I made to a neglected estuary in that degenerate little town north of the border. There, under a shawl of polluted cumuli, I hearkened to your tales of the great plague ships that had once damned these shores, how that fleet had emerged from a noxious mist; gliding gracefully into port, their rudders manipulated by a fell spirit far beyond mankind’s grasp. You’d said their hulls had been brittle wormwood, their sails the pelts of gods long crucified and flayed, these galleons that crept into port and let their cargo of vermin come vomiting out. Rat backs seething with infected tics, their innards black with disease, these creatures that scuttled into every nook of the city, plopping toxic droppings into the grains, tenderly nibbling on slumbering flesh.

I did what I could to recreate and reify this myth, Professor, using a special white powder I’d concocted. I watched the Normals wither inside their pathetic little houses, crumpling like puppets with clipped strings. I of course was unaffected, having donned my proper vestments.

If only you’d been there with me to bask in these delights.

*

Maximilian has set up his Observatory in another locker a few doors down from mine. Though he was never part of your class, I always believed he was sympathetic to our cause. The wedding of his technical prowess with my instincts resulted in what might be the best tool a cruddy human has to follow your spectral trail, Professor: the Observatory.