I felt so utterly miserable. "Dear God, you're haunting me," I said. "And I'm a coward in my soul! A coward. Why did you say that strange name? I don't want to know. No, don't tell me—This is enough for me. I'm leaving. You can haunt this bar till doomsday if you want. Get some righteous individual to talk to you."

"Listen to me," he said. "You love me. You picked me. All I want to do is fill in the details."

"I'll take care of Dora, somehow or other, I'll figure some way to help her, I'll do something. And I'll take care of all the relics, I'll get them out of there and into a safe place and hold on to them for Dora, until she feels she can accept them."

"Yes!"

"Okay, let me go."

"I'm not holding you," he said.

Yes, I did love him. I did want to look at him. I did want him to tell me everything, every last little detail! I reached out and touched his hand. Not alive. Not human flesh.

Something with vitality, however. Something burning and exciting.

He merely smiled.

He reached across with his right hand and clamped his fingers around my right wrist and drew near. I could feel his hair touching my forehead, teasing my skin, just a loose wisp of hair. Big dark eyes looking at me.

"Listen to me," he said again. Scentless breath.

"Yes... ."

He started talking to me in a low, rushed voice. He began to tell me the tale.

Chapter Four

The point is, Old Captain was a smuggler, a collector. I spent years with him. My mother had sent me to Andover, then brought me home, couldn't live without me; I went to Jesuit, I didn't belong with anyone or anywhere, and maybe Old Captain was the perfect person. But Wynken de Wilde, that started with Old Captain and the antiques he sold through the Quarter, usually small, portable things.

"And I'll tell you right now, Wynken de Wilde amounts to nothing, absolutely nothing, except a dream I had once, a very perverse plan. I mean my lifelong passion—aside from Dora—has been Wynken de Wilde, but if you don't care about him after this conversation, no one will. Dora does not."

"What was this Wynken de Wilde all about?"

"Art, of course. Beauty. But I got it mixed up in my head when I was seventeen that I was going to start a new religion, a cult—free love, give to the poor, raise one's hand against no one, you know, a sort of fornicating Amish community. This was of course 1964, the time of the flower children, marijuana, Bob Dylan seeming to be singing all the time about ethics and charity, and I wanted a new Brethren of the Common Life, one in tune with modern sexual values. Do you know who the Brethren were?"

"Yes, popular mysticism, late Middle Ages, that anyone could know God."

"Yes! Ah, that you know such a thing."