The general furniture of the room was profuse, antique, and—like the chairs upon which Crockett and I were seated—comfortless in the extreme. In short, the entire chamber created a distinct impression of musty, decaying grandeur—of former opulence and grace now deteriorated into stern, grim, and irredeemable shabbiness.

Asher himself created a similar impression: that of a being raised in an atmosphere of luxury and refinement who had—through those reversals of fortune so sadly endemic to our human lot—been reduced to a life of extreme and even abject degradation. Tall, gaunt, and exceedingly unwholesome in appearance, he was garbed in a once-fashionable—though long-obsolete—style: threadbare knee breeches, a yellow-stained linen shirt with ruffled front, and a dusty swallow-tailed coat with badly frayed cuffs.

His age was nearly impossible to determine, though I inferred—from the little I knew of his family history—that he could not be much older than two-score-and-five. But so bloodless—so wan—so dreadfully wizened—was his countenance that he might have been a personage of sixty or eighty—or, indeed, an embalmed and exsanguinated corpse that had somehow regained the power of animation. Beneath the white and vellum-like surface of his visage, the facial bones protruded with an almost skeletal sharpness and clarity. His thinning, fine-textured hair hung in limp, greasy strands to the level of his shoulders, and was of such an inordinate blondness as to appear almost white. Beneath his broad, jutting brow, his sunken eyes shone with a strange, slightly hysterical lustre; and when he spoke, a set of moldering, peculiarly sharp and rodent-like teeth were visible behind his pale and flaking lips.

Most disconcerting of all, however, were the incessant movements of his delicate, long-fingered hands, which rubbed each other in a constant scrubbing motion, not unlike the grotesquely fastidious gestures of the Musca domestica, or common housefly.

“So,” croaked this singular individual as he turned his attention on my companion. “You are the celebrated Colonel David Crockett.”

“I am for a fact,” the latter replied. “And who might you be, if it ain’t too bold to ask?”

“Roger Asher—at your service,” said the other with a slight bow, confirming the identity I had already deduced. Straightening up again, he scrutinized the seated frontiersman with a long, appraising look in which I perceived more than a hint of amused curiosity and condescension.

“Were my dear sister, Marilynne, not so severely indisposed, she would be most honored—indeed, most thrilled—to meet you, Colonel Crockett,” said Asher in a tone that conveyed the same inexplicably derisive attitude as his expression. “For—of the few remaining pleasures available to her—the reading of your most remarkable, most unbelievable adventures, as reported in the monthly almanacs published in your name, is by far the foremost.”