Ambrosio continues this obscene searching for some time, shuffling about the room in confusion. De Flunkl turns to Harold.

‘Why do you not leave, too?’ he asks, his voice shaking. ‘You want to. Men are talking here; it must be unpleasurable to you.’

Harold, his eyes still on the sacks of bodies in the corner, leans against the cool, damp wall. The big husk of a man scratches his beard, puts his hands behind his back, slouches. The tiredness that has so recently waylaid him seems to have gone off him.

‘I want to bear witness to your descent into hell,’ he replies.

The heaviness of the room is great, and its death is close, but Harold welcomes its death as he would welcome any summer’s rain.

Outside the sun is even hotter after William’s brief sojourn indoors, and he is dizzy like some new thing born into the world. His pupils, in a silent scream of pain, shrink to stifle the shine pouring into him. Turning twice, he is completely lost, his brain burning and his hand over his forehead, little lazy explosions of dust set off by his bootsteps on the dried earth. There is no one in sight but Saint John, who has taken off his tunic and is playing by the fountain in the dirt with the dead mare’s intestines, wrapping them round his chest like chains.

All around William is the corpse of Nobber. Without exception, the small crooked doors are closed and the windows blocked. It is a slouched, small street, irregular and decomposing. Some houses have breath in them, surely, but these houses are closed oysters.

He did not notice the town before as he was immediately distracted by Mary, and then Alannah, but now looking at the houses he sees that they emit nothing. They are blank; they must be pried open. Happily would he bloody his fingernails wrenching open a door to see its inner life, but he knows inside there would only be grey death, or, at best, a huddled mass of the infectious. They, too, would resemble the single, grey beating muscle that is the stuck centre of an oyster, thoughtless, senseless, uncomprehending.

The sickness, he knows, is only what is not. The sickness is absence; it has no deeper manifestation than the nothing before him; though there is much fanfare at its passing through, once it leaves nothing remains in its wake.