The woman led him up the stairs. He was carrying his own things now. He lagged behind her. It was clear she did not want him there, that she had only agreed because the police had asked her. She let him into a room. There was a candle stub on the wooden bed-head, fixed there in its own wax. She lit it for him and left him. He sat on the bed feeling his skull. He started to shake and gripped his own arms, willing it to stop. When it did, or when it was less, he put the fiddle case on the blanket beside him and opened it. The instrument appeared whole, though he would need daylight to tell if the wood was cracked. He opened his bag, rummaged. The writing case was there, and the pistol, though the gunsmith’s parcel was not. He closed it, pushed it under the bed. He thought he should take off his boots, then remembered. He got beneath the blanket. The room was cold, as if the building had a season all its own, untouched by May.

He put the candle out with the flat of his palm. The room folded around him, darkness like the heaping of cinders, grey ash. He started to whisper the Lord’s Prayer but broke off at “forgive us our trespasses” to listen to the sounds from the room next door. A rhythmic tapping against the partition wall, a woman’s sighs, a man’s sighs, a woman’s cries, a man’s goading. The rhythm built, became a crazy drumming on the wall. The wet slap of flesh on flesh. The woman’s cries were delirious, comical, a kind of false singing. In the dark, he filled his chest with air, swelled his lungs, ignoring the pain, and let out a roar, a sound bigger than himself: “ENOUGH!”

After a moment of utter silence the house roared back at him.

* * *

When he woke it was raining. The sound of it, arriving in gusts against the window glass, was like a cool hand on a wound. He listened to it, closely, then he slept again, woke definitively and tried to sit up. He couldn’t—certainly not in a single movement. He shifted, tested, negotiated with those parts of himself that were most raw, most intolerant of any disturbance. Eventually he got his legs out of the bed. That was something. He wiped the gum from his eyes, peered at the room, its collection of facts. The night before began to reassemble itself. The girl with the freckles, the blue orange, the feel of his fist against a man’s neck, the new police. He looked round for some water. There was none. He looked for a mirror but there was no mirror either. He looked for his boots and cursed himself.