I pushed back the chair and rose to my feet. “I have to be alone now,” I said. “This is all simply too much. I have to wander out there, be alone.… I don’t know what I’ll do. We have several hours more to talk about it. I want to be alone. You should go on to New York, that’s certain. All of you should go. And you should fight this Voice with all your power. As for me, I don’t know.”

Sevraine rose and came around the table and took me by the arm.

“All right then,” she said. “You go wandering if you must. But I have something that might help you with your meditations, something I arranged especially for you.”

She led me out of the room and down a long passage that was covered in soft glittering gold like so much of what I’d already seen. But soon another cruder and unadorned passage led us away from this one and down a long steep rock-cut stairs.

It seemed we were in a labyrinth. And I caught the scent of human beings.

We came finally to a long ramp that led into a small room illuminated only by a couple of thick candles on ledges, and there beyond a wall of iron bars stood a golden-skinned human being staring at me out of the shadows with bitter furious black eyes.

The scent was overpowering, delicious, almost irresistible.

The man began to shake the bars with all his strength and rail at Sevraine in the most vulgar and coarse French I’d ever heard. He hurled one threat after another at her of confederates who would come to rip her limb from limb and visit every erotic abomination on her that he could conceive.

He swore his “brothers” would never let anyone live who had done harm to him, that she didn’t know what she had done to herself, and so forth and so on, round now in circles, damning her under the worst words ever created in any language to denounce a female being.

I was fascinated. It had been a long time since I’d encountered anyone so totally given over to evil, and so blatant in his fury. The smell of the sea came off his filthy dungarees and his sweat-soaked denim shirt, and I saw scars cut into his face and into his right arm that had hardened into seams of pure white flesh.

Behind me a heavy door was closed.

The creature and I were alone. I saw the key to his cell on a hook to the right of the gate that held him back, and I took it down while he went on raving and cursing, and I turned it slowly in the lock.

He flung the gate back immediately and lunged at me, his hands moving to my throat.