We arrive at last. Or rather, we get close. Then a barrier stops us, a grate of wrist-thick, vertical bars set wide enough apart to admit an arm and shoulder but little more than that. A bright light, oddly flat and lifeless, throws the grate’s shadow across our approaching forms. I gesture to Boswell to set our lamp down on the ground, then squeeze my stomach against the bars; lean my cheek on their rusty cold. Our position is such that I can see but a small part of the space before us: a cavern, a worktable, the slender neck and pinned-up hair of Lady Naylor. Her torso and legs are hidden by the backrest of her armchair and even her head is more than half obscured by a steel girder that supports the ceiling midway between her and us. The table next to her is laden with instruments and beakers, most prominently the bulbous form of a glass jug heavy with tar. At the far end of the table, in a clear line of sight, is the hunched form of a man tending to a child. The man is nondescript: a greengrocer with a sloping neck; the cheeks fleshy and florid. The child is foreign, brown-skinned, strapped to its chair. Only the head is visible, rises above the tabletop to the base of the neck. Captain van Huysmans’s demon is looking poorly; his mouth wide open, tufts of hair coming loose above the ear. It is as though he is moulting, a new boy being born out of his sweat and pain.

ф

We do not even attempt to break down the grating. Its ends are cemented straight into ceiling and floor. It would take an hour and a pickax to get us through. Thus there is only one thing to be done. Boswell knows it too. When I turn to look at him he has already cocked his rifle.

“Where do I shoot?” he asks. He is speaking softly but there is in his voice a note of expectation.

“Mother,” the marionette-boy says. “Punish Mother.”

He sounds like a child wheedling for a sweet; points with a finger broken at the knuckle, bending sideways where a finger must not bend.

“Mother. Mama. Now, now, now!”

His tongue in Boswell’s ear.

But Boswell hesitates. “Difficult shot,” he says at last. “Girder’s in the way.” And, after a pause: “How about the child?”