“I miscalculated. I should have anticipated the dog. That’s all that’s bothering me.”

But it wasn’t, not quite. There was also this feeling, strange and yet remembered. He was tired. It had been a very long time since he had felt so.

“You can never give a perfect death. There will always be suffering.”

Yes, that was true. And even after all these years he did not like to inflict suffering. But it shouldn’t weigh on him like this. Feeding was supposed to make you feel vital and alive.

This could only be a passing phase, the result of his having been thrown off-balance by the dog. He decided to dismiss it from his mind. He turned to the window, stared out.

The night was magnificent. He had always seen a great truth in the dark, a kind of joy, something forgiving of such violence as his. Thinking of it brought a welcome sense of justification.

The lights of towns came and went. John felt deeply in love with it all. He allowed himself a little of the pleasure of the kill, reflecting how he was fundamentally happy in his life.

Before he quite realized it his eyes had closed. The humming of the car began to mingle with the voices of memory, distant memory.

His eyes snapped open. This was not normal. He opened the sun roof to let in some cool air. The pattern of their lives was extremely regular. You slept six out of twenty-four hours, and it came upon you about four hours after you ate.

What, then, was this?

He was drifting, half-asleep, into a very pleasant sensation, his mind possessed by a soft sigh of remembrance, of dream . . .

For a flash it was as if he were in an enormous, cold room lit with candles, a fire crackling in the grate. He was surprised. He had not thought of the ancestral home of the Blaylocks since he had left England. And yet now he remembered his own bedroom so well, the incessant dampness, the grandeur, the familiarity.

Miriam was as beautiful now as she had been then. He would have touched her, held her, but she did not like to be disturbed while she was driving.

He remembered the tall windows of his room with their view of the North Yorks Moors, where gypsy fires flickered at night. The faces and voices of the past flooded into his consciousness. Drowsily, he watched the strange modern landscape pass the car, the endless lights, the cramped, scruffy little houses. How alone he was in this world.