Jil Punkinflake hops up on a sawhorse, and leaning forward looking into my eyes he tells me the story of a prodigy who sat in the grass by the wayside of the capital road in a shapeless black garment of many different materials and dashed off in the dust of the road immaculate alphabets on the spot, even sometimes for every single passer by. People looked down at the rows of letters and saw so much of themselves they broke down then and there, or instantly decorporated. One is better advised to be alone when one first looks on one’s own alphabet, even those specifically designed to conceal the nature of the buyer from himself always show too much in showing too frankly this desire to hide in the letters.

Suddenly a look of detestation, such as I’d never imagined he could be capable of, let alone see myself, creases his face; his eyes darken and he hops down from the sawhorse. It’s as if his expression were being corrupted by the effect of a corrosive poison.

He is looking past me—I follow his eyes, I see the crowd, the stalls, the buildings, but I don’t know what, among these things, he is glaring at so fixedly. He touches my arm, and pulls me a little way aside, into the mouth of a narrow alley, still looking beyond me.

“What is it?” I ask. I must have been asking that for a while already.

Jil Punkinflake is actually panting with emotion, and his grip on my arm is uncomfortably firm. I begin to get alarmed, and try again to align my gaze with his. Now I’m sure—a young woman, or a girl, maybe twelve years old, oblivious, composed, her head flowing with dense, long dark hair, is walking past us. She looks neither right nor left, but down toward the street, and people seem unconsciously to recoil from her. Some glower, but most simply move out of her way without apparently being aware of her at all. She is dressed in a white nightgown, and, though it hangs still and straight from her shoulders, it seems to undulate, and now she seems older than she had at first.

“A sleepwalker?” I ask, but I get no answer.

As she passes nearest to us, I feel something hit me, like the blow of a loud sound, that seems to fracture something in my chest. I feel the fracture’s sick edges, and I want to gasp. The feeling dims as she passes, dwindling away down the street. I feel as though my life somehow adheres to her, and that it dwindles with her as she goes, and that I am helpless ...

Now I improve.

Jil Punkinflake watches her pass with an ugly and uncharacteristic look of loathing.

“Who was that? You seemed to know her ...”

“That,” he says as though it cost him pain, “was a dreamer.”

“A sleepwalker?”

His eyes close like lowering blinds; his face is rigid. His teeth are almost chattering.