They were talking about fortune telling, and I said I wanted to know my fortune—

“Come on, narrator, you can write down what we do.”

I fall in with Jil Punkinflake, Nectar, a pair of women named Dusty and Lilly, and a puppyalonging freshman named Keen. It’s an hour after sunset, and the country road is a livid silver scar in dark blue earth. Our hands and faces all seem to glow in the blue dark, swinging and streaking through the air. Giddy, sick-looking stars are tumbling around above us, through the empty branches. The road is gauntly lined with trees, and fallow fields striped blue silver and black behind them.

They are taking me to see one of their teachers, an immigrant or refugee who teaches at the college under an assumed name, Dr. Mellaart. They speak of him with a combination of reverent enthusiasm and a more childish excitement, as though he were only an entertainer. His group meets in a suburb outside the city, abandoned now the tributary dried. Many grand old houses there are gradually blowing away. The water never came back.

I like Lilly. She has a long jaunty stride and a face lit inside like a paper lantern. She shows me her side by side ten gauge with a garland of lacy bowels carved into the butt; entelodonts are still seen here occasionally, and respond with interest to the carrion smell of the mortuary students. Lilly looks very sporting with her gun and her little hat. Jil Punkinflake feeds his death’s-head from a glass dropper as we walk.

The house comes into view on the right, through a break in the trees. A residual violet light stands in smears of thick water on pale clay soil, trees feebly claw the air in a copse off one wing, and the bare, scattered land beyond the house is creased with a shallow, oozing stream, little more than an inky scrape in the ground. An eerie, resonant stillness pours down in an avalanche from the sky, settling about the house like an invisible plume of dust. Lilly glances up at me with iodine whited eyes.

“It used to belong to a big camphor man,” she says. “Once, his detectives caught up with a man who’d hijacked one of his cargos. They brought him here, and camphor man cut both his legs off him in one of the upstairs rooms.”

She sidles up to me and takes my arm with her free hand.

“The man broke loose somehow and got as far as the front door before they shot him dead. From that time, now and then, people have heard him thumping down the stairs without his legs.”