We follow the line to a building with steps going down to the river. An adjacent tree is growing down through the roof and the long naked branches white as bones bore into the shelves. The pungent odor of decaying paper blends with the usual musty neglect smell, and I hear mice flit along the walls. With Jil Punkinflake’s scalpel I cut along a thickly embossed leather membrane covered with golden curlicues and letters stretched all out of shape, which has grown over the shelves here. Most of the shelves are wrapped up like sleeping bats in folds of thick binding leather. I make a number of lateral cuts, and immediately the pages begin to dribble out onto the floor.

“Catch them! Don’t let them touch the ground!”

Jil Punkinflake darts back and forth snatching pages out of the air, starting to laugh a little, and I am, with mounting silliness, slashing at this groaning leather membrane. The leaves sail out, and Jil Punkinflake’s deft hands catch them.

“All right now,” I say, “Give me those pages.”

I carry them outside and hold them out, let the wind rattle them in my hand. Then I shove them into my satchel.

“This will take a little time.”

I write up the now single screed on a roll of fine creamy paper, with a pen that audibly cuts the ink into the fibres, and bind that paper up with black crepe. That shows a bit of flair. I give this to Jil Punkinflake by the starlight of early that morning, and he takes it in his outstretched hand, then inbrings his hand holding the roll, gazing down at it as though it were an infant.

The mist lifts and lowers; it does this languid dance dreamily over the dank earth and lifts long shoots, limp and elastic, above its level, and I watch a slender probe trailing off and losing itself in the air in front of me. The body of the mist forgets and expends this pinch of its stuff without noticing it; before it vanishes, it acquires a sort of demeanor, like something not far short of a tranquil personality.

The kinked wand of mist is turning invisible and is reflected in the steelly bus of a tiny concave mirror in a bronze frame, and what I had taken for small green leaves nearly swallowed up in black I now see is a dark and green patterned sheet of wallpaper ... on the wall ... on which hangs the mirror ... in front of which I stand ... but in which I don’t appear.