He led me away to the attic, clambering through a dismal hatch and throwing down a rickety ladder for me to struggle up after him. Nat’s parents had told me of his nocturnal ramblings in this uppermost chamber. For—unlike the cellar—they knew about his love for this particular place.

He lit several candles. He seemed more active than I had ever seen him before. The ancient beams played off one another at the most curious angles, apparently not at all conducive to sound roof construction, although their age and proven architectural durability argued otherwise.

Nat beckoned me from another hiding place of his, a stubby gable with miniature black brickwork. From a variety of nasty dark hooks hung several skeletons, of human children, I imagined. I was casually informed that they had been excavated during the various alterations that the little house had undergone in the eighteenth century. They had not been reburied, for at the time the local graveyard had fallen prey to subterranean rivers. It was felt that the old bones, for even then they were very aged, should not come to rest outside of the parish. They had therefore been sealed in the attic and forgotten. Also dangling from a hook, swinging menacingly in a gentle aught, was the jaw-bone with which Nat had sought to take his own life. Bizarrely, it looked as if it had been sterilised.

Strewn about this cramped compartment were several other bones, some so decayed as to be mere piles of dust. In a corner, part obscured by shadow, lay something that resembled an Egyptian mummified baby, though by now I felt that I could not be shocked by anything that Nat might have in store for me. He was most gleeful at the way he had turned the tables on me; effectively reversing, at least temporarily, our relationship. He was the possessor of knowledge, albeit totally quack and charlatan, and I was the bewildered wretch in need of enlightenment.

I made an appointment to see Nat a few days hence. I was greatly relieved to escape the mad charnel house. I cancelled all evening engagements and spent the rest of the day practicing my violin for this month’s chamber ensemble concert, in an effort to relax. That place should be declared unfit for human habitation, or hermetically sealed and opened as a black museum.

I realise I have totally failed to take into account the effect of environment in the case of Nathaniel Snoxell. The eldritch house, in which he lives, would fully explain his doom-laden feelings. Indeed, this aspect of his character is so firmly entrenched that he would cease to be ‘Nat’ without it. His younger brother is only superficially influenced by the morbidity of the house. Their elder brother is entirely untroubled by it, being obsessed by things mechanical and sexual. Indeed, he is so utterly different to the other two that when I mentioned this to his mother, she became agitated as if I was questioning the young man’s parentage.