CHORUS: You think the creature in the dark is born of your ambition? After I’ve just constructed a perfectly lovely metaphor about your mind being a gristmill of bloody evil? A villain you may be, but a lunatic you are most assuredly.

“Come with me, into the night, Chorus. Stay close. Comfort me.”

CHORUS: And thus the knave did think a humble narrator dim-witted enough to serve as decoy for the creature. Alas, as was most often the case, Iago was in thought, intention, and execution deeply fucking wrong, and off he went to find the fair Emilia.

The rowboat that had seemed absolutely spacious when Jessica and I were rowing it in suddenly seemed small and inadequate with Drool’s hulking form at the oars. It did not help that the lummox could not swim and so flinched at every wave. I’d had him row several hundred yards out from the breakwater to avoid the attention of the patrol, so we sat, pretending to be fishermen, I suppose, that is, sitting in a boat looking at the water, waiting for something to break the bloody boredom.

“Jessica are a fit bit of stuff, yeah?” said Drool.

“A half hour ago you thought she was a boy, now she’s fit?”

“You have a go at her, Pocket?”

“No, I am still bereft from the loss of Cordelia, and Jessica is engaged, although that may be a bit of a false promise, but I have not had a go at her.”

“ ’Cause Lorenzo would be cross with you?”

“No, because I have promised the ghost of Cordelia.”

“I shagged a ghost once. It were all right, until I got scared. You have a go at her?”

“No, I didn’t have a go at her. I’ve been dead. Not really dead, but unwell. Injured. Betrayed, disparaged, much abused, and somewhat plagued by a sable-colored melancholy.”

“Aye, she sounds fit. You have a go at Sable’s Melon Jolly?”