Slowly, as the shaman watched, Moses gave way to the blond mask. The pale eyes with their whorls of blackness beneath the blue smiled at him. ‘You should have stayed in the gutter to die on your own vomit. Your useless drunk’s head can’t even guess at how long and slow your death will be here. The agony will seem an age.’

‘I will die with a name. I will have existed. Your death is eternal.’

Its fury made it careless. For a moment as it roared in Calvin’s face, the diners in the restaurant looked up in alarm. Some of them thought they saw something and some of them didn’t. But for a fraction of a second, the diners in Rib Experience, Main Street, Silver, found themselves like a herd of antelope smelling a lion, and their primeval senses twitched beneath their modern skins.

It was over before the message reached their conscious brains and the result was no more than a few butts shifting uneasily in seats, a few anxious glances at something they thought they saw at the table by the window. No riots, no peasants charging the beast with pitchforks. But Calvin cheered internally as his trickery worked. He had frightened it and it had retreated.

The blond pretender realized its error and composed its human form more carefully as it stared at Calvin for an age, then stood up and left the restaurant calmly, waving to him through the window as he disappeared from view. Its coffee, of course, lay untouched. Calvin felt in his pocket for the dollars he had left and put two down on the table. He had to move, but he could not. His legs felt as though they were filled with nothing more than liquid rubber. Maybe it was right, he should have stayed in the gutter. His head and his heart were bursting, and all Calvin Bitterhand wanted to do was lie down and give up. The ice-cream couple had paid their check and were leaving now, and they walked to the door, arms around each other’s waists. Calvin watched them with dull, clouded eyes. Just before they reached the swing doors, the boy broke away from his smiling girlfriend as though he realized he’d forgotten something, and approached Calvin’s table with an energetic bound. The old Indian stared at him warily, unable to arm himself against any more trickery. The boy leaned over Calvin’s table and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Thank you. From everyone.’

Calvin gaped at the boy, unable to answer or comprehend, until the girl called her partner back with a coquettish wave and they left the diner as they had entered. Laughing and kissing.