He could remember—not which day, but the way the day felt—when he had read the story first. The palmy Santa Monica breezes, smelling of oranges and the sea. The lush greenery at his window, and the white-washed wall of his neighbor’s house, the ruddy slate of its roof. Birds were twittering. Bees were humming among the oversized flowers whose names he didn’t know. He could hear the plash of someone swimming in his backyard pool. His mother. And he lay alone, in his room, on his bed. Little California Rick in shorts and T-shirt. With the Aurora monster models on their shelves above him staring benignly down. Frankenstein, Godzilla, the Creature from the Black Lagoon with genuine green scales. Dracula, on whose black plastic chin he had hand-painted a line of red. And he held the book of ghost stories on his stomach. Spooks and Phantoms. The book his father had given him, resigned to the fact that the boy would read it with more pleasure than his gifts of westerns, Jack Schaefer, Louis L’amour. Young Richard had lain in the whitewashed California springtime, and his mind had gone off into the autumn of Victorian England. Off into the haunted house with Neville and Quentin. Off to the abbey ruin, this very ruin, here. He had loved that story, loved it.

And it had never really occurred to him to wonder why. What was it about himself that was so willing to connect with a setting and a situation that were different from everything he actually knew? He had never produced a picture that wasn’t full of the Gothic, the Victorian, the whole “Black Annie” aura. And why? He couldn’t help but wonder about it now, now that he was standing here.

Because the rising medieval stone of wall, the leaning graves—even the threatening weather—the whole classic ghost story scene—were truly as familiar to him as if he had been here a million times. They were as familiar to him as a celebrity’s face, as if they slotted in—thock—to some archetypal jigsaw emptiness in his mind. They were that familiar—and, at the same time, he had never felt like such an alien, like such a stranger in a strange land.

What the hell was he doing here anyway, so far from home? Who were these people around him? Harper, Bernard, Sir Michael. Sophia. What the hell was he doing involved in all their lives? Making such a mess of them? He was dying, for Christ’s sake. He should be with people he knew. With pals who would cluck over his predicament, and doctors who would tell him things that seemed to make sense. In a world he knew, really knew. Not like this one, which he’d only appropriated as a child, which he’d only spent his life reinventing.