She worked the Prime Time case open and removed the cassette. She eyed the television on its stand, the long black box on the stand’s lower shelf—eyed them with trepidation. She bent down. Pressed the TV button. The picture popped on instantly. This was encouraging. A commentator in a light blue suit started speaking to her about rugby. She pressed the channel selector. Ein, zwei, drei, fier, funf. Funf—that’s what the manual had recommended. But the commentator in the blue suit reappeared on the screen. Why should this be so? Whatever could it signify? She was filled with the familiar sense of misgiving she usually felt just before a machine did something really ghastly.

Nonetheless, grunting with the effort, she bent lower. Touched the cassette to the flap on the box.

To her alarm, the beast seemed to seize the thing right out of her hand and swallow it.

“Crikey,” she said, straightening.

But the hours of study had not gone to waste. For the blue-suited rugby commentator now winked into jade nothingness.

And a moment later—as Harper lowered herself painfully onto the edge of Bernard’s bed, as she propped her stick against the floor, as she folded her hands on top of the dragon, and rested her chin on the back of her hands—Spectre began to unroll on the screen before her.

15

Bernard, meanwhile, had begun to recite poetry. It was all that stood between him and the mouth of madness.

His progressive schoolmasters, in their enlightened kindliness, had never forced him to commit much verse to memory. You can always look it up, they told him—which shows how little they knew.

Harper, on the other hand, had drilled him with the stuff from his youngest years. “These are fragments,” she had intoned, “which you may one day shore against your ruins.” He had not really understood what she was telling him—till now.

Because in ruins he surely was. Convulsing in the blackness. Shivering against the confines of his stone enclosure. Vomit- and piss-covered. Feverish. Blind. Hour after hour after hour. Babbling insanely when his mind drifted. And when his mind cleared, inhabited by a horror that made him feel as if a bomb were going off inside him and he had no room to explode. Hour after hour.

Dying. He was sure he was dying now. He could not breathe. He felt as if his organs were mired in sludge. He was fading almost willfully from a consciousness that had become abhorrent to him. The invisible death’s head beside him stared and grinned. Hour after hour.

And so, at last, with all the courage he had left, he began to recite.

It was one of those situations—it’s remarkable how many of them there are, really—when only William Blake would do.