He busied himself with a computer journal swarming with equations, and I turned to the book my aunt had most recently lent me, a novel by Bulgakov. While I wasn’t sure I grasped every reference, let alone the whole of its explosion of ideas, I found its unbridled inventiveness exhilarating, and looked forward to the reappearance of Behemoth the cat, surely a demonic familiar. The edition used one of Thelma’s paintings on the cover, a glade where the shape of every tree seemed mysteriously symbolic and the solitary androgynous figure in a robe decorated with sigils could just as well have been Margarita as the Master. I might have asked my aunt what she’d had in mind while painting, but I sensed she didn’t want to talk. I could have thought she’d tried to use her research in the almanac as an excuse to shut herself in the studio upstairs.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have read Bulgakov so close to bedtime. In bed I imagined Behemoth taking even more shapes than he did in the novel. The prospect kept me awake, and so did my uncle’s inventive succession of snores. At some point I left all this behind, and wakened to hear my aunt and uncle murmuring in their room. No, the voice was just my aunt’s, and my uncle’s renewed snores weren’t an answer. They weren’t even in the same room. My aunt was talking in the studio, to herself or to her work, unless she was on the phone. I couldn’t make out a word, and reverted to sleep.

The next time I awoke the house was quiet except for a snorting mutter from the other bedroom. I sneaked to the toilet for a discreet pee, having closed the door as quietly as I could. Embarrassment at being overheard made me aim my output at the porcelain above the pool. Having flushed the toilet, an action that didn’t bother me as much, I was padding back to my room when I noticed that the door to the studio was open wide enough to let me see part of the view beyond the window. Distant treetops caught the dawn, and as the light advanced through the forest I glimpsed an odd illusion of a figure crouching among the highest branches of a tree as though it was poised to leap in the direction of the house. Surely it was composed of wood and foliage, but I was about to edge the door wider when I heard my aunt mumble and an equally protesting creak of the bed. I retreated to my room so fast that I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t seen the shape launch itself into the next tree like a squirrel.