He has a point. The house looks much more forbidding than it did in the summer when I was taken around it. The sitting room has turned into a cavern where absent pictures have left pale rectangles on the otherwise tobacco-browned walls. The smell of nicotine I noticed before is now competing, for the place of dominant odor, with damp: I’d better check the gutters. The dining room differs from the sitting room only in that as well as the odors it contains two items—a large dining table with bulging calves, and a telephone. I place Archdeacon Frobisher’s letter on the dining room table and lift the receiver. The line has been connected, for which I suppose I must thank him, but I wonder why the phone hasn’t been installed in the study. The study had been locked on my last visit and no one could find the key. It had been mislaid by the previous incumbent, the unhappy Charles Blakemore.

But the key, I discover, has been found, and left for me in the lock of the study door. I open the door, and instantly understand why they didn’t put the phone in here.

Not only has the room not been cleared, I wonder if it’s been touched in years. A thick fuzz of cobwebs covers the single high window and the bookshelves are still loaded with dusty dilapidated volumes. The most outstanding feature of the room, however, is the collection of old newspapers. Bales of them, tied up with string, stacked one on the other everywhere on the floor. The stacks stand at varying heights, rather like a city of high-rises, nearly obscuring the heavy hardwood desk and table, which are both heaped with a mountain of unopened mail. I turn on the light—a weakling thirty-watt bulb. I can’t see into the corners of this room.

I don’t want to see into the corners of this room.

Poor Blakemore. Surely they could see he was losing his grip. Why didn’t anybody help him?