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The place was utterly devoid of life

Indeed, it stank of insecticide Of course, he had saturated it to save his old wooden statues, he would have had to do that I could not hear or s at all The lower flat was eh a small radio chattered the news in a bathroom

Easy to blot out that little sound On the floors above, there were ht a vision of a sedentaryto the rhythner, doo the "hated dawn" or soan foolishness Leitmotiv be damned There was another person up there, but she was too feeble to be of any concern, and I could catch only one i

I didn't care enough about any of this to bring it into loving focusI was safe in the flat, and He'd be co all these rooms with the perfume of his blood, and I'd do my damnedest not to break his neck before I'd had every drop Yes, this was the night

Dora wouldn't find out until she got home tomorroay

Who would know that I'd left his corpse here?

I went on into the living room This was tolerably clean; the room where he relaxed and read and studied and fondled his objects There were his comfortable bulky couches, fitted with heaps of pillows, and halogen laht and modern and easy to maneuver that they looked like insects poised on tables and on the floor itself, and sometimes on top of cardboard boxes

The crystal ashtray was full of butts, which confirlasses in which the liquor had long ago dried to a glaze that was now flaked like lacquer

Thin, rather frowsy drapes hung over the s,

Even this room was jammed with statues of saints¡ªa very lurid and e a chubby Child Jesus in the crook of his arin, obviously of Latin Aranite, which even withreseel

For one split second this granite h sthat I thought was following me

But I didn't hear any footsteps here There was no rip in the fabric of the world It was a statue of granite, that's all, a hideous ornaes of Hell and Heaven

Lots of books lay on the tables Ah, he did love books I mean, there were the fine ones, made of vellum and very old and all that, but current books, too, titles in philosophy and religion, current affairs, memoirs of currently popular war correspondents, even a few volumes of poetry

Mircea Eliade, history of religions in various voluift, and there, a brand-new History of God, by a wo of life¡ª

Understanding the Present, by Bryan Appleyard Hefty books But fun, my kind, anyway And the books had been handled Yes, it was his scent on these books, heavily his scent, not Dora'sHe had spent more time here than I ever realized