Nodnod. "And you were at that one performance of the King in Yellow, right?"

"Yes." ...what even is her angle here.

More scribbling! "Right. Cool. --completely unrelatedly, did you find out anything else by batting your eyelashes at the police station?"

"The police have very little idea what exactly happened at the scene, other than a whistle being involved. Also Roby was at a town that had some other suspicious deaths, but-- there's nothing but gut feeling linking those two at the moment. --But mostly it was spooky space whistles. Spooky retroactively dream-haunting space whistles."

"Which town?"

"Clare Melford, Suffolk."

She writes this down. "Thank you. --I don't have more weird questions. Sorry about how incoherent that probably was from the outside."

"I asked you deliberately because this is much more your wheelhouse than mine. I didn't expect it to make perfect sense to me."

That night, Oscar has a dream.

He is hunting. Scrub gorse, heather, and granite spread out to the horizon. He remembers the story of a man lost on these moors. As the sun fell, and he had resigned himself to sleeping out in the cold, he came across a lovely girl who was out hunting with falcons. She spoke Old Breton. He went with her to her manor house and quickly fell in love with her. In the morning, as he sat with her in the garden, he was bitten by a viper. He swooned and when he woke all that was there was her grave — it said she died in her youth a hundred years ago, for the love of a man of his name. In his mind’s eye Oscar sees images from this tale: the pale triangle of her face, the ivied stone of her grave, and her falconer, Hastur — he sees him too and wishes he did not, for Oscar knows what he heralds. As in the story the light is almost gone and Oscar settles down on his haunches, knowing he must spend the night out here. He watches as the sun goes out like a snuffed candle and the world changes to pitch black. He lies down to sleep. But just as he is drifting off he hears the bells.

When he arrives at work Oscar discovers a Sal lurking among the shelves.

"Sal-- good to see you. Something you wanted to talk about, or should I leave you to it?"

He reluctantly nods. "I was wondering how much headway you'd made into Der Wanderer."

"I finished it."

".........Oh. How was it? Anything particularly compelling? Or disturbing, as it were?"

"I don't think you should read it."

"You know, I only skimmed it and I was considering saying the same to you."

"...I thought I'd feel better after I slept but it hasn't worn off."

"That's quite an effect. ...How did it make you feel, exactly?"

"I'm not thinking straight, Sal. I have this thought like-- I feel like I could see the future. Or send someone a vision of it. Like Roby and William Way, is how it feels in my head."

"What? How? Like it feels like you know what you would have to do to cause that, or like you know if you just set your mind to it...?"

"If I set my mind to it."

Oh, this is dangerous. This is playing with fire. Sal should not be doing this. "Well, you could try to give me a vision right now and if it doesn't work it'll help snap you out of it."

"I don't need you to help me check whether I'm delusional. I know it's not true. I just can't make the feeling go away."

"I don't think you're delusional. I just know that sometimes it settles my stomach if I can see in front of me that the impossible thing I'm ruminating on isn't happening."

"...I told you because I know you're a nice kid. Understand I don't want this getting out to people."