But I do have a confession. Lord knows I have long experience of the face you show to the world – I particularly recall the postcards you sent me from the merchantman Dog Shark, with their minutely described weather conditions, knots made, distances traversed, and courses corrected, followed by an abrupt signature – but I am not unaffected by it. Give me an ear to bend and I’ll talk until the sun comes up, step out to water the back alley, and if anyone is left in the room when I get back, set sail for noon. But I’m continually thrown off course by your dogged willingness to take down any damned thing I say without showing the slightest interest in any part of it. You aspire to be a recording machine, Jake, but you are a man. There is a consciousness behind the moving pencil. You could not possibly be as indifferent as you pretend.

– I collect stories, Gus.

Not souls? Are you sure the people of Northangle who contribute to that forlorn handful of loose-leaf binders on those shelves over there haven’t left a little more of themselves behind than they intended to when they sat in your story-telling chair? Are you eating these people up, story by story? Thou, devourer of souls?

– I just collect the stories. I don’t know what the tellers leave behind.

Aw, Jake, I was just talking. But I thank you for the considered reply. And I can tell you what I’m hoping to leave behind. All of it. I want every last scrap of this story out of my mind and onto your pages, forever. If that constitutes the bulk of my soul, or whatever it is, so be it.