I was quickly running out of things to say about my own time in the channel, the longer my absence from my landlord went on. The first stirrings of what later became perfectly clear to me were happening in those febrile days of solitude and mental squall: Mr. Blud was my book’s muse. Without him, the mill wheel did not turn, but clung stubbornly in place as if rusted by barnacles. I was loath to give the impression of rushing back to use the library when my host had seemed so very ill on my last visit, lest it look rude. But at the same time, my brain was clawing ceaselessly against its cranial cage with its desire to know more about William Alexander Dubose and his doomed daughter.

I paced the living room floor of my cottage, my walking stick in hand, reveling in the solid thunk it made against the deeply-scarred hardwoods. I do not know how long I was engaged in this activity, although I am confident that on soft ground I would have long since been walking in a rut of my own creation. I finally stopped in order to see the remains of the day outside draining from the round-topped windows like the color from a condemned man’s face when the gallows came-a- calling. It must have been nigh on an hour I stood there in reverie, but in remembrance it was but a few moments, the darkness descending rapidly before my eyes. It was with the absolute last dregs of daylight, released from my stupor, that I happened to look down at the path I had been wearing on the floor and noticed something I never had before.

I dropped to my knees abruptly, dropping my walking stick with an alarming clatter. There was a lone needle from a fir tree on the floor, or rather in the floor as I realized when I tried to pinch it between my fingers to pick up. The floor had no doubt been lacquered many times over after...whatever had so damaged it, in order to make it safe for walking. Some of the gouges in the floor were deep enough to stub a toe or catch a nasty splinter had they not been chemically smoothed over. It was in this chrysalis of floor varnish that the needle had been caught. I sat down on the floor and looked at it. There were no trees near the cottage. I’d been truthful with Riven about that much; nothing grew nearby in the rocky outcroppings save moss and the occasional weed. No, someone had brought this with them to the cottage on their boot bottom likely.

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It was such a small thing, the needle. It oughtn’t have bothered me at all. Reader, I cannot in good conscience give myself credit for foresight, yet something ineffable told me this needle was a stowaway from something shameful and hidden, and that all its brothers and sisters had been carefully swept away before the scene was sealed off forever. My fire was banked low and the embers glowed, casting my unmoving shadow across the room as I stared, a man possessed by something infinitely more powerful than fairytale ghosts and demons. I was possessed of an idea, an idea that would not let me go no matter how I tried to slither from its grasp. When I could tear myself away, I returned to my restless pacing, more determined than ever that the next day I would return to Mr. Blud’s, invited or not, and camp in the library for some proper research.

With my priorities for the next day so clear, it would have been wise to simply go to bed and wake up with a fresh mind for work the next day. But I could not sleep. All night I paced, my walking stick sounding the alarm of my unrest thunk thunk thunk. It was hardly the first time a writing project kept me up at night, but I was a novelist, a fairly tame occupation in comparison to what then took hold of me, which was a powerful obsession with a single, real individual. In my mind, I was desperate to learn more about Dubose. I was so certain that he was the key to my book about the channel, the thing that would frame the whole story, the single lifethread. But as was so often the case those months I spent on the channel, I was wrong. You see, my obsession was misplaced, though it took me where I needed to go in its own ponderous way. I was indeed on a collision course with a singularly haunted man who lived on the channel, a man with a daughter who meant more to him than anything else in the world. It just wasn’t the man I imagined.