‘Do you ever feel homesick? Cold and gloom abound, soft the sea’s waves sound...’
I asked him what he thought of the pictures I brought him, but before I finished he begged; ‘Do you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ I replied.
‘Three dead men riding north’, he said.
Thus passes worldly glory.
Once I found a man in a quiet dark room, far from the world that I had come from, sitting bent on the corner of a tomb. Around him were trinkets and golden cups, shields, old intricate instruments, gilded books, a proper hoard. He couldn't turn to face me, he was so frail. He just asked quietly, ‘Have you come to rob me?’ I said that I had not. Then he thought he knew me; he might have supposed that if I hadn’t come to rob him I must be his saviour; he said he was surprised to hear my voice. I took a step closer, and saw better the glittering treasure but was unmoved by it. I had everything I could ever want in The Greenhouse downstairs. I asked whether he had prepared himself for the afterlife with this elaborate display, but he said no. ‘I just thought to arrange these oddments together... Tell me, what is it like?’ I asked him what he meant. ‘The other world’, he replied. ‘Tell me’.
‘The other world is evanescent and withered’, I said reflexively. He gasped quietly for breath.
‘Do you know’, he said with effort, ‘I have dreamed of late of ladders made of thorns’. I was surprised; ‘so have I!’ I said.
‘Ah. And did you climb them?’
‘No, but my companion did. They took pleasure from it’. He didn't respond. ‘I ran away’, I added. ‘That afternoon, I was close to the other world. I could hear its discordance’.
The crooked man just let out a long, slow sigh.
