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monster’s unceasing lament.
    “Dead! Dead! And I killed her! The bloody cane! Blood everywhere! This must be hell! Yes, hell! And I deserve it! Devil’s red lacquer on her skin! The smell! The taste! Dead, my world’s all dead!”
    Crutchsump was hardly reassured by the tenor or content of the monster’s babbling speech. But somehow, she nonetheless received the distinct impression that the monster itself intended her no harm.
    Bolstered by this intuition, Crutchsump came to within inches of the monster. Tentatively, she reached out a hand to touch its arm.
    Receiving the touch, the monster raised its naked face, and ceased its lamentations.
    Braced for unwelcome intimacy, Crutchsump nevertheless reeled back at the proximity of horror.
    The creature was a eunuch, obviously castrated sometime in the past. For where its introciptor should have jutted proudly forth was a mere blob of flesh, a cruel scarification, healed ugly long ago.
    Other than that absence, however, its features were human enough, within a certain latitude: eyes, mouth, chin, ears, the whole countenance besmeared and runneled with tears.
    The monster spoke, rationally this time.
    “Help me. Please.”
    Crutchsump felt an immediate pity for the creature. She knew what it was to pass whole days in poverty, ignored by all, unspeaking.
    “Help? All right. All right, I will help you. But first, we need to cover your face.”
    Rummaging in her sack, Crutchsump pulled out the long scarf she had earlier found in the trash. After picking tangled shifflet bones off the fabric, she wound the dirty stinking cloth around the monster’s face, leaving only the creature’s eyes exposed, before knotting the fabric at the back of its neck. Not a proper caul, but good enough.
    “Now stand up. I don’t have any clothes for you, but at least your face is decent. That’s all that really matters.”
    The monster released Pirkle and stood.
    Crutchsump received another shock.
    Pegged to its groin was some kind of amorphous, bumpy tri-lobed growth, plainly a kind of goiter or cancer. Crutchsump’s pity for the monster only increased, once her initial revulsion was past.
    Luckily, the lashings of mud and muck across the monster’s whole body blurred the anomaly, as did the oncoming night. Crutchsump prayed the smelly caked-on covering would last until they reached her home.
    Now Watermilk had vanished wholly from sight, and full darkness had descended.
    “Pirkle! Lead us back to the street!”
    The wurzel had stood by in patient approbation of the whole process of making friends with the monster and rendering it decent. Now Pirkle proudly led his mistress and new companion through the maze of reeds and back to Huid Avenue.
    Once she had attained the familiar highway, Crutchsump experienced anew the unreality of her situation: side-by-side with a creature from who-knew-where in the Cosmocopia. Oh, well, having adopted this strange refugee, she could hardly abandon it now.
    “Come, let’s move.”
    Crutchsump set off down Huid Avenue at a speedy clip—as fast at least as her tired flesh could move.
    The monster followed a few paces behind.
    As they approached the first of the busier districts of Sidetrack City, the monster faltered. It seemed stunned by the number and quality and hustle-bustle of the evening citizenry, reacting possibly also to that citizenry’s startlement at the monster’s own outrageous appearance. The sight of a majestic Noetic caused to monster to freeze completely.
    Were it not for Pirkle gently nipping and chivvying with its mandibles, the creature might have remained rooted to the sidewalk for good. But as it was, Pirkle and Crutchsump managed to guide the monster to the borders of the Telerpeton slums, and thence down the short flight of crumbling stairs into Crutchsump’s apartment.
    The monster quietly slumped down on Crutchsump’s own pallet of shabby blankets and closed its eyes. Within minutes, a nasal burr accompanied its descent into