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of the beast and did not care to look at it.
    No, he’d rather look out the window. Once he had, after all, seen a bird fly by.
    The Beast had not always been there. On the first night there had been nine candles surrounding his bed, which, in his nightmare that night, became an encircling wall of fire imprisoning him.
    The next day Azrael de Gray had come, tall, imposing, with the cold, dispassionate eyes Peter remembered from the sitting room portrait he’d been afraid of as a child. Azrael wore a large cloak woven with cabalistic signs and zodiacal symbols. When he had drawn out and put on a conical wizard’s cap with stars on it and moons of different phase around the brim, Peter had laughed out loud. The get-up looked like Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Disney’s Fantasia.
    Azrael silenced Peter with a curt gesture. The voice in his throat had simply dried up immediately. It was a day before he could talk again.
    Then Azrael had drawn the picture of the Beast in chalk upon the wall. Around it he had inscribed circles and triangles, with phrases written in Latin and Arabic script along each border. Azrael had said nothing at the time, except a brief prayer to the angelic intelligence governing the planet Mars. And then he had left.
    Peter enjoyed staring out the window. Every now and then he saw a passing cloud. Once he saw a bird.
    On the fourth day Peter’s hunger pangs had diminished to a tolerable level, as if his body were forgetting how to crave food.
    It was on the seventh day Azrael de Gray came once again, this time to speak with him.
    III
    Azrael de Gray was perfectly dressed in a handsome blue pinstripe suit and a dark blue overcoat of the most expensive cut—but the effect was made absurd by the several necklaces of heavy gold chain he wore; the half a dozen diamond studs at his wrists and collar; and the bracelets, rings, and a woman’s belt of gold links.
    There were three men in business suits behind him, one carrying a chair. One man looked normal in his poise and expression; one walked with a swaggering, rolling gait, as if he were not used to human feet, and he said, “Stow ’er there, mate!” to the third, who put down the chair. This third man had the glassy stare of hypnosis or enchantment.
    Azrael waved them away out of earshot, down the corridor. He took a can of Morton’s salt from beneath his coat and traced a circle all the way around the room, squeezing to walk into the gap between the headboard and the wall. Then he faced the wall and made a gesture—middle and ring finger curled, forefinger and pinky straight—in four directions, murmuring, “Depart! Depart! Depart!” Then he hung his overcoat on a hook on the wall so as to cover the chalked face of the Beast.
    Evidently the Wizard wanted privacy. Peter noticed wryly that Azrael did not think to turn off the security camera, however.
    Azrael sat.
    “Hope you didn’t get all dolled up on my account,” grunted Peter.
    Azrael ran his beringed fingers through the many chains of jewels he wore. “These stones, grown in the womb of Earth to that perfection which mirrors Heaven, are possessed of double virtue, being, here, emblems of wealth; there, as amulets of infused power. Yet I see by your curled lip you disdain my finery as gaudy show; so, too, have my advisors condemned my appearance. You mock me for a peacock; yet I would not be a peahen. This generation of man is more strange and fabulous than any land of Orient or Hyperboria. Why would your people cherish drabness over splendor in garb, wearing denim and dark stuffs, they, whose wealth makes seem Solomon and Croesus unto paupers? Your bounty expands beyond the riches of the immortals who dance upon Mount Cytheron and cloud-dark Olympos, but your dress is soberer than monks at penance. Observe this sleeve seam, stitched with finer hand and more evenly than any fairy seamstress of the court of Finn Finbarra could do! La! Do I dress too much? I wore but rags