“Where did you get the idea for that?” Hephaestus asked, wiping his chin.

“In a dream,” Lloyd replied, thinking of all the strange dreams that seemed to possess him. In catacombs, creatures beyond description shrieked-living sphinxes with forked tongues and stinging tails… serving maidens with the heads of ibises and dogs… hooded cobra women… things with wings and scales… and a hulking silhouette with the legs of a camel, the barrel-chested torso of a rude galley slave, and the awful engorged head of a baboon.

Monkish shapes in tornado-green tunics shuffled behind frail curtains of snakeskins where embalmed and dismantled bodies sprawled on stone tables. Jackal-faced children could be seen gnawing on carcasses in a cage-and in transparent jars floated lilies that looked as if they had sprouted tentacled nerves… frogs becoming human embryos, or almost human… while in slick, drained pits there lurked soft machine reptiles and enormous tube worms made of meticulous spun metal wrapped in an oozing tissue cultivated in vats.

In the hotter months the boy would flail about in his corn-shuck bed, so that Rapture took to giving him a hypnotic that she made using melatonin. While this remedy often controlled the sleeping problem, it did not alter the periods of black depression the boy could slip into, or the relationship he carried on with his dead twin sister, whom, of course, he had never known except in that blind amphibious time within Rapture’s womb. He often said that his sister was right beside him, and if asked whether he could see her he would answer that he could feel her and that he could smell her. Like licorice and rain wind, he said. Rapture, who had grown up with revenants and hairball oracles, was more accepting of the boy’s beliefs-but Hephaestus argued that imaginary friends were one thing, an imaginary dead sister something else.