The next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back. I had the sense of coming up from some cold dark place far beneath the earth’s surface. That was true, I realized, only in a symbolic sense. I hadn’t actually gone anywhere, let alone some dungeon in the bowels of the earth. I was still in Harald Engstrom’s house in Union City. I might be in the basement, which was technically below the earth’s surface, though probably not below sea level. And I might not be in the basement after all, because I seemed to be lying on a bed, and I didn’t recall seeing any beds in his basement.

I’d evidently passed out, I thought, and maybe Harald had carried me upstairs to a bedroom. The brandy, I thought – and at once it occurred to me (as it will long since have occurred to you) that there was something in that brandy more to be reckoned with than mere ethyl alcohol.

For God’s sake, he’d slipped me a mickey! I’d been drugged!

“Coming out of it,” someone was saying. Not in Danish, or Swedish either. In English.

“He almost surfaced the last time,” a second voice said, this one female. I noted this, and noted in retrospect that the first voice had been a man’s. “Maybe he’ll make it this time,” she said.

“Don’t say any more,” the man said. “He can hear you.”

Indeed I could, but from that point on there was nothing more to hear.

No words, anyway. I could hear them breathing, if I put my mind to it, and distantly I could hear the hum of machinery and the muted sounds of human activity. I was beginning to get the feeling that I was not in Harald Engstrom’s house after all, but I couldn’t think how or where I might have been moved. I certainly didn’t remember any movement, though I probably wouldn’t if I’d been deeply comatose as a result of whatever had been in that last glass of brandy.

How long had I been out? I was lying on my back with my arms at my sides, and I hadn’t moved a muscle except to breathe, but I moved now, lifting a hand and bringing it to my face.