My name’s T’Prin. I sell slaves.
He awoke, remembering nothing. They told him his name was T’Prin, that he’d been a slavemonger, that he was now bankrupt. They thought he’d want to know what date it was and kept repeating it to him.
He’d never heard of the Month of the Quill — he knew the months by other names. But he’d call it Quill if they did. He’d play along with everything they said until he found out who he was this time and what the hell they’d done to his eyes.
“I say, fellows,” said Waddams after the sherry had been poured and the esteemed members of the Zambezi Club were settled into their accustomed postprandial positions, “did you hear about old T’Prinzy?”
Slavemonger T’Prin thought his worst problem was impending bankruptcy. Had he but known of the gibbering horror that was even now slithering from the well behind his isolated country home, had he caught the merest glimpse of its fetid claws dripping with noisome ichor or its thousands of facial
tentacles blasphemously quivering with subliminal phallic intent, had he suspected for a single moment that before the night was through he would come face-to-face with the malevolent forces that wait in a place beyond darkness for the call that will summon them into our blindly unsuspecting world… perhaps the demands of his creditors would have occupied less of his mind.
As she drove along the yew-lined driveway toward the imposing Jacobean manor where she was to serve as governess to the T’Prin offspring, Harmony Bellancourt thought back to the unsettling interview where she met the broodingly handsome master of the house and said to herself, “I suppose it doesn’t matter that he’s a notorious slavemonger, as long as he pays me.”