From the secret diary of Oliver Guest.

Entry date: June 14, 2026

The day I died: July 6, 2021. I remember it like yesterday.

I woke up a little after seven, though it might be more accurate to say that in the final night of dreams I never slept. Sometimes I was with my darlings, all my darlings. They were the same age at the same time, as they had never been in life. They would be fourteen years old forever. I would see to that.

But I traveled into nightmares, too, whenever my thoughts drifted forward half a day to imagine my final minutes. No Death Row, of course, and no march to the scaffold, not in these enlightened times; rather, we would stroll together, I and the observers and reporters and admirers and guards, to the Chamber of Morpheus.

What wonderful things words are. Three-quarters of a century ago the suicide flights of the Japanese Air Force became the kamikaze, the Heavenly Wind; today the death cell and sleep without end become the Chamber of Morpheus.

But back to reality. I woke around seven on the morning of my last day, and by eight they were at me again.

This time it was a short, neatly dressed man with a dark beard and a balding, wrinkled brow. He entered the room where I struggled to swallow coffee and toast — this condemned man, at least, ate no hearty breakfast — and he began, “Oliver Guest—”

“Do I know you?”

“We have never met, no. I am Father Carmelo Diaz.”

“I specifically said, no priests. I was promised no priests.”

“I know. It is not as a priest that I come here.”

An obvious falsehood. A true priest can no more decide to be a nonpriest than a fish can decide to live out of water. But he went on with something of greater possible interest, “I carry with me an offer from the Governor.”