About this time I began to receive messages. Slipped under my door in the middle of the night and waiting for me when I got up.
The first one I got was on a Tuesday. or something along those lines. Well, I must say I considered it for quite a while, but it still meant nothing to me.
The moon is, in fact, a hole in the sky. Consider.
I didn’t mention it to anybody at first. I was rather hoping it might be from one of the girls. A late ‘Be my Valentine’. But the next night I got another one which said something like,
What is that state of mind we call “consciousness”
if not the constant emerging from a tunnel?
and then I knew it had to be His Grace.
I must have said something to one of the other lads on the Wednesday, most likely, who said he’d just received his first that very morning, written on a scrap of paper and slid under his door, just like mine. His had something to do with sarsaparilla. Sarsaparilla – fact or fiction? I think it was.
It turns out we were nearly all of us getting them. Maggie Taylor claims she opened her door and saw him scampering away.
He must have been using the secret passages he had put in for the tunnels. I should know because one of them goes right past my room and sometimes I would hear him sneaking about. That’s a very peculiar feeling, I should say, to be lying in your bed late at night and hear someone creeping up and down between the walls.