“I know I’ve said this before,” says Neville Tildsley to his client, “but I really can’t thank you enough for choosing me. I mean, when you could have used pretty much any architectural firm in this entire city…”

Lights, automatically triggered, reveal a bare concrete tunnel at the base of this fine new house, unwinding in regular steps toward a wide, domed space set with mirrors which, instead of amplifying the electric glow, seem to deepen some essential character of the darkness. The architect peers with bumbling curiosity at the many paintings, objects, and coins which are now displayed here. Life after life. Age after age. This bishop’s staff or crosier. This silver sickle, sharp as the thinly waning moon its shape somehow echoes. Here a space, or rather three spaces, which remain unfilled. And here, right in the chamber’s heart, lies an odd kind of well or sump, a glimpse into the foundations of reeking earth that was hauled here into the heart of Manhattan from the hold of an old hulk out on the East River marshes at his client’s request. A strange and difficult task, and considerably expensive, especially with the even odder stipulation that everything must be accomplished over the course of one, specific, moonless night. This, too, he teeters toward.

Then comes a shift of the air, and now the architect seems to be standing in a darker and more primeval space; more the lip of a cavern than anything that ever existed in his meticulous blueprints. He almost teeters, gives a grateful gasp as he’s caught in his client’s cold grasp, and again as his cellulose collar is pulled back, and the grime and stubble glory beneath is bared for the flash of the silver blade, and, far too quick to scream, his last breath is lost in the gape of a second mouth. Glimpses of chickweed growing on a railroad track, and the pinched, worried face of his wife as Neville Tildsley judders into death. Then, blood to blood, he’s falling toward the craving pit, and all that’s left is for this era’s one remaining servant, the driver of that faithful Packard, to dispose of the architect’s car in a way which will account for his missing body.

And that was all.