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biologic existence, then the quiet time, holding the snoozing fin head cradled in your arms, rocking in the rocker next to your telescope out on the open air observatory while the wind transforms the face of the dunes to a whole new physiognomy, the ocean laps the shore in the distance to the south, and the night birds sing in the forest. In that peaceful time, that’s when the deal will be sealed and you’ll promise your life in protection and care for the helpless fellow. Because, Weiroot, even though your face is a rippling moonscape of healed wounds, your posture is worse than that of your listing home, and you’re feared by those who don’t know you as a strange and cantankerous entity outside of society, The Man Who Escaped Hell, you are no more nor less than any man—a hungry heart and a wavering will. That’s right, don’t deny it. You’re thinking, “Here’s my family. Here’s my opportunity to care and have someone return the emotion.” I see right through your schemes. Your thoughts are utterly transparent to me. And oh, what great pleasure you will derive from naming the wee beast, like it’s a puppy, like it’s your own invention. You’ll try Hartvill, Tharnweb, Wenslav, to see how they roll off the tongue, every now and then checking the child’s countenance to see if the word fits the face like a tailored mask. But all along, all along, you know you’re slowly but resolutely spiraling in a decreasing orbit toward Weiroot Junior or Weiroot II, and the excitement of that has your big toe itching in your eel skin ankle boot. When you’re just about to grasp for one of these narcissistic monikers, something grabs you instead, some dim glimmer of reason, and you veer off and christen the child Oondeshai, which was the name of an island in Hell. Then a kiss to that purple brow and you lean back in your rocker and rock beneath the stars from whence he came, closing your eyes and falling into a dream of the future. Beautiful. Or so you think, but wait, Weiroot. Just a second. Dreams are dreams and the future is like a hall of mirrors reflecting the past and offering up wavering illusions until everything shatters and you’re cut to ribbons by shards of reality. Allow me to suggest where all this is leading. Little Oondeshai will be both a pleasure and a trial for some time, and, though difficult at first, you’ll learn to give of yourself, to feed, comfort, and care for your charge. Your stone men will be put through their paces as they’d never been, even in the ancient time when they were created to serve and protect Satan, long before you found them in the cave in the sea cliff and brought them to life with an inadvertent sneeze. There will rise up a hurricane of activity in the wooden palace, all centered on the child, and every action will embrace him as its eye. This won’t necessarily be bad, for it will take you away from your melancholic study, it will resurrect you from your pointless pondering of the stars. I don’t deny there will be long walks among the dunes in which you will tell the boy stories, half true, half the product of your own skittering imagination, like the one about the man who teaches the monkey to be a man while the monkey teaches the man to be a monkey and they switch places only to discover deep philosophical truths they’d never before conceived of until the man puts the monkey in a cage and the monkey escapes and kills the man and then is shot by the man’s wife, who loved the monkey turned man more than the man turned monkey. Yes, you’ll fill the child’s head with that kind of simplistic clap trap to make him a dreamer, and he’ll show no revulsion when he runs his fingertips over your scarred, tree bark face. Together you’ll fly dragon kites, running over the dunes, in the slanting light of cool evenings. You’ll fish for Tillibar skeeners off the ocean cliffs with a long rope, a hook to snag Leviathan, and the stone quadruplets heaving and ho-ing,