I can't easily begin to describe the circumstance in which I returned, dishevelled and exhausted, to my rooms that night. I collapsed feverishly on the faded red Turkish carpet in a demon injected slumber and it wasn't until the still dawn's early hours that I again stirred. In the blackness the wood-panelled study swayed and steadying myself against a chair's leather back sensed the looming dark shadow of my manuscript-laden desk, on it the scattered typewritten pages I had been working on. Resting my broken leg, gathering the tattered remnants of my clothing around me in the cold I saw once more the strewn pages of text that had sent me off into the night in a confrontation of everything I previously divined delusion. Lowering myself painfully into the chair's upholstery and switching on the desk lamp I sat hunched in the pool of its green glass wash, my fingertips brushing upon the silver key in the desk's only drawer. Opening it, its singular contents the yellowing photograph of a movie star, her glamour faded into dust long ago. Losing I don't know how long to reverie a wan moon glinted on the window when I roused and limping to the undrawn curtains with my hand pressed against the windowpane looked out onto the garden enveloped in a shroud of twisting nocturnal mist, in its tendrils that curiously unearthly sculpture stretching its melancholy fingers into this world.
It was only a few short months ago that the mysterious stranger Mancuzo arrived, dragging his battered cardboard suitcase covered with port labels over the bare wooden hallway looking for lodging. Remaining at first to himself, his veiled interest in the strange statue in the back garden would increasingly entangle me in the knots of his own fantastic dreams.
On the window, where my hand contacted the glass, water droplets condensed into rain puddles on the outside surface. Looking at it curiously, I noticed white spears of frost forming a radiating pattern. Turning over my hand in disbelief I reeled as I saw the tips of my cold fingers dipped in spikes of pallid milky frost, my numbed hands held by the grasp of icy tentacles.