I awoke from a short, anguished sleep to find my throat painfully swollen and constricted but my drunkenness gone and my brain, which had been enlarged and feverish before my sleep, shrunken to its normal size, leaving a gap into which gloomy depression had wormed its way; my head was hopelessly, wretchedly clear. With one hand still clutching at the blanket which the instinct of self-defense had kept wrapped round my shoulders and waist even during my dreams, I stretched out the other into the darkness beyond my knees and, groping for the whisky bottle containing water, took a mouthful. The cold of the water seemed to soak right through to my lungs and my sadly oppressed liver. In my dreams, Takashi had stood in a mist about five yards in front of me, still looking like a crumbling red plaster dummy with his upper half split open like ripe pomegranates. Countless glittering pellets studded the sockets of his eyes, transforming him into an iron-eyed monster. He stood at one corner of a tall triangle of which I was the apex; at the remaining corner a bentbacked, sallow-faced man stood watching us in silence.
