fetid and decaying flowers, had seen on the floor within his door, had
had no more meaning for him than if it had belonged to some dim and
faraway dream. And at the beating of the telegraph-boy upon the door,
within a few feet of the bed where he lay, he had gnashed his teeth and
stopped his ears. He had pictured the lad standing there, just beyond his
partition, among packets of provisions and bundles of dead and dying
flowers. For his outer landing was littered with these. Oleron had feared
to open his door to take them in. After a week, the errand lads had
reported that there must be some mistake about the order, and had left no
more. Inside, in the red twilight, the old flowers turned brown and fell
and decayed where they lay.

Gradually his power was draining away. The Abomination fastened on
Oleron's power. The steady sapping sometimes left him for many hours
of prostration gazing vacantly up at his red-tinged ceiling, idly
suffering such fancies as came of themselves to have their way with him.
Even the strongest of his memories had no more than a precarious hold
upon his attention. Sometimes a flitting half-memory, of a novel to be
written, a novel it was important that he should write, tantalised him
for a space before vanishing again; and sometimes whole novels, perfect,
splendid, established to endure, rose magically before him. And sometimes
the memories were absurdly remote and trivial, of garrets he had
inhabited and lodgings that had sheltered him, and so forth. Oleron had
known a good deal about such things in his time, but all that was now
past. He had at last found a place which he did not intend to leave until
they fetched him out--a place that some might have thought a little on
the green-sick side, that others might have considered to be a little too
redolent of long-dead and morbid things for a living man to be mewed up
in, but ah, so irresistible, with such an authority of its own, with such
an associate of its own, and a place of such delights when once a man had
ceased to struggle against its inexorable will! A novel? Somebody ought
to write a novel about a place like that! There must be lots to write
about in a place like that if one could but get to the bottom of it! It
had probably already been painted, by a man called Madley who had lived
there ... but Oleron had not known this Madley--had a strong feeling
that he wouldn't have liked him--would rather he had lived somewhere
else--really coul