It is the end of a long and chilly winter night, the dark sky is giving way to timid light, and I am once again in this house of forgotten dreams.
The radiators hum and hiss, grumble and groan, and for all the fuss, they seem to give little warmth in this high-ceilinged room. I lie here, half awake and halfway to dreaming, wrapped in a cocoon of quilts, feeling that uncomfortable chill that comes with a winter’s dawn.
Looking past my window to the darkened park, I can see a thin, colorless thread of light, a ghostly fluorescence low on the horizon. Nothing stirs. Not the wind, not the flutter of a beating wing, not the frailest branch of the tallest tree. Nothing moves under the veil of night,…