“Becky? Where are you? Well, don’t move. Just stay where you are or we’ll lose one another,” Alden called out.

But Becky, wherever she had settled with an English magazine or her tapestry frame or the briefcase full of paperwork she had brought home for the weekend, would never hear him through the thick stone walls of the some-centuries-old castle in which they had been living for the past two years. Alden spoke aloud to keep his spirits up, or, as he scarcely admitted to himself, to keep the spirits at bay as he paced the Great Hall through the darkness the wan beam thrown by his flash- light only cleaved into blacker halves. So halved, the deepened gloom pressed twice as tenebrous on the left and on the right as Alden formed a sort of certainty that whatever lurked in the murk to his left lowered even more banefully than the second secret horror eeling through the utter inkiness to his right.

He really hadn’t much good to say for Czech electricity. These power cuts happened too frequently and too mysteriously on perfect summer evenings when the air was so stilly composed that the ruffle-edged moths could not catch and heave themselves aloft on the least breath of air. This summer of 1992 in Prague was running so dry that the dependent wings of the wandering moths scritched across the parched earth and pavement. Alden had heard them as he lay upon his deck chair out in the lightless belvedere and slowly determined what the so-quiet creep and onward scrabble must be, aided by the brief flare and flame of a new and antique Cartier, or Cartier-style, lighter. He was sorry to say he had taken up smoking again. Tobacco was freely offered and enjoyed in this city and in this cult...