Upon arriving home to his ridiculously—he suddenly noted with even greater clarity than before—orderly, proper, drab room, Mr. Harbinger sighed. He removed his hat, pocketed his glasses, and sank in bleak defeat into the sole, uncomfortable easy chair which graced his room. There was another of those momentarily crystal-clear glimpses.
"I've trated my last ti," he said aloud with the depths of the Styx in his colorless voice.
Closing his mind as best he could to this very disconcerting habit that had acquired him, Mr. Harbinger continued to sit there, looking at the dingy wall he had examined minutely now, every evening, for the past thirteen years.
I would appreciate it if that wall would just go away, he thought, knowing that it wouldn't, and that he was probably condemned to stare at it, or one worse than it, every evening for the rest of his life.
It was while he was contemplating a particularly uninteresting spot in the fading design of the wallpaper which was intended to decorate his room that he noticed it wasn't a spot at all, but an eye. Of all things!
Reacting in exactly the same manner as he would when confronted with a line in a newspaper ad which defied his watery vision, he plucked his pince-nez from a vest pocket and placed them in their accustomed notch upon the bridge of his nose.
"Go away," he said to it, when he had assured himself that it was most decidedly an eye.
"Why?" returned a mouth, suddenly materializing out of the design below both eyes, the second of which had resolved itself in time to wink at him in a most disconcerting manner, almost rudely, one might say.
"Because," Mr. Harbinger faltered, at a loss as to how best to converse with a disembodied mouth and a pair of floating eyes which could not even remain on a line with each other, but kept drifting about over a small area of the wall, bumping together now and again.
"In a moment you'll commit a non-sequitur like 'Oh yeah?' and I will scream," the mouth promised.