"Characters? What Characters?"
"All the characters that are drawn in books, painted in novels, sketched in magazine articles, thumb-nailed in feuilletons or in any way created by anybody and everybody who has had the fortune or misfortune to put his or her writings into print."
"That sounds like a quotation from a prospectus. What do you herd Characters for? Aren't there enough souls in the Universe?"
"Who possess souls and who do not? For aught you can prove, man may be soulless and the creatures he writes about immortal. Anyhow, about a hundred years after printing became an established nuisance, the loose Characters used to blow about interplanetary space in legions which interfered with traffic. So they were collected, and their charge became mine by right. Would you care to see them? Your own are there."
"That decides me. But is it hotter than Northern India?"
"On my Devildom, no. Put your arms round my neck and sit tight. I'm going to dive!"
He plunged from the bed headfirst into the floor. There was a smell of jail-durrie and damp earth; and then fell the black darkness of night.
We stood before a door in a topless wall, from the further side of which came faintly the roar of infernal fires.
"But you said there was no danger!" I cried in an extremity of terror.