Chapter Seventy
Herr Voot woke in the middle of the night, compelled by an irresistible urge to urinate. He sat up, dangled his legs over the side of his bed—nothing so interesting so far, I grant you, but wait—uncurled the toes of his left foot into his slipper, and screamed in pain. Once he had fumbled with the weapon which had wounded him, and switched on his lamp, the mystery resolved itself: some villain, somehow, had stuck a mousetrap in his slipper.
He hobbled along the corridor, invective frothing from his mouth, fantasies of Mikfin’s impaled torso commandeering his thoughts. The moribund lamplight in the corridor at this time of the night swathed everything in a sickly yellow, the shade of an expiring animal whose flesh was already seeking its fated place of rest in the soil. The whole hotel, Voot thought—indeed, all existence—might have the same said of it. The loss of sensation in his toes, to which he’d only moments ago been devoting so much of his attention, rather paled in comparison with the death of the universe, he couldn’t help but admit. But he agreed that the world had grown old, perhaps before its time; all the human history which had had any right to be wrought, had been; and the only decent thing to do would be to treat our species as you would a horse with a shattered thigh. Would he be so unmanly as to deny the world its dignified expiration simply on account of his own selfish propensity to thrash about in instinctive hope of happening upon a broken ship’s beam to which to cling?
Filing past him down an intersection in the corridors, at that moment, could be seen the duchess, followed by her footman, to imperially demand from some sleepy sous-chef a quarter-wheel of cheese. He desired her at once—all apocalyptic fancies having vanished—but sighed in admission of the impossibility of her condescension to the steerage of society, where he was destined to dwell.