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At least that is what the thirty-six-year-old Tom Flanagan told me - he would not have used those phrases at fifteen, and I am more or less improvising on his words as it is, but the fifteen-year-old boy who stood at the bottom of the staircase and felt the house claiming him experienced the despair and pity that the adult man described to me. For he knew that he had been elected, though he had refused it; he knew that he was to be the new King of the Cats, though he would refuse that too, if he were able. And the adult Tom told me that at fifteen he had known that the Florida parking lot in which he had seen a battered car containing a dead man was the truest image of Shadowland. He could not get that picture out of his head.