He spent the remains of that day in his quarters stupefied with fear. He did not eat. He made no response to the several calls at his door. He did not notice the darkening of the room when night fell. He did not light a lamp. He could not tear his mind from the scene of the disembowellment. It was as if the horror were there with him, invisible in the blackness, reenacted over and over. Somehow the morning came. Perhaps he had lost consciousness for some unmeasured time. The day confronted him as a hated enemy; it would be a day of paralyzing terror and desperation, unendurable.
  The vials.
  He remembered with near euphoria the vials in a compartment of his portmanteau, with the syringes and needles. The horror had until now completely blocked from his mind this obvious remedy. He found them packed with something else that had dropped from his mind: the black-bound book of his own God, his own neglected God. He had tossed it in carelessly while packing, but now it came to light like a miracle. He kissed it ardently and pressed it to his beating heart, weeping tears of joy. I shall become a martyr, he vowed, devoutly, ardently, if somewhat incoherently. He kissed the Bible again before laying it aside and gathering the vials greedily into his hands, for the first thing he required was sleep. They tinkled musically, giggled merrily like little girls with secrets, named Mary, Emma and Mabel and Margaret. How much sleep? Forever? Painless, untroubled, eternal oblivion? That was in his power. God had given him that power. Knowing that power was sufficient consolation for the moment; he need not exercise it now. He needed only to sleep away the day.
  At an unknown hour deep in the night he regained consciousness. The horror flew back at him at once, the nightmare that attacked on the wrong side of sleep. Before him was the glinting, evil blade, the rat-boy turned inside-out. Then he saw his own execution, heard his own screams ringing in his ear, saw his own entrails obscenely exposed to the light. He administered for himself a smaller dosage of the drug.
  He took up the Bible and read psalms, rushing through one, fixating on a single line of the next. He was held up for an hour on one word, until its meaning was lost and he wondered only at the oddness of the letters, until his exhausted mind went blank and he slept.
  To his dreaming self he sternly exhorted, you must do something. If you do nothing, he will kill you at once. Oh, no, no! That can’t be true! It is true! Only if you do something has he given you thirty days. No, twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight? That is the lifespan remaining to you. The lifespan of a housefly. If is sufficient a lifespan for a fly, why not for you? Be a fly and you will have been granted a complete lifetime. But how does one become a fly? I wonder what it’s like to be one. How strange the world must appear when you look at it from the ceiling with a thousand eyes. Never mind that—his other chided—You must concentrate your mind. Concentrate! Very well, the question is, how can I build a temple in twenty-eight days? You already know, was his reply. You are I, and I know, so you know. If it must be done in twenty-eight days, then it can be done. Somehow it can be. Will God perform a miracle? Why should he? We have not been a very good Christian. No, in fact, you have not been a Christian at all. No, I suppose it is not going to get done by any miracle. That can’t be the solution. Then, how? You know how. The temple exists already. You know that. You told the King you had seen it. Were you fibbing? No, about that I wasn’t fibbing. Then you have but to make him see it too.
  When he opened his eyes again, Alfred A. Brussel knew roughly what he must do. He was already working out the sequence of steps, listing in his head what he had, what he needed, already calculating feet and inches.
  ‘Perspective, optics,’ he said, and repeated it like a chant. ‘Perspective, optics. Perspective, optics. What is transparent? Vellum. What is solid? Colour and dimension. Perspective, optics, yes, yes! What is colour without dimension? Paint. Yes. What is dimension without colour? Vellum. Yes, indeed. Perspective and optics. Lenses and diffraction. Perspective and optics, colour and dimension. What is there but the eye and what it sees? Nothing! What else must there be, could there be, ought there to be? Yes, I have accounted for everything. Occam’s razor. Why complicate with matter what is really so simple? What have I done with my spy-glass?’
  ‘A-ha!’ he pulled it triumphantly from the pocket of his great-coat.
  With almost a skip in his step he ventured from his quarters and ordered an especially large breakfast. When it arrived, he was already buried in his sketch book, and his forgotten meal, set beside his spy-glass, grew cold. ‘Perspective, optics,’ he concluded, having resolved one problem to his satisfaction, and sitting back to admire his cleverness, before confronting the next puzzle. ‘Colour and dimension, lenses and diffraction, and beauty. We must not forget beauty’ He applied his pencil afresh. ‘Sir, I will not argue with your view that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder; I only ask, why do you say “merely”?’ He drew into being still another preliminary cube, then sat back to admire its pristine and infinite nature. ‘Hah! But, what isn’t? Now, I ask you, Mr. Boil, what are your atoms and your gases? . . . No, no, Mr. Newton, that is where we must part ways. Force and weight are very serviceable ideas, but I will not go farther than that. You cannot ask me to admit such chimera exist outside the mind . . . Where would that be exactly? Have you been there? . . . No, you ask the wrong question, Dr. Forte. Beauty is existence . . . Exactly, one is never found without the other . . . Well, I say this, there is no need to suppose more than the beholden and beholder.’ Then, after a long silence, his face luminous with rapture, he said to all the spirits who had gathered in the room:
  ‘I am Alfred A. Brussel, the Architect, the seer. I am the only architect that exists.’
  Meanwhile, the slop-bearers, unaware of their being imaginary persons dwelling inside the mind of the Divine Architect of the Universe, clinging instead to the superstition of inhabiting a slum, now found themselves no-where at all, having been evicted from their waterside district. Their shacks were levelled. The Architect ordered a high screen of wattle & daub erected around the building site to keep out prying eyes. With more than five score labourers in his service, this work was completed in three days. After this, little activity was observed. The Architect was rarely seen, seldom leaving his rooms. Yet, less than a month later, the Architect informed King Othon that his temple was ready. The King was baffled. The Architect appeared a little nervous and excited, but he was certainly not flinging himself on to the pavement begging for mercy, as the King both expected and had no intention of granting. From reports, the King did not think anything much had been built inside the walls of the construction site. His whole court thought the same and expected the Architect to be inside-out come lunch-time.
  ‘Let us go first to one of the city towers and admire at a distance your temple as it rises splendidly above the houses, Your Highness,’ invited Alfred A. Brussel.
  His Highness gazed at the Architect, dumbfounded. Nothing had ever risen from that low part of the city but the stink of excrement and offal, for that indeed was what it had been built on.
  When they were arrived at the tower, it was seen that the Architect had considerately ordered a hoist built, with a comfortable box for His Highness to sit in, to reach the top with ease. They stepped out on to the balcony, where Alfred A. Brussel spread his arms in a magnificent gesture that seemed to say that the whole panorama was of his doing. ‘I never pretend to be modest, Your Highness. It is not a trait compatible with greatness. To put it simply, it is the finest thing I have ever done.’ He took a breath as if the air itself was redolent with his masterpiece. ‘Ravishing. Yes, the proportions are superb.’ He clasped his hands behind his back as he prolonged his admiration of the view.
  The King, hand over brow to block the sun, stared. The view was of monotonous, monochromatic flatness. First, the flat roofs of the houses, blinding and scintillating under the sun, then the cracked mud expanse of the dried-out lake, divided only by a torpid stream of brown water. There was nothing to stop the eye till it reached a line of parched, dusty trees. He told the Architect he saw nothing.
  ‘Eh, what’s that, Your Highness? Of course! How stupid of me! forgive me, here I was, so wrapped up that I forgot you are still encumbered with your layman’s eyes. That is why I have made a new pair of eyes for you. Come and look!’ He directed the King to a newly-built brick pillar with a box mounted on top. The box had two eyeholes in it. ‘Just look through those and you will see exactly what I do, Your Highness.’
  Othon XVIII peeped into the eyeholes and instantly jumped back with a startled cry. He stared at the contraption as if it might attack.
  The Architect chuckled. ‘No, no, it won’t bite, Your Highness. It’s perfectly harmless, but very powerful! Have a look! Look and behold!’
  With trepidation Othon approached the pillar again and applied his eyes to the holes. This time he drank in the view. Then he looked with his naked eye. Several times he did this, switching between the box and his naked eye, scarcely believing the difference. The city was a dim shadow when seen through the box. Thus it contrasted all the more strikingly with the astonishing, glorious and shimmering vision rising at its edge, that seemed spun from gold and light.