Mr. Umberto Bassington-Smythe sat in a dingy little restaurant drinking what might have been the foulest, blackest, and most incongruously thick cup of coffee ever brewed. It really was remarkably bad coffee, bitter, viscous in a slimy sort of way, and tasted more than a little like it might have been filtered through an ancient and putrefying sock. Gah! But this stuff is vile he thought as he took another drink, so why is this my third cup of this swill? It's not as though I can't afford decent coffee. By the clocks, am I enjoying this? He wasn't, but the thought disturbed him slightly; it was unsettling, rather like the coffee itself. He took another sip, possibly to see of the coffee really was a bad as he thought. If anything, it seemed to be worse. The fact that the alleged coffee, and he was beginning to doubt the veracity of both menu and waiter, had cooled somewhat and was congealing into something like bacon grease did not really help matters.

There were several other patrons occupying the meager scattering of tables. most were equally engaged in the fine art of not tasting the coffee. From the look of several of them they were students who had overindulged in various interesting substances and were now attempting to clear their heads with the swill. Truth be told, Umberto was engaged in a similar ritual, though as far as he knew he'd not been drunk or otherwise. According to the newspaper he was perusing without much interest it was Hamis the 10th. Three months and eleven days. He thought with some alarm. Has it really been that long? What have I been doing all this time? Where have I been? He tried to clear his head with another drink of the coffee. While the culinary qualities of the brew left something to be desired it was remarkably good at clearing the head of all extraneous thought. This was probably due to the brain being utterly incapable of comprehending something so vile without making use all available faculties.

He could not, or did not wish to, remember what it was that sent him off to where ever it was he went when the stress piled up and there seemed no way out, but he did know that he'd gone and run away again. The date on the newspaper alone told him that. He sighed. Part of him, a very small and quiet part of him, knew exactly where he had been and why he had gone but its voice was lost in the general confusion of his mind and was ignored on account of the fact that the truth was monumentally dull. The young lady with whom Umberto had struck up something of a moderate romance had thrown him over for another on account of irreconcilable differences regarding the keeping of canaries and the use of skulls as items of household decoration. He particularly disliked canaries on account of their being yellow (a color that always gave him headaches) and he was of the opinion that nothing cheered up a room quite like a few well-placed skulls. The grins, he always thought, lent a certian jaunty air to even the dreariest of rooms. She had not agreed, being prey to the common delusion that skulls were unaccountably creepy.

As to where he had been, he had spent the last few months living under the name of Wilmont Featherstone in a small and comfortable inn down by the river where he divided his time between fishing and boating. Such were the excesses of Umberto Bassington-Smythe.

He took another sip of the coffee and tried to remember where, exactly, he lived.