Chapter Twelve
I enter Lockhart’s brown-shingle relic quaking. The rest of my life is finally beginning. After all these months of waiting, after all this tense anticipation, I worry that I’ll find him less than my mind imagines. I wait in the living room for some minutes before he addresses me. He’s busy on the phone, arguing over the price of something rare—though I have no idea exactly what he’s talking about. It sounds as though he’s haggling over the price of flesh—slave flesh. I wonder if he’s a trader in the black-market. Though if he is, there’s been no sign of it in my previous trips to his house. Then too, those were both too brief to know the truth about how this master lives. If he is as Bernard says—one of the very best and worst, then his involvement in underground activitie
