Chapter XIV
Blood Pudding
Pudding Rodensby sat down, put his varicose right hand upon the controls of his buoyed chair, glided past his collection of antique firearms and floated toward the lacquered front door, where his surgically dwarfed white-haired English mastiff currently stood growling. The old man had acquired the dog when it was a similar-sized (but brown) puppy thirty-one years ago, and he knew that the little beast only made noise when it had a reason for so doing.
Ascot yowled. Pudding wondered at the cause of the hound’s midnight perturbation, and hypothesized that the noisy couple who had moved in up the hall were having another row.
The dog woofed thrice, and a chill climbed the flaccid skin that covered its master’s back: The old Englishman fully comprehended the gravi
