521
Late at night, at 7 Pinsters Street.
Leonard Mitchell sat down in his chair, raised his feet to the desk, and rested them on its edge.
Then he leaned back, making the wooden joints creak, and his breathing gradually grew slow and deep.
After an unknown length of time, his eyelids drooped, covering his eyes.
By then, Leonard's spirit had entered a gray, hazy world, though he was still in his own bedroom.
The gas streetlamps beside the street and the warm firelight in the various houses looked unusually dim now, illuminating only a small area around them and taking on a hazy quality.
Illusory, oval balls of light, some hidden and some visible, overlapped as they enveloped the houses, seemingly the source of their existence.
This was the city in a Nightmare's eyes.
Following the information from his earlier investigation, Leonard leaped out the window in his Nightmare form and flew toward 17 Minsk Street in Cherwood Borough.
Rather than barge straight in, he landed at the door amid the thick fog and politely rang the bell.
To the calls of "Cuckoo! Cuckoo!" Stalin Sammer opened the door in her nightdress. Holding a silver-inlaid court feather fan over her chest, she asked in sleepy confusion:
"Who are you looking for?"
She was Klein's landlady from when he had played Sherlock Moriarty, a blond, blue-eyed woman of about thirty.
Leonard had now changed into the black-and-white checked uniform of a Loen police officer. Casually showing his identification, he said:
"Do you know Sherlock Moriarty?"
Since she was dreaming, Stalin reacted slowly. Several seconds passed before she said:
"Has something happened to him?"
As she asked her question, under Leonard's influence, she naturally manifested her mental image of Sherlock Moriarty beside her:
He wore a half top hat of silk,