Chapter 6: The Figure Moves Closer

The figure was not, by any technical definition, closer.

Dorian had been precise about this — had been, in the small hours before the building stirred, conducting what he would have described, if pressed, as a simple review of the environmental perimeter, which was to say he had stood at his window in the dark and looked down at the street with the unhurried attention of a man who has had three centuries to develop opinions about where things are permitted to stand. The far streetlight was fourteen yards from the building's front step, a distance he had established on the night the figure first appeared by counting his paces on the pavement in the manner of a surveyor's assistant, which he had been, briefly, in 1773, for reasons that were at the time financially prudent. The figure had stood at that streetlight for eleven consecutive nights, and eleven consecutive nights was long enough for Dorian to have categorized its position as established rather than approaching, which was a category he found significantly preferable.

He stood at the window now and revised this categorization.