Plutonic Rainbows

On 1 November Dan McAteer posted that GPT-6.2 Astra and Fable 5.5 were “HIGHLY likely to be released next week”, and that OpenAI and Anthropic would “wait until after the U.S. mid-terms elections on Tuesday, Nov. 4th, to avoid social disruption.” Polling day was actually Tuesday 3 November. It came and went, and five days later neither model is out.

As a reason to hold a launch, the vote explains a couple of days at most. The theory caught on because it gave everyone a date, and the AI For Humans hosts were still saying this week that the new models were coming “maybe because the election has happened here in America.” If the labs were only staying clear of polling day, the Wednesday after was the obvious time to ship. Instead, on Wednesday The Information reported that OpenAI could release a new Astra, a new Sol and a cyber model as soon as Friday, 6 November. Friday came, and OpenAI announced BioBasicsBench, a 100-task wet-lab benchmark, and the models didn’t come. The election’s longer reach is another matter, and I’ll come back to it.

The models certainly look close. Decrypt counted the clues: a gpt-6.2-astra label taking 19.8% of one account’s Codex usage on 1 November, a “Mythos 5.5” label in the hidden code of Anthropic’s Mythos page (which still lists version 5.1) the same day, and a claude-fable-5-5 entry that turned up in LiteLLM’s model catalogue on 13 October before being pulled. On 5 November people found Astra and Sol on the quotas page of the Google Cloud console. One of the AI For Humans hosts said Astra had been “fully at capacity” for him all week, and that Anthropic’s current models had gone “big dumb”, his theory being that compute gets moved off the model you’re using to test the next one. I’ve no idea whether that’s real. It may just be what waiting feels like. Either way, a model that’s answering real Codex requests and has quotas set up with a cloud partner is plainly built.

Built isn’t the same as cleared, though, and OpenAI has already shown the difference this autumn. GPT-6.1 Astra was scrapped on 28 September after OpenAI decided it didn’t meet the company’s safety standards, and nobody outside could have told that from the plumbing. So when people say these models were surely ready by now, my answer is that the servers were. Sign-off is a separate gate, and it’s the one OpenAI has already shut once on an Astra.

The current explanation has the same shape. On Saturday AGTP passed on a claim that “serious alignment and safety issues were found at the last minute” and that “a few more days of polishing” should get the models out. It rests on one unconfirmed post, and AGTP says plainly that OpenAI hasn’t said anything. The other story on X is a game of chicken, with each lab waiting for the other to ship so its own flagship doesn’t get one day of headlines before the rival’s lands on top. I half believe that one, mostly because it would explain a wait that has outlasted the election without anyone needing to have found a problem.

Where the midterms could really matter is Anthropic’s IPO. The vote made AI an electoral issue: CNBC reported that 56% of voters called AI and data centres a crucial or major factor, and 65% of those backed a Democrat for Congress. I went through the market fallout in Ask the Bond Market. Then on 5 November Reuters reported that the AI backlash could threaten the timing of the IPO, whose roadshow had been expected to start in the week of 9 November. A company selling shares wants its best model in the news that week. A slipping roadshow cuts both ways, since Anthropic could ship Fable 5.5 early to steady nerves, but I’d bet on it holding the model for the new date. That would be a delay the election really did cause, routed through the share sale rather than polling day. I can’t show the two are linked, and Anthropic hasn’t said a word about Fable 5.5.

My own calls from Friday were GPT-6.2 Astra and Sol before 13 November and the next Fable model in the last week of November. The OpenAI call now needs a launch within five days. I can’t weigh one unconfirmed post about a safety problem either way, so I’d put it at even odds, which is a long way from where I started on Friday. I’m leaving the Fable call alone, because a late roadshow, if anything, nudges Anthropic towards it.

This picture of Gail Elliott on a white parapet, turning back to the camera in a long fringed jacket, comes from the same sitting as her cover for the April 1989 issue of British Marie Claire, though it isn’t the frame they used. This one has the whole day in it: matching trousers, a balustrade, a hand braced on the ledge, hair slicked back as if she’s just come out of the sea, mountains going blue in the distance and a sky that hasn’t decided whether to clear. The copy here has been through Topaz’s Wonder 4, enlarged fourfold from a scan, so the individual threads of the fringe are partly the software’s guess. The shape is in the original, though, pale tufts on the shoulder and a ragged line running down towards the waist.

The cover crops all of that away. It’s head and shoulders, the collar pushed up against her jaw and the column and hills blurred to nothing, and she looks almost straight out, unsmiling, lips slightly parted. The two frames share the thing that makes them work, which is that she isn’t selling anything with her face. Here she glances back over her shoulder as if someone has called her name and she hasn’t decided whether to answer. That reserve is why neither picture looks dated to me in the way a big toothy grin from the same year would. The clothes and the lipstick, a proper 1989 red, give the date away. Her face doesn’t.

The type on the cover tells you more about the magazine than the photograph does. Above the masthead it says “April £1.20 British Edition”, and down the left side, in blue and red capitals, run “Women with an insatiable desire for sex”, “The child slave trade” and “‘We saw the Virgin Mary’”, then lower down “How to be famous for a day”. Fashion is squeezed in at the very bottom: “Fashion: fresh affordable irresistible”.

That mix was the point. Marie Claire’s own history describes the French original as offering “serious and provocative journalism for women, by women, on top of covering all the latest in fashion and beauty.” The British edition had only been running since September 1988, so this was its eighth issue, and the cover keeps that promise fairly literally. Beyond the cover I haven’t found much of what was inside.

Elliott was 22 that spring. She was born in Balham, went to Tokyo at 17 on a two-month contract that turned into two years, and moved to New York at 19 with a full portfolio, as she told Ella Baché years later. In 1989 she was also wearing Escada, whose knitwear of that moment covered every surface in appliqué and colour blocks. So in the same year the same face was selling both directions at once, the heavy, decorated end of the eighties and this pared-back white.

The shops were describing the move away from decoration that spring. A UPI report from 3 April 1989, written at a Saks seminar in Virginia, lists it plainly: “Shoulders are narrower, pants are wider,” suits are softer and sheer fabrics are everywhere. Kirk Reeves, Saks’s couture director, put it bluntly: “Fashion has cleaned up to a large degree.” In Milan, the Ferré archive’s notes on his spring collection list “absolute white,” and in Paris Martin Margiela had just shown his first collection, for spring and summer 1989, the beginning of the deconstruction he’d become known for, which went a long way further than anyone at Saks was talking about.

I don’t know who made Elliott’s jacket, and the scan doesn’t say. It still has a little shoulder to it, and the fringe is pure late-eighties fun, but the padding has mostly gone and the colour has gone entirely. It’s one shade and a good face doing the work that gold buttons and bows were doing a couple of years earlier.

There’s a ring on the hand pressed against the ledge, a plain band, and as far as I can see it’s the only jewellery in the picture. I didn’t notice it until the third or fourth look.

Tuesday’s midterms gave Democrats both chambers of Congress, and plenty of them won by running against data centres. Bernie Sanders celebrated with “National data center moratorium now” on X. The bill he announced in March with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would halt construction or upgrades of any data centre drawing 20 megawatts or more until “strong national safeguards” exist. Investors took the hint, and by Thursday afternoon the Nasdaq was down 5.4% as chip and data-centre stocks were dumped. Further down the ballot, more than 30 local measures to restrict data centres went to voters in 13 states, and nearly all passed.

A national moratorium isn’t happening while Trump holds the veto, and he has waved off calls for mandatory AI rules all along. Governors are another matter. Texas holds 27% of planned US data-centre capacity by Wells Fargo’s count, and Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott there after promising “a moratorium, a ban, on all data center approvals” until the state legislature passes protections. That needs nothing from Washington. Cleanview reckons the new governors could pause 41% of planned US data centres between them. In Congress the likelier weapon is cost, with Chuck Schumer naming household power bills as a priority and talk of making developers pay for their own grid upgrades.

The election didn’t create the problem. It landed on a build-out that had already run out of its own cash, and a frozen permit doesn’t cancel a loan, it just stops the building that was meant to repay it. Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon spent close to $207 billion on capex last quarter, nearly double a year earlier, and over the same quarter Alphabet, Meta and Amazon spent $45.2 billion more than they generated in free cash flow. A year ago the same three were $36.4 billion in the black. Only Microsoft is still positive, by $18.6 billion.

More and more of the gap is borrowed, and lenders are getting nervous. Goldman counts $296 billion of hyperscaler debt issued this year. S&P cut Meta’s credit outlook to negative. CoreWeave has a 2032 bond with a 9.625% coupon that now yields above 16%, which is a market pricing the chance of not getting paid back. I wrote in February about money going in circles between chipmakers, labs and clouds, and the circle only turns while someone outside it keeps lending.

Gartner’s arithmetic is the real bubble case: data-centre owners need $8.5 trillion of cumulative revenue by the end of the decade to justify what they’re building, against no more than $3.6 trillion of AI revenue those data centres are expected to bring in. Nothing I’ve read closes that gap, and spending keeps climbing regardless, towards about $740 billion a year for the four big spenders. So I don’t expect a pop so much as a squeeze, weakest borrowers first, and squeezes still end in falls. Capital Economics has the S&P 21% lower by the end of 2027, and I’m with them.

A Texas freeze would hurt Alphabet, which now borrows too, but Alphabet still has search to fall back on. A neocloud with a stalled campus and bonds yielding 16% has nothing behind it, which is why I’m watching the CoreWeave yield rather than the Nasdaq. If it keeps climbing, or the paper stops selling at any price, the lenders will have answered the question before the stock market does.

This week The Information reported that OpenAI could drop a new Astra, a new Sol and a cybersecurity model as soon as Friday, which is today. The leak-watchers call them GPT-6.2 Astra and Sol, though OpenAI hasn’t announced either. There was never a 6.1 Astra, because OpenAI scrapped it over safety concerns. ArtificialWatch’s release log puts OpenAI’s median gap between frontier models at 41 days, and 41 days after GPT-6.1 Sol was 9 November. My call is GPT-6.2 Astra and Sol before 13 November.

Anthropic’s median frontier gap is 22 days, and it’s already 39 days since Claude Sonnet 5.5, so the median is no use here. That figure comes from a burst across tiers. The tier that’s due is the top one, and it runs slower: Fable 5.1 came 84 days after Fable 5, and 84 days from 1 September is 24 November. Opus 5.5 also performs at the level of Fable 5.1 on most work, by Anthropic’s own account, and a flagship the tier below has caught isn’t much of a flagship. So the next Fable model lands in the last week of November. LLM Countdowns says 30 November, close enough that I won’t argue.

The trackers have been wrong already this autumn. Forkast counted projections for Anthropic and OpenAI on 28 and 29 October, and neither lab shipped a frontier model that week. I got a Thursday wrong myself in September.

Laura Dale was seven when George Churchill photographed her towing her Guy along a London pavement in 1970, a glass jar in one hand and a length of string in the other. The caption that travels with the picture reads “Rattling her can: Laura Dale, seven, from Hampstead, pulls a pram chassis with a guy collecting for Bonfire Night in 1970”, which is nearly right. It isn’t a can. It’s a glass jar, empty or close to it, and she’s swinging it towards the camera as if Churchill might be good for a coin.

The Guy rides in what’s left of a pram, the body long gone and only the frame and its spoked wheels remaining, and he’s better dressed than you’d expect: a roll-neck jumper under a heavy coat tied at the waist with string, and a pair of real shoes at the end of his legs. His face is the strange part. Someone has painted it with real care, the curled moustache and pointed beard of every schoolbook Fawkes, and then topped it with a mop of pale, straggling hair that looks like unravelled rope. He sits slumped and patient, like an old man being taken out for an airing. Laura is all movement by comparison, hair flying, a woollen jumper too big for her, an Alice band, white socks and patent shoes. Behind her, half hidden in a shop doorway, another child is watching.

I should say which of those details I trust. The copy I found was 306 pixels wide, so I ran it through Topaz’s Wonder 4 to enlarge it fourfold, and software like that doesn’t recover detail so much as guess at it. The jar, the painted face and the child in the doorway are all there in the small original. The cables of the jumper and the weave of the Guy’s coat are mostly the software’s best estimate, which means I’ve been studying the incidental details of 1970 with an almost archaeological fascination when some of the artefacts are reconstructions.

Nothing in the picture has been arranged to look picturesque. The pavement is blotched and stained, the shopfront is scuffed, and the window is crowded with handwritten cards and notices, the kind of window that once did the work of a local noticeboard. A newspaper bill hangs from the frame, and the whole enterprise has the cheerful untidiness of an ordinary English afternoon in autumn, with none of the faint menace that so much seventies imagery seems to pick up at this distance.

The custom itself has gone. The London Museum’s page on penny for the Guy sets out the routine: children stuffed old clothes or pillows into a figure, took it round the neighbourhood “often in a pram or wheelbarrow”, and asked people for money. In theory the money bought fireworks, though “more often than not, it was just kept as pocket money”, which I find entirely believable. Then the Guy went on the bonfire. Effigies of Fawkes have burned since at least 1790, and before that it was the Pope, a piece of history nobody mentioned to me when I was seven. Henry Grant photographed the custom across London from the 1950s to the 1970s, so Churchill’s picture is one of a great many, but the Grant photographs on the museum’s page show children in groups, gathered round their Guys, where Laura is caught mid-stride. By the end of the century the tradition had faded out, and nowadays, as the museum puts it, it’s trick-or-treating that sends children onto the streets, “asking for sweets, not cash”. Even the cash was about to change. Decimal Day came on 15 February 1971, so the pennies Laura was asking for were the old ones, with a few months left to run.

Laura is entirely at home in a world that now seems almost as remote as Victorian England, and the age of the photograph isn’t the reason. The reason is how much of what she takes for granted went in such a short space of time: the old money, the bonfire built in the street or the back garden rather than at an organised display, and the idea of making a man from old clothes, wheeling him round the shops for coins and then setting him alight.

She couldn’t have known any of this. On the afternoon itself she was most likely thinking about the jar and whether it would fill, and about fireworks, and the melancholy only arrives from our side of the photograph, more than half a century later, where her quick, noisy afternoon has gone still. The Guy, presumably, went on a bonfire a few days afterwards.

“In my experience, if a jilky is involved, it usually gets put down to a mains explosion.” That’s the first sentence of “Not Even Legend”, the second story in Alan Moore’s Illuminations, and after the brothel and the split brain of Hypothetical Lizard it lands like a change of key. It runs to sixteen pages and first appeared in Uncertainties 5, which Brian J. Showers edited for Swan River Press in 2021. The speaker is a Whispering Pete, one of four kinds of creature he lists, “Snapjackets, jilkies, mormoleens and Whispering Petes”, and he’s frank about the first lot: “repulsive little insect-vegetable hybrids that can camouflage themselves as nearly anything and eat domestic pets”.

Alongside him runs a meeting. A paranormal study group gathers after hours in an estate agent’s office, Chalcombe & Bentine, because David Watkins, “always the most soberly dressed at the paranormal study group’s bi-weekly meetings”, is the branch manager. Conversations hang in the air and clatter “like atonal wind chimes”, and the narration drifts from one member to the next, as Koom Kankesan notes in his Comicon essay. Tall Brian is “proselytising about ghosts” at Adriana, “that goth media-studies lecturer who only joined, like, a few weeks ago or something”. That “like” isn’t Moore’s. It belongs to whichever head the narration happens to be in, and it’ll take on anyone’s voice for a sentence or two before moving along the table. Bloomsbury’s own blurb says the group has been “infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate”, and a point of view that slips into every member in turn is a very good place to hide one. I’ll leave the who alone.

The group calls itself CSICON, the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal, and Moore didn’t make that up either. CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, was founded in 1976 under Paul Kurtz, and Robert Anton Wilson turned the name inside out for CSICON, which he credited to one Prof. Timothy F.X. Finnegan of Trinity College, Dublin. In Cosmic Trigger III it “still offers $10,000 to any ‘normalist’” who can come up with the goods. Moore gives Wilson’s joke name to a roomful of earnest people sitting among “Chalcombe & Bentine’s orderly appraisals of the housing market”.

William Shaw calls the story “a loving parody” in Strange Horizons, and I’d put more weight on “loving” than he does. One member arrives having walked the length of Fetter Street before “remembering that the ring binder with all her suggestions was still in the back seat”. You only write that if you’ve sat through evenings like this one and didn’t mind them. The group is petty in places, but it’s the ordinary pettiness of any club with a rota and a borrowed room.

Whispering Petes live backwards, and the narrator can’t explain the name: “Nobody has the first idea why we’re called Whispering Petes, when we don’t whisper and don’t seem to have more Petes than any other demographic group. I mean, something like 58 per cent of us are women.” The best guess going is that the name is coined around “the twenty-third century” and then “transmitted to the past as an oral tradition”, handed down, for them, from the young to the old.

Then Moore stops joking for a page. The narrator remembers “my darling Mila, and our son Jan, who had memories reaching to the twenty-second century. The two of them were Whispering Petes as well. It was a nice way to undie. Those early, elderly years were idyllic.” They felt “younger, stronger every day”, though it seemed strange when Jan “reached childhood with more life experience than either me or Mila”, and all three “knew, to the hour, where things were heading”. Jan at six is “a strapping six-year-old”, and Mila stares at him shaking her head: “Look at you!” Kathryn Adams at Pixelated Geek says that seeing what “birth, and death, and the end of relationships” look like for these people took her breath away. It’s the saddest thing in the book so far, and Moore gets there in about four sentences.

The Petes don’t get choices. “There’s just things we’re definitely going to do, and how we feel about it doesn’t make a scrap of difference. This is our existence, working backwards through a diary that’s already written, from romance to massacre.” Read it in the order the Pete lives it and the love comes first and the killing after. Read it the way the rest of us keep a diary and the massacre comes first and the romance follows it, which is a strange sort of consolation and possibly the only kind on offer. Shaw says the investigators “meet a tragic end at the hands of a real-life cryptid”, which suggests whose massacre this is. Kankesan points out that the Pete’s sections can be read in reverse, each one starting where the next one ends.

Moore has done a backwards life before. Kankesan brings up “The Reversible Man”, a four-page 2000 AD short from Prog 308 in March 1983, drawn by Mike White, and Aditya Bidikar, writing on his blog, says the formal idea here is “pretty much a combination of two of his 2000 AD shorts from the early 80s”. He doesn’t begrudge Moore “a bit of recycling”, and neither do I.

I went looking for the title and found it in Kafka. In the Muirs’ translation of “The Burrow”, the animal in its tunnels is afraid of enemies from the inner earth, and says “not even legend can describe them”. I’ve no idea whether Moore had it in mind, and none of the reviews I read mention it.

Som-Som’s operation is described before it happens, in a careful future tense: “She would be blinded, but not exactly. Her hearing would remain, after a fashion, and she would even be able to speak. But she would be Silenced.” The House Without Clocks severs the link between the two halves of her brain, fixes a porcelain mask over the right side of her face and a thick glove on her right hand, and from then on the wizards who pay for her can say whatever they like in bed. She hears it, and nothing she hears can get back out.

“Hypothetical Lizard” opens Alan Moore’s Illuminations, his first book of short stories, and it’s the oldest thing in it by more than twenty years. He wrote it in 1987 for Liavek: Wizard’s Row, a shared-world anthology edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull, and William Shaw’s review in Strange Horizons calls it his “first serious attempt at short prose fiction”. It was up for a World Fantasy Award the following year, when Ursula K. Le Guin won. Somewhere between then and now it lost its first word. It used to be “A Hypothetical Lizard”, and I think the article was better, because it admits there might be others.

Liavek has a rule for magic that’s worth knowing before you go in. According to Wikipedia’s summary of the setting, everyone’s luck surfaces on their birthday for as long as their mother was in labour, and in that window you can invest it in an object that powers your spells for the rest of the year. (So a hard birth makes a stronger wizard, which is a bleak thing for a group of fantasy writers to have agreed on.) A wizard’s power is sitting in a ring or a cup or a button somewhere, and anyone who learned which one would know exactly where to hurt them. I’d guess that’s what makes a wizard’s pillow talk worth the surgery.

The neurology is real, or near enough. Roger Sperry had shared the 1981 Nobel Prize for work on what each hemisphere of the brain does on its own, and Moore takes split-brain research and turns it into a brothel’s business model. I’m not sure the mask and the glove add up exactly, nerve by nerve, but the passage Kathryn Adams quotes at Pixelated Geek is about how it feels rather than how it works: “Silence, massive and absolute, surrounded her and would not permit her to make the smallest sound. She was embedded in silence, a tiny bubble of consciousness within an infinity of solid rock, mute and grey and endless.”

It’s dense. Paul Di Filippo, reviewing the book for Locus, calls it the most conventional piece there and gets the flavour right with “Huysmans-via-Tanith-Lee”, decadence and cruelty in sentences that won’t let you skim. The courtyard is “the gargantuan inkblot”, and one arrival rattles into the House “in a small cart lined with cushions”. Moore’s later prose, all the way to The Great When, keeps that appetite for ornament. Here it’s younger and not always under control, but a plainer style would sit oddly in a brothel where every resident has been altered to suit somebody’s taste.

Som-Som can still talk, though not to any purpose. What comes out are non sequiturs about the life before. When her friend Rawra Chin visits, Som-Som sips “her floral infusion through the left corner of the mouth”, the side the mask leaves free, and Rawra learns to wait “until Som-Som had finished her non sequitur” before going on. Rawra’s introduction is the sentence most reviewers stop on: “The visitor’s name was Rawra Chin, and she was a man.”

Shaw winces at that line, though he finds Rawra’s portrayal sympathetic, and he notes that it survived “revisions to the original text”. The snippets I could compare show how fine-grained those revisions were. Foral Yatt’s greeting was “cooly inoffensive” in the 1988 reprint in The Year’s Best Fantasy and is “coolly inoffensive” now. Somebody fixed the spelling of an adverb and left that sentence standing, and it was the one most worth changing.

Foral Yatt is an actor, Rawra’s lover and then the person she leaves, and Rawra isn’t simply the wronged party. There’s a moment where she “gazed icily down at the figure on the bed”, irritated past bearing by “that unbearable little-girl voice”, and the Brazilian critic Luiz Santiago, writing at Plano Crítico, is clear that both of them do wrong at different points.

The title arrives partway through as a ball that can’t be opened and might or might not have a small lizard inside it. Di Filippo quotes the best image of it, with Foral holding it: “The copper ball turned between his fingers, a miniature planet rolling from day into night.”

The ending is where readers split. Santiago admits he couldn’t say for certain what crime is committed in the last pages, offers a guess involving poison and Foral leaving in Rawra’s carriage, and asks anyone who understood it to explain in the comments. Adams settles for “a revenge that’s epic in its scope and its pettiness”. I’m not going to settle it either, and I don’t think the story means me to.

Santiago puts his finger on why without quite meaning to. The crime goes unresolved although there’s a witness, because the witness was shaped precisely so that she couldn’t tell secrets. Moore has built a viewpoint that’s physically unable to testify and then made it the only witness. Whatever happens at the end, Som-Som takes it in and can’t give it back, and the reader is left where she is, holding a closed copper ball and being told there might be a lizard in it. John Pistelli prefers Antony Johnston’s comic adaptation for Avatar Press because it “clarifies its central conflict”, which seems to me the one thing this story shouldn’t have done for it.

American Vogue ran its new grey dress for day across a four-model spread on page 663 of its September 1986 issue. The copy is pleased with itself in the way fashion copy used to be: the dress is back “in a big way”, and it’ll take you to work and out after.

From the left, Lauren Helm wears Mary Ann Restivo, Jo Kelley wears Donna Karan, Lisa Kauffmann wears Bill Blass and Jacquie Page wears Byblos. It’s the same brief four times over, a long skirt and a belted waist, and the prices run from about $230 for the Restivo to $1,100 for the Blass, a wool jersey turtleneck dress with a trumpet skirt. Karan’s comes in two pieces, a bodysuit and a skirt, with a shawl that wraps and belts. Byblos adds a pinstriped shirt collar and otherwise keeps to charcoal, which is restrained for a label known for its colour; two years later it spent a whole Vogue page on a single red.

The grey is the odd part. The text promises “new muted greys” and calls the Restivo charcoal, but on the page the two dresses on the left print as black, or close enough that I can’t tell them apart. Only the Blass and the Byblos read as grey. It could be the paper or the scan, or charcoal under studio light just goes that way. I’m not sure.

Everyone’s in gloves and everyone’s mid-stride, chins up, except Page on the right, who’s laughing with her mouth wide open, the only face on the spread that isn’t arranged. Helm left modelling at 31 and went through Columbia’s postbac premed programme; the college says she now runs a private practice treating eating disorders.

On the thirty-eighth step down Abbot Thomas’s well, with the cement knocked away, Mr Somerton uncovers a slab “upon which was engraven a cross” and feels “Disappointment again”. He has spent weeks over his tracings, worked through Trithemius and Bacon on secret writing, and counted the commonest letters in Latin and then in German, and the thing he came for is in front of him and he can’t see it. His valet Brown, holding the lantern, can: “It’s a funny cross: looks like a lot of eyes.” Somerton snatches the lantern out of his hand. Earlier, in the stripped abbey church, he’d found a scrap of the Abbot’s glass left in the tracery, a small figure with a scroll reading Oculos habent, et non videbunt (“They have eyes, and shall not see”), and he took it for “a hit of the Abbot at his Canons”. It’s from the psalm about idols, Psalm 115 in the King James numbering: “Their idols are silver and gold”, and then “eyes have they, but they see not”. The verse after that has noses that “smell not”, and the guardian of this gold announces itself by a smell of mould.

“The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” is the last story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and it follows Oh, Whistle, where Parkins was offered the test the doubting apostle asked for, the chance to put his hands on the thing, and went for the window instead. Now James gives the name Thomas to the man doing the hiding. The Abbot’s device, which he worked into his cipher, is “Gare à qui la touche”, beware whoever touches it, and James admits that it “doesn’t quite fit in point of grammar”.

Touch is how this story’s horror arrives. Somerton’s elbow knocks the candle over and he draws the bag out “in complete darkness”, something “more or less like leather; dampish”, until it slips forward onto his chest “and put its arms round my neck”. He never sees it. What he gets is “a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it”, and legs or arms or tentacles, he doesn’t know how many. The first thing Gregory does at the inn, knowing none of this, is run his fingers over the panels of Somerton’s door while feeling for the handle, and there’s “a terrible cry”, then “In God’s name, who is that?” Later Somerton tells him to lock his own door: “They—they like it, the people here”. He starts the sentence about the things and finishes it about the villagers. Gregory hears “a fumbling about the lower part of his locked door” two or three times before dawn, and is sure of it “to the end of his days”.

The Abbot hid his clues in Scripture he’d altered. Job’s scroll should say conflatur, where the gold is refined, and Thomas made it absconditur, where it’s hidden. He chose a good chapter to tamper with. Job 28 is about miners, the man who “putteth forth his hand upon the rock” and brings “the thing that is hid” to light, and then it asks where wisdom is to be found and answers that “It cannot be gotten for gold”. Somerton reads the first verse and stops there.

I’m less sure of the next thing, which sits in the Latin at the top of the story. The old chronicle says the Abbot would feel no grudge against whoever found the gold, “se inventuris minime invisurum”. Invisurum can come from invideo, to begrudge, or from inviso, to go and look at. The grammar wants the grudge, since the finders are in the dative, but the words will also bear the reading that he’d hardly come to see them. Brown, a step or two above his master, looks up and sees “someone’s ‘ead lookin’ over at us”, “a holdish man, and the face very much fell in, and larfin’”. Gregory’s guess is that whoever set the trap “might have come to see the success of his plan”. In Helen Grant’s history of the real abbey, Thomas is “putative”, so the sentence is very likely James’s own Latin, verb and all.

The Abbot was fussy about copying. Each robe in the window carries thirty-eight letters, and the glass-painter scratched “xxxviii” on the edge of Job’s border, with a note like it in each light, so nobody would get them wrong. Thirty-eight is also the step where the stone turns up, and I doubt James did that by accident. The Project Gutenberg text, which is the version most people will find online, prints Job’s letters twice in the cipher table and gives them to Zechariah as well, so anyone trying the puzzle from it fails on the third robe. For a story about a painter who scratched a count on the glass to stop exactly that, it’s a poor showing. The right letters appear only further down, in Somerton’s worked answer.

The real glass had its own successors. James wrote the story in the summer of 1904, Wikipedia says, to “fill up” the book, after cataloguing the old glass in Lord Brownlow’s chapel at Ashridge. His inventory, Vidimus says, credited the whole Ashridge collection to Steinfeld on the strength of the abbey’s name on some panels, much as Somerton’s book says the glass can be identified by “the numerous inscriptions in which the place is mentioned”, and when it came up for sale in 1928 only about a third turned out to be Steinfeld’s. All the same, the story did what the Abbot promised. A short notice of it in the Eifel Club’s newsletter reached Nikola Reinartz, a young priest with an interest in local history, who got into the chapel at Ashridge, with some difficulty, and then published the news that part of the cloister glass had been found. Ernest Cook bought the collection and gave it to the V&A, which has thirty-eight panels from the Steinfeld cloister, and that number really is chance. “Job, John, and Zechariah will tell either you or your successors,” Thomas used to say, and a ghost story about Job, John and Zechariah told an Eifel priest where Steinfeld’s windows had gone.

Gregory has the last word, and it’s something Somerton walked past. Somerton had decided the Abbot “carefully abstained from any of his cynical and allusive inscriptions” on the well-head. Gregory, who went down in daylight to put the slab back and smear it with mud, finds one beside “a horrid, grotesque shape—perhaps more like a toad than anything else”, a label reading “Depositum custodi”, which a footnote translates as “Keep that which is committed to thee.” The man with the Trithemius and the tracings had eyes for every scratch on the glass and none for this, and a country parson read it on his first morning. It’s 1 Timothy 6:20, and the verse goes on: “avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called.”