M> finish show. Drive home while almost falling asleep.
M> get home. Disrobe and get into bed without waking wife
M> nor cat. resolve to get more sleep some day.
It was beginning to wear him down, slowly. You just can't run a machine like that on insufficient sleep. His eyes got a bit redder around the edges each day, but he had this schedule to keep to. It was that much harder just to keep going each day.
It was a Wednesday when the letter arrived, but he didn't get to it until Thursday morning around eleven am. It was a standard business envelope, bulging as if someone had decided to send him three floppies, or a flattened box of matches. Whatever it was, it rattled; he spent a few minutes looking at the monomaniacally intricate spiderweb patterns drawn all over the envelope, with little rectangular blank windows for the address and stamps. He ripped the end off the envelope, and a puff of grey powder or smoke flew out, into his face.
He froze, sitting behind his desk. It was as if someone had sprayed him in the face with an atomiser filled with ice-cold water, lightly scented. He felt tiny aches in his joints fade away as if by magic.
Much better.
A tiny scrap of paper fell out of the envelope. He picked it up, deciphered the shaky scrawl:
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