“In a room twenty feet by thirty—blocked off by a wood-and-plaster wall from the attic storeroom of the shop below— ten men slept, as January had guessed, on the bare floor, rolled in blankets with their heads on their spare jackets or shirts. The place stank of unwashed clothes, unbathed flesh, of mice and roaches and of the smoke leaking through the brick of the two chimneys that rose up along the dividing wall. January had to feel his way gingerly down the center of the room so as not to trip... over anyone, as he sought the place he'd seen in the little dim moonlight let in when he'd opened the door. There was a dormer on the other side of the slanted roof—which, like Hannibal's attic in the Swamp, rose to a point a foot and a half short of his own height—and after a few minutes his eyes adjusted to the still denser dark, so that he could guess at the shapes that lay all around him, breathing deeply, heavily, in the vermin-infested dark. Still, it was less crowded than the jail cell, quieter and far cleaner.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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