The Leather Funnel

In a house off the Avenue de Wagram, a collector of occult books keeps a room where every object has a history. On his reading table lies a wine-filler of blackened leather, brass at the rim, its narrow neck haggled and torn as though something had worried at it. He holds that an object present at a paroxysm of human feeling keeps that feeling, and gives it back to whoever sleeps beside it. His guest, a British Museum scholar who calls dream science quackery, agrees to test the theory on the couch.

What comes is a vaulted room: three judges in black, a fair-haired woman who does not flinch. The waking half of the night is quieter, and worse.