Customer Service Representative v. Customs Officer

After the burial of the dog-masked boy and the duel between the Customer Service Representative and the Custodian, the dueling ground grows quiet. The day's warm, a breeze wafts through the valley. It cools the CS Rep, who lies in the grass under the oak, napping. He falls in and out of sleep until dark.

He'd heard the Custodian jabber about a swarm of maniacs who shot from the forest and nearly killed him. Though he doubts what he'd heard--with good reason, given the Custodian's bizarre continence--because he can't explain the death of the dog-masked boy, he feels a growing dread as the sun falls behind the peak to the west, and night falls.

Throughout the night he hears sounds from the forest. He makes out the distant, barely audible throb of drums.

And from the west, too, he hears sounds: not drumming but the mild tones of a far-off waltz, carried by the breeze.

They issue hours apart from one another, the waltz coming decidedly after the drumming, and continuing throughout most of the night.

The Customs Officer arrives the next morning with a satchel full of bureaucratic stamps.

I bring my own stamps, she says brusquely, from home. I don't make them, I buy them from a catalogue. Government issued stamps are generally substandard is the reason.

She shows him several stamps of hers without him having asked. A list of some of the stamps shown:

- Rejected Foodstuffs
- Unsanitary Packaging
- Potentially Riotous
- Of Questionable Moral Composition

They raise their guns, their guns go off.