Status Updates From Empusion

6. The patients

…it was hard to rid oneself of the impression that Lukas despised others. This contempt was like s skeleton; without it he might have collapsed and dissolved like a melting snowman. But inspire of that, Wojnicz thought he seemed weak, as if made of flimsy material that looked good from the outside but would not last.

Attaboy Wojnicz!

5. Holes in the ground
…it feels as if they are standing on a stage, as if this is the overture to an opera, and the spectators in this theater are the trees, blueberry bushes, moss-coated stones and some fluid, ill-defined presence that is moving like streams of warmer air among the mighty trunks, boughs and branches.

lucius’s adventures were like dreadful torment because the threat of never managing to return to his own shape was always hanging over him, the threat that he would die as a donkey, and that his real nature, his internal existence, would never be recognized!

The outer and inner existence, with one of them being interchangeable deserves full attention here…

Empusa has already been named a few pages before (p87), and now the issue of shapeshifting passes by in a casual memory of Mieczys’s. Also, he blends Thilo with his childhood friend Tolek, in a non-erotic parallel with Pribislav Hippe and Clawdia Chauchat.