The moon, high in the early spring sky, silvered the long-concealed room with a glow that lent the objects within the quality of a bas relief. The dark figure, though, saw nothing this night save the handkerchief. Its soft folds hung gracefully from his surgically gloved fingers, its pale linen seeming to shine with a luminescence of its own. Nor was he aware that beyond the stone walls the winter's stillness was occasionally pierced by the first tentative mating calls of insects and frogs slowly emerging from their seasonal torpor; within the building's dark confines the silence of nearly half a century still reigned.

Enclosed in that silvery silence, the dark figure stroked the linen lovingly, and from the depths of his mind, a memory began to emerge....