This is how the local undertaker describes a man he buried some weeks before: “He went into himself. He didn’t talk for a year and a half and then he choked on a sausage. You’d visit and he’d say nothin’ to you, but he’d know you were there.”

Their lives are put to the test. The storm rages outside and the water rises to the third step. Voices are lowered to whispers. At last they are forced to retreat to the upstairs.

The story brings to mind another time when a flood posed a question mark over humanity. That other crisis led to a new covenant. This time the refuge is a small upstairs bar where Caoimhin plays nostalgic 70’s pop and serves free pints. He comes to the realisation that these people are the only humanity he has, the only humanity to whom he can address his writing.

He experiences a profound sense of Acceptance. “I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last.”

He renounces his inner turmoil, his dissatisfaction with the world. Things have always been the same since the inn was established in 1648 and will always be the same. His creative acts can only have meaning in relation to the people who surround him. When he has accepted that, it will set him free to write again. All the madness that went before is dismissed as ‘the gloom of youth.’ He will not “go into himself” like the un-named man the local undertaker buried the week before – a man whose age is significantly given as one year older than the narrator.

The subtle horror of the story is left entirely implied.