A woman has dinner with an old acquaintance who has gained a reputation for financial wizardry, hoping to get some advice for how to invest some money her husband has recently acquired. The acquaintance takes her to a grotesque mannequin cum radio receiver that she insists has been her family’s advisor in all matters for three generations and locks her into a basement room with it. When the woman emerges three days later she finds that she has been transformed herself into some sort of oracle channeling the arcane messages of the idol, and is pressed into service dispensing unintelligible answers to an endless stream of supplicants.
This is another story from Gavin’s “grotesquerie” collection, and it might be even more disturbing than the last. It leans into the squalor and neglect of the acquaintance’s home, and the grotesqueness of the idol, and wraps it all in a story with nothing but nightmare logic.