Hanging with Ben Bow is not exactly like spending quality time with Eliza. For one thing, Ben is three hundred years old, all creaky and shaky, while Eliza is young and healthy and amazingly flexible. For another, Eliza smells like seawater and clay — earthy smells that inspire lusty thoughts. Ben smells like Depends. Comparing Ben with Eliza is like comparing a sun-slaughtered crustacean to Venus herself.

Coffins don’t usually come across as conniving and crafty. Neither kind does, really. One kind is stiff and heavy and somber, and the other kind holds dead people.

But earlier this evening, as I was walking past the Coffinhouse on my way to nowhere in particular, Henry and Cory were standing on their porch and snickering. Actually snickering. I thought briefly about notifying the media, but then I remembered that it was me.

Dauntless reporter that I am, I scaled the steps to the Coffin Cabana and inquired.

“When you think about it,” Bo said, flexing his mahogany muscles as he pressed fire to steel, pushing toxic wisps of acrid smoke into the seaside air. He was continuing his work on the torpedo with the human face and ass. It reminded me of most of the Presidents this country has endured since I was born. “When you think about it, this world is Hell. I don’t just mean figuratively. I mean literally. Think about it. The people who wrote the Bible described hell as a place of fire, brimstone, sorrow, anguish, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I had an evening to kill. Things in The Village weren’t likely to heat up for a while, given that most of the Villagers pretty much keep vampire hours. And things in The Town had long since buttoned down, with people getting ready for evenings of fish boiled and consumed, teeth brushed, prayers offered, and flannel nighties donned for the impending 8.5-hour trip through Slumberland. “Early to bed and early to rise, and you’ll fish for cod ’neath sunny skies,” they all say. Actually, they don’t — but they could.

I was in The Village yesterday. Bo was not. It seemed like the perfect time for another chat with the most beautiful, graceful, sexy, alluring woman ever born into this species.

I’ll finish telling you about the Coffin dinner from a few days ago. Having disposed of the evening’s light chit-chat — covering the usual cocktail-party topics of politics, work, cold-blooded murder, that sort of thing — I sat down with Coffin, Inc., for a nice New England meal. Cory had rustled up some broiled salmon, boiled potatoes, boiled spinach, and boiled corn, a meal that undoubtedly put a strain on the island’s supply of fresh water. Henry had rustled up some more whiskey.

Previously, in Island Wars… Donovan Graham wants to travel the world and write about exotic places. His first gig, on Grand Seal Island off the coast of Maine, has seen him walking barefoot on hot coals, enduring a Talent Night that was downright freaky, falling madly in love with a gorgeous sculptress named Eliza, and witnessing the escalating show of force between the United States and Canada.