Copper Jones turned up late on Friday night at 'Ossie' Oster's place in prefab number seventeen. The family was woken up and given the bad news. 'Ossie' found it hard to make any sense of the news, and Copper Jones wondered if he had understood. Copper Jones was what Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) called 'a messenger'.

Walter Benjamin:
"A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead. For the community of all the dead is so immense that even he who only reports death is aware of it."

Similar knocks to those made by 'Copper Jones' are being made on unsuspecting doors every night of every week. Road 'accidents' have come to be regarded as some kind of law of nature. They are the modern day equivalent to being savaged by wolves in the dark forests of ancient times. (Except that today's 'wolves' have been fashioned and designed and glamourised by humans themselves.)
Some tricky logistical problems come with death in a prefab. When a coffin is wheeled in people areuncertain about where to put it. The hall is too small. the kitchen is out. The biggest room - the sitting room - is the obvious place, but place the coffin here and everyone can feel overwhelmed by the grief of it all. So it will often go into one of the two bedrooms. In 'Ossie' Oster's case it was placed in the bedroom where the ghost stories were once told, where you could hear the sound of trains hiss their way through the tunnel in the woods, where the paper-thin prefab walls acted as antennae into the surrounding darkness.