"Many years later, when he faced his own personal firing squad (which he didn't actually face but sort of chewed) my brother, Seymour “Seymour” Gassbag, would remember the night, some 200 years or so earlier when, during a siege of Ebola fever in our family, our sister Fanny was moved into the room that we shared with eight or nine of our pustulous, febrile siblings, all of whom would die."