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work, it didn’t pay well, but enough to get by on; I was thrifty. After a few weeks, I felt settled enough to contact some old friends, sent text messages saying, simply, ‘I’m back. Get in touch.’ I went out drinking with them. They all said how well I looked, awkwardly skirted mention of my sickness. I did not, though, attempt to contact Rachel; there seemed no way I could make amends, and I thought seeing her might cut me to the bone.
    And that’s the end of this tale; a return to an ordinary, if slightly hollow, existence. At least till the day, frantic to share my woes with any who might understand, I placed the classifieds.
    Or almost the end. There’s an uncanny epilogue to relate. One evening, perhaps six weeks after I was released from the Fairchild Institute, while walking past Smithfields Market in a stupor, listening to music – I distinctly remember the song playing was Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ – a harrowing gospel-blues, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned, taking out my earphones. An old man stood there, smiling a thin-lipped smile.
    ‘Don’t remember me, eh?’ he said.
    I shook my head.
    ‘Well. I was the one warned you about them wolves.’
    Then I recognized him: the man who’d accosted me in the Saracen’s Head all those months ago. Thinking him a phantasm, I shook my head to clear my senses. But he was real.
    ‘Seems you didn’t take heed,’ he said, took a roll-up from his shirt pocket, lit it with a match struck on a filthy thumbnail. He cupped his hand round the flame, drew on the fag, got it smouldering.
    ‘You’d’ve done well to’ve listened to me,’ he went on, without taking the roll-up from his mouth, letting it dangle from his bottom lip.
    But I’d turned away. I put my earphones back in, set off briskly, not once looking back, Blind Willie’s hoarse zeal drowning out anything further he might have said.

I
    I’d had an eternity to brood over the writing of this memoir, to order my impressions, to consider by what alchemy to turn incident into prose; yet, when I came to set down the first words, to begin, I faltered. Baffled by its convolutions, I’d no idea at what point to open my story.
    Perhaps the proper way to have started would have been to introduce myself, give my name, but that’s something I couldn’t do. My memory’s no better than that allotted any common man, is entirely unsuited to immortality. The events I’ve written of, and those I’ve still to tell, seared, burnt, blistered, scarred my brain, but I’ve forgotten much else. My recall of names is especially poor; mine was lost to me long ago, as were those of the others I will write of: I’ve made up those used in this account.
    Deprived of this gambit of name-giving, that brazen alloy of brag and cozen, that feigns a laying bare, while claiming sway, it took me many hours of staring up at the wheeling constellations and ruminating before I hit on an opening. I knew I’d need to plunge in, write swiftly, allow myself to be swept along by the currents of my tale, or else I’d founder. I decided simply to begin at the beginning, cast my mind back to that time, long ago, when I saw the eldritch skull beneath the skin of the wonted world and my life was changed forever. But what happened to me on that dreadful night is only part of what I wish to set down here; I must, lest I lose the momentum I’ve built up, press on.

II
    Having found out the world I’d known was merely a bright painted scrim, and glimpsed the vile shambles on stage behind, I shambled through life, staggered, listless. My brain had baulked at what I’d seen, yet I was sure it was no delusion. The ground beneath my feet had been undermined; I felt it might at any instant give way, and I fall through into some dread cavern. The next year and a half passed in routine and tedium; my seared nerves took solace in the bland and dull. After a while, though, I began to gag on that