There’s still nothing anywhere about the murder, the body. The palpable sensation of his throat in my hands hasn’t faded. I know that I killed a real man, and not a sending. I can’t sleep, though, and that’s a problem. It’s beating me down. A confession to the police might enable me to sleep, but more likely it would mean placing myself under the sway of the beast.

Nothing in my daily routine is disturbed. No one is the wiser. Some say I look a little tired, a bit under the weather, and suggest I take a sick day or two, but everyone is so bound up in their own problems that they haven’t got much attention to spare for me. Otherwise, my days follow on with comforting regularity; being too tired to think is in some ways a help to me in my work, and even though that outstretched hand begging alms is always floating somewhere in my field of vision, I don’t suppose anyone else can see it. No one has asked me about it.

But now, down the long hallway, raked with the golden light of late September that the window louvers break apart, golden light that shouldn’t be there, a figure I know vanishing just now at the end, stepping just out of sight, a grown woman, a white skirt—I hear the word whispered—

“Snowy!”

My voice screaming it in my memory, in silence. I’m frozen in place for only a moment. My head light and my hands and feet like ice, I rush after you, not a little girl but a full-grown woman, as if she had never fallen—

Now I can’t stop panting, and in my sleepless condition I feel like I’m going to faint, and I hurry to the bathroom to splash water on my face. No towels. I rub my face with my hands and dry them beneath the blower, lean against the wall my face dripping onto the floor, swaying.

The beast is here. It’s the day of the Purlieus isn’t it? Why the hell didn’t I remember? Haven’t I always taken special care of this day?

It can’t come for me directly. These things can only come at us in golden light at sunset, in the shadow of the old beech trees and the gnarled roots of oak trees. The beast can bring these things along, and make them, but it can only get me if I come to it, if I allow myself to be tricked or confused by what I see around me instead of sticking closely to my own inner guidance. Step one, get out of the bathroom; step two, get out in public where you can be seen, where there are witnesses.