“It started when I did a piece on urban legends. You have all your usual stuff, modern myths and burgeoning folklore, some funny, some horrible, some creepy, everything you’d expect to hear. But I started hearing new ones.”

“Like what?”

“Just rumours, snippets of stories. Someone saw a gunfight where people threw fire. Someone saw a man leap over a building, or a woman just disappear.”

Inspector Me tilted his head. “So the modern urban legend is about superheroes?”

“That’s what I was thinking, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve been hearing whispers about an entire subculture where this stuff goes on. Lynch said it’s everywhere, if you know what to look for.”

“I see. And did Lynch claim to be such a superhero?”

“Lynch? No. God, no. I mean, he wasn’t well, obviously. He had visions, he said. That’s what he called them, visions. He’d had them since he was a teenager. They scared the hell out of him. He was sent to psychiatrist after psychiatrist, given pill after pill, but nothing worked. He’d describe these visions to me and they seemed so vivid, so real. He couldn’t hold down a job, couldn’t maintain a relationship… He ended up homeless, drinking too much, muttering away to himself in doorways.”

“And this,” Inspector Me said, “was your source?”

“I know he sounds unreliable.”

“Just a touch.”

“But I stuck at it, listened to what he was saying. Eventually, I learned how to separate the ramblings from the… well, the facts, I suppose.”

“What kinds of things did he see?” asked the girl.

Kenny frowned. He didn’t really understand what gave a student on work experience the right to question him, but Inspector Me didn’t object, so Kenny reluctantly answered. “He saw the apocalypse,” he said. “He saw a few of them, to be honest. The first one concerned these Dark Gods, the Faceless Ones, whatever he called them. Someone banished them eons ago, nobody knows who, and they’ve been trying to get back ever since. When he was seventeen, Lynch had a vision in which they returned. He saw millions dead. Cities levelled. He saw the world break apart. He kept having these visions, and every time it would be some new aspect, some new viewpoint from which to watch the world end. He was convinced we were all going to die one night, a little under three years ago. He said these things, these god-creatures, would emerge through a glowing yellow door between realities. Of course no one would listen to him. And then the night came when the world was going to end… and it didn’t. And the visions stopped.”

“I love stories with a happy ending,” Inspector Me said.

“It wasn’t over, not for Lynch. More visions came to him. He predicted the Insanity Virus, you know.”