I waited a few moments to get my breath back and for my heart to stop thumping.

It’s Hibernatory Narcosis, idiot.

The most dangerous side effects of anomalous inter-Winter rousing were never physiological, but psychological: narcosis in its mildest form was a sense of tingling or numbness, which then ran the gamut from feeling drowsy, to feeling drunk, to hallucinations where scraps of momentarily unsuppressed dreams caused reality ambiguity that could result in paranoia, dissociative behaviour and, in extreme cases, violence to oneself and others.

But it wasn’t all bad: on the plus side, I knew that thinking of Birgitta could bale me out of any hallucinations. It was a handy trick. I’d use it again. But on the down side, I was experiencing a similar narcosis to that of Watson, Smalls and Moody. And aside from the whole Birgitta dream, which they never mentioned, I was seeing things they had been seeing. Perhaps not in precisely the same way, but close enough – and it hadn’t done them any good.

I peered around the empty car park. It was gloomy and cheerless, with only the occasional drop of water splashing on the ground to punctuate the silence. My flashlight had dropped from my grasp and rolled under the car, where it was illuminating the left rear tyre. It was out of reach so I lay upon the concrete to squeeze under the Buick. I stretched out and touched the flashlight with my fingertips but it rolled away and the light fell upon another nightwalker, dead under the car. It was a woman with dark, matted hair.

I crawled under farther, grabbed the flashlight and was about to wriggle out when I felt a vice-like grip tighten around my upper arm. I jumped in fright and swung the flashlight around. I had been wrong: the nightwalker under the car was far from dead. Her teeth were yellow, her clothes filthy and her fingernails rough and broken. She gazed at me with a disconcerting absence of humanity and in the way an expectant hungry child might stare at an ice cream. Lloyd’s fears had been well founded: three Weetabix and a turnip a day had not been enough. I was also, I noted, in no immediate danger of being bitten. One of her dungaree straps had snagged around the car’s jacking point.

I was about to back out when she produced a low whispery growl, somewhere deep in her ragged throat. I stopped, but not because she’d spoken. Nightwalkers often knew a few words; it was so commonplace it wasn’t seen as a trick worth noting. No, the reason I stopped was because the short sentence was chillingly familiar.

‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘I  . . . love you.’

I stared into the violet eyes with a mixture of horror, surprise and loss – and I knew exactly who it was.

‘Birgitta?’