I tentatively reached out to touch the building and with an almost seamless transition moved to a different dream. I was still Don Hector but it wasn’t high Summer any more, it was late Autumn, and a grey overcast portended of rain to come. I shivered, even though wearing an overcoat, and looked around. The blue Buick had gone but the Morpheleum remained, looking darker and more forbidding but identical and now in an overgrown wood with dead brambles, silver birch and saplings of ash, their branches bare, ready for the Winter. I knew where I was – in the overgrown gardens within the quadrangle back at HiberTech. This was the place where Don Hector went for peace and solitude. His and his alone.

But if I had thought I’d left Mrs Nesbit behind, I was mistaken. She was right there next to me in the Morpheleum. She wasn’t attached to the landscape, she was attached to me.

‘What’s happening?’ she said.

‘They’re not dead,’ I said in a state of confusion, airing my views about nightwalkers before I’d even realised it. ‘The catastrophic neural collapse brought on by Morphenox-induced Hibernational Hypoxia is not a collapse at all – it’s a state of displaced consciousness below the threshold of detection.’

I didn’t know what I was talking about; this was Don Hector speaking, not me.

‘We know that,’ said Mrs Nesbit, ‘hence the need for the cylinder. Now, let’s take this one step at a time. Are you still outside the temple to Morpheus?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go inside.’

I stepped forward and squeezed between the heavy bronze doors. The interior was the size of a badminton court and illuminated by narrow windows set deep into the thick masonry. There was a central aisle with two arcades running parallel on either side, separated from the main chamber by a series of arches that sat atop columns of a simple, unfussy design. I walked to the sanctuary at the rear, where a domed roof was centred above a dusty altar covered in offerings to ensure sound and safe sleeping. Mostly flowers and foodstuffs, they had rotted away many years before and were little more than desiccated scraps.

‘Don’t make us do anything you might regret,’ said Mrs Nesbit, who was now in the temple and casting a bluish glow onto the stonework, ‘because we can make our dreams into your nightmares.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘you could make that your mission statement and company motto.’

‘Bravely spoken,’ said Mrs Nesbit, ‘but we’ll have the last laugh. You’re almost out of dreamtime. We’ll speak again.’

She vanished abruptly, and my ear twitched as I heard the scratch of a shoe against stone. Partially hidden in the shadows was a man dressed in a medical orderly’s uniform of a collarless white jacket with a flap buttoned diagonally up the front. I recognised him immediately: Charles Webster, my confident and distinctly unwonky sleep-avatar.