Then it was as if she had been seized by an invisible lover, forcing her even further backwards until the lotus position could 231no longer hold and her neck arched back until her head hit the floor, hard, again and again; and with her fingers buried deep inside her own body, she spread her big, strong thighs wide apart and let herself go until she met the wall, writhing all the while as though she were out of her mind.

Then she was suddenly calm, as though she had been knocked unconscious. Her fingers lay lifeless, entangled in the thick bush around her groin, streaked with the red blood she had daubed on herself. Her body was white and doughy as she gasped in long, trembling breaths. Around each of her large, light-brown nipples she had drawn a heptagram with strange letters and symbols by the points of the star. On her stomach she had drawn a star inside a circle, with another symbol in the centre, and around her groin there was a blood-red chain of even more figures and signs.

Then she came to and looked straight at me.

Her eyes bulged and an expression of rapture crossed her lips, as though for a second she believed I was a messenger from beyond, an emissary from the Prince of Darkness, someone who would perform his master’s acts with her and guide her into new rituals. Then her eyes went back to normal, she sat up with a start, grabbed her dressing gown and covered herself. As she rose to her feet she stood there for a moment in all her naked splendour, eyes flashing, crimson with confusion from the neck upwards, then she turned her back on me, wrapped the dressing gown around herself, shuffled her feet into worn-out slippers, spun round and met me with crossed arms and her face ablaze.

‘Who are you?’ she snarled. ‘What are you doing here?’

I backed away, into the cluttered sitting room, with my legs against a chair, almost losing balance, while she tore the curtain aside and came after me.232

Then the normality of the sitting room seemed to bring her to her senses. She drew the curtain to and stepped half a metre into the room, as imperious as a matron, though less flushed now and her voice not quite so authoritative, as she said: ‘This is a breach of my privacy. You have no right to burst in here like this. I asked you who you were.’

I raised my hands in a disarming gesture, still shaken by the bizarre scene I had just witnessed. ‘My name’s Veum. Varg Veum. And I’ve come from … the past.’

She grimaced. I recognised her from the photograph, but her hair was lighter now. Her eyes were dark blue, and there was still something febrile and charged about her: she was breathing hard and her mouth was half open, and I couldn’t help but notice remnants of blood on the blonde down over her top lip. In the light-blue, quilted dressing gown she could have been a housewife who had overslept and suddenly found the chimney sweep at her door. But I knew better.