His ear was bent over it, he called out, ‘It has a name, I can just hear it if I’m so close. I think it says it is Ada Cruickshanks. Yes! Ada Cruickshanks she’s called, Lucy! Your own Ada Cruickshanks!’

But as he showed me, holding his hand out, it leapt from his hand and, rolling itself with great speed, rushed from the room. Clod and I looked at each other for the tiniest of moments and fled after it.

All those escaped objects were rushing pell-mell in the same direction. They were skittering, thumping, crashing along the cellar walls, all speeding the same way. All hurrying to the same meeting. To the Gathering itself. But some of them did not make it, some of them tumbling forward suddenly grew larger, changed shape. A kettle skittering along, rolling, rolling, stopped being a kettle at each turn and grew bigger and greyer and became all of a sudden an old woman in a filthy floral print dress, thick legs, she sat there upon the ground and screamed and screamed.

‘Mary Staggs! Mary Staggs!’

Mr Briggs was at her in a moment, he had a swinging bucket and a spoon and he rushed to put the spoon to the poor old woman’s mouth, he shoved it in her and she stopped her screaming. Further along a bicycle wheel circled into a young boy with missing teeth, looking about him most peculiarly and wobbling upon his legs, very unsteady as if he’d quite forgotten how to walk, and he, coming to himself, hollered out, ‘Willy Willis! I’m Willy Willis! Mammy, Mammy! My mammy!’

The boot scraper waddled no further but suddenly stopped in a heap and was a fat man in a dented straw hat, mutton chops, looking most confused, and weeping, ‘Brian Pettifer, sea captain. Baltic. Kattegat. Gulf of Riga.’

Mr Groom was upon him and giving him grim physic as fast as he might.

All was confusion down there, a battle scene, objects rushing into people, and also serving Iremongers, upright and hollering and falling into objects. I saw a parlour maid fall to the ground and in an instant become a creamer jug. A leather Iremonger, a heap worker, leant against the wall and was very sudden a ladder. A body Iremonger, tall with shining hair parted exactly in the middle, was in a moment reduced to a leather satchel.

People dropping down around us, people pulling up.

And still rushing past all these people turning into objects and objects turning into people were so many other things, mostly sprung from Piggott’s room, all hurtling forward, towards, towards … I saw it then. Clod did too.

‘Lucy! Look, Lucy!’

Huge it was.

That Gathering.