The Shrander was waiting for him in the master bedroom. He could see her clearly through the open door, standing at the bay window. Light poured round her thickened, monolithic silhouette, transfiguring the bare floor of the room, then spilled out onto the landing at Kearney’s feet, illuminating the rolls of dust beneath the cream-painted skirting board. Arranged on an inlaid table just inside the door he could see: books of matches; condoms in squares of foil; fans of Polaroid snapshots; a pair of oversized dice with symbols he didn’t recognise.

“You can come in,” the Shrander said. “You can step right in.”

“Why have you brought me here?”

At this a white bird flew past the three panes of the bay window, and the Shrander turned to face him.

Her head was no longer human. (Why had he ever thought it was? Why had anyone in the taxi queue thought it was?) It was the skull of a horse. Not a horse’s head, but a horse’s skull, an enormous curved bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip, and which looks nothing like a horse at all. A wicked, intelligent, purposeless thing which cannot speak. It was the colour of tobacco. There was no neck. A few shreds of coloured rag—perhaps they had once been ribbons, red, white and blue, studded with coins and medallions—hung where the neck might have been, forming a kind of mantle. This object tilted itself intelligently, looking up and sideways at Michael Kearney like a bird. Breath could be heard inside it. The body beneath, wrapped in its maroon woollen coat, stained and smelly with food, raised its pudgy arms in a proprietary yet generous gesture.

“Look,” ordered the Shrander, in her clear, childish, counter-tenor voice: “Look out here!”

When he did, everything lurched and there was nothing but blackness and a sense of enormous speed, a few dim points of light. After a moment, a chaotic attractor generated itself, churning and boiling in the cheap iridescent colours of 1980s computer art. Christ’s blood, Kearney thought, streaming in the firmament. He staggered, nauseated and vertiginous, and put out a hand to save himself: but he was already falling. Where was he? He had no idea.

“Real things are happening here,” the Shrander said. “Do you believe me?” In the absence of a reply she added:

“You could have all this.”

She shrugged, as if the offer was less attractive than she might have wished. “All of it, if you wanted. You people.” She thought for a moment. “The trick, of course, is to find your way around. I wonder,” she said, “if you know how close you are to that?”

Kearney stared wildly out of the window.

“What?” he said. He hadn’t heard a word.