“Get a fucking move on. It’s closer than ever. It wants me to do something.”

Together they bundled Meadows into the lift and down three floors. He seemed to wake up as they dragged him across the lobby and out to the canal bank. “Kearney?” he said repeatedly. “Is that you? Is there something wrong with me?” Kearney let go of him and began kicking his head. Sprake pushed his way between them and held Kearney off until he had calmed down. They got Meadows to the edge of the water, into which they dropped him, facedown, while they held his legs. He tried to keep his head above the surface by arching his back, then gave up with a groan. Bubbles came up. His bowels let go.

“Christ,” said Kearney reeling away. “Is he dead?”

Sprake grinned. “I’d say he was.” He tilted his head back until he was looking straight up at the faint stars above Walthamstow, raised his arms level with his shoulders, and danced slowly away north along the towpath towards Edmonton.

“Urizen!” he called.

“Fuck this,” said Kearney. He ran in the opposite direction, all the way to Lea Bridge, then got a minicab to Grove Park.

Every murder reminded him of the Shrander’s house, which in a sense he had never left. His fall had begun there, his deeply fallen knowledge imprisoned him there. In another sense, the Shrander’s pursuit of him in succeeding years was that knowledge: it was the constant fall into the awareness of falling. When he killed, especially when he killed women, he felt released from what he knew. He felt for an instant as if he had escaped again.

Bare grey dusty floorboards, net curtains, cold grey light. A dull house on a dull street. The Shrander, intact, irrefragable, enduring, stood in its upper room gazing magisterially out of the window like the captain of a ship. Kearney ran away from it because, as much as anything, he was frightened of the coat it wore. He was frightened of the smell of wet wool. That smell would be his last unfallen sensation.

The beak opened. Words were spoken. Panic—it was his own—filled the room like a clear liquid, an albumen or isinglass so thick he was forced to turn and swim his way through the open door. His arms worked in a sort of breaststroke while his legs ran beneath him in useless slow motion. He stumbled across the landing outside and straight down the stairs—full of terror and ecstasy, the dice in his hand—into the rainy streets, looking for someone to kill. He knew he wouldn’t be saved unless he did. A kind of lateral gravity was in his favour: he fell all the way from the Shrander’s house towards the railway station. To travel, he hoped, would be to fall away from falling, at some more acceptable, some more merciful angle.