As the light begins to dim Mr Udnam hits the floor – his breathing is ragged. Colour drains from his face. Jessie stands over him. Her horns are silhouetted in his black eyes as the light goes out in them.

Jessie and Elise, Hope – they too are fading.

Archie opens the front door wide and shouts down into the stair…

– An ambulance, somebody, please, please! My wife! Agnes needs an ambulance.

Dora gets up, knocking the Ouija board to the floor.

There is a blue light flashing on Lauriston Place as an ambulance pulls out from the Royal Infirmary. The Victorian hospital’s huge windows watch it go, its windscreen wipers barely able to stop the rain lashing off it. Dora Noyce is stood at the entrance to No. 10 Luckenbooth Close, ready to wave them down and take them upstairs to her friend. Tears pour down her face in the rain. Upstairs, a man’s body is inert and gone. Archie holds his wife like he never has. Knowing he got it wrong and that he should have held her like this every single day, howling at this cursed building for taking his wife away.

Agnes drifts.

Angels above her rise up and up into light.

It’s so beautiful.

That moment of freedom – when souls are no longer tied to human pain.

What an awful and terrifying and wondrous mortal coil!

The angel sisters hold their hands out to her – as do all the other spirits she has helped over all these years. They are there too – lines and lines of them – leading up to the place of ancestors. She wants to follow them so badly! Somewhere far away, her husband shouts in the stairwell and footsteps pound up stairs. No. 10 Luckenbooth Close shakes. The fabric of time dissolves and, for a second, she sees exactly what Mr Udnam did. Then, her tiny circle of vision goes out entirely.

1963

Flat 6F6

William Burroughs (49) this building is a psychic vampire

AS LATE evening approaches the city’s sound softens but it still has its garish bursts. Street lights on Princes Street and Queen Street come on at once – all the way along the Royal Mile and down the hills to Stockbridge, the New Town, Leith and the South Side and over at the West End, Dalry and Gorgie. All the lamp posts create their moon glows for creatures to walk home. All of this while the poet stands at the window never more content than with his lover’s arms wrapped around him. Just to hold and be held, this is the only place he wants to be.

– So, if that’s how it works then do you think that the very first human who spoke was just the first person infected by the virus of language, as it were, Bill?

– I think the written word came before the oral tradition.

– Surely we spoke in grunts, or noises?