DOT OPENS the door. There is a small hammer on her mat. It looks like an antique. She’s reluctant to leave the little warmth there is in the flat. Pulls her beanie down. If she is to spend the bells following spirits – she’s glad to have had a drink already. The hammer is in her hand. It works by itself. With a feeling of being a conduit, willingly, she goes into her bathroom and raises it above her head. Claws into plasterboard. She gouges a hole into the bathroom wall. Musty air wafts up from inside the building. Her hand fits inside the cold cavity. Just cobwebs and dust. She tries to be gentle. This building has endured enough. It is a sickly patient! Dot: some kind of mad psychic doctor come to cure its rickets! That’s one to put on her CV. Dot – whose cracks are lined only with gold – feted Doctor of the Underworld: references – solely from the spirit realm.

The interviewer described her as non-able-bodied last time.

Dot isn’t a non-anything.

Fucking non-entity, that woman was. Her own mum was, too, when she thinks about it. Dot’s mother was always disgusted by her faulty child. Not arriving exactly as she should! Not doing what was expected at every single moment! Her mother always said, in her terse tone, that she wouldn’t let Dot ruin her life – oh no – she was far too strong for that. She wouldn’t let anyone ruin her life! The woman endured, piously, the terrible hardship of her daughter’s presence.

Fuck them all!

Tap. Tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

In the attic (her temple), thousands of deathwatch beetles stop what they are doing.

She knows who her disciples are!

Dot has looked them up.

Hacking into the Wi-Fi from the Witchery up the street – it is very satisfying.

There is nothing Dot can’t do with technology.

It’s like she was bred for it.

One day they will use technology to open up communication between this world and the rest of the universe and Dot will have no difficulty in gaining employment then. Her disciples of the attic are many and interesting. After conducting much research and finding various dead specimens to inspect more closely – she’s learnt that her only other living companions in this building come from the order Coleoptera, in the superorder Endopterygota. If that doesn’t make her Head of an Underworld, she doesn’t know what would.

Down below her, wooden joists throughout the whole building creak.

Metal echoes somewhere.

There is a shudder.

Dot stops – hammer in hand – guilty as charged – is her investigative surgery on the building going to be the final thing to make it fall?

With her in it?

No. 10 Luckenbooth Close is a very fragile fucking building.

There is nothing to say she will not be buried alive by tomorrow.

It’s a risk.