After that the people began to die and others set fires around the street, but Glynis no longer remembered anything; still, he felt fine. One night there was a ruckus, and much yelling, and everyone was out of their houses except for him; and then the next day, Glynis was looking out his window and saw a man with a black face looking back at him, grinning widely, and he noticed the man had been speaking for some time.

‘It will keep the sickness segmented,’ the man had said.

‘Colca?’ Glynis asked.

‘I am Colca,’ the man said.

‘And how are you keeping in this warm weather?’ Glynis said.

‘It is for your own health,’ Colca continued. ‘We must keep to our houses.’

‘I remember when your skin was white,’ Glynis laughed, ‘and you, this tall.’

He put his hand out to demonstrate Colca’s former height, and nearly fell off his stool, which set him laughing again.

‘We are under curfew,’ Colca said, placing a nail behind his ear and lifting a plank of wood over the window. ‘Do not come out that door, or I will do what I must. There is no choice.’

The house then turned dark, and there was the sound of nails being driven into the frames. Everything shook and Glynis sneezed at all the dust that had been loosed.

‘Fine by me,’ Glynis had said.

And it was, because by then he could hardly see anything so having the window boarded made no difference, and he is still staring out of where it used to give onto the town. He has some ale left in the barrel, but his wife Aethelburga annoys him. She refuses to acknowledge the sickness; says it does not exist, that Colca made it up to control them so he could give free rein to his perversions.

‘Your brain cannot take all the reality pouring into it,’ he says, looking at her. ‘You prefer it in a more diluted form.’

‘What?’ Aethelburga asks.

She is standing above him now, and he sees her face is like rotten fruit.

‘Have you been listening to me?’ she asks.

He thought it the shade, but half of her face is pulped with a green bruise. It has closed over one of her eyes, plumping up the eyelid.

‘What happened to your face?’

She doesn’t say anything.

‘This ale tastes awful,’ he says.

‘You mistook the barrel for the pan yesterday and pissed in it,’ she says, ‘and yet you haven’t stopped drinking for a moment. You have grown worse than the animals. You must stop this.’

Glynis laughs at this, and then she is speaking again, but everything is dark and her speaking is so soft it is lulling him to sleep.

‘I said Eilís is sick.’

He thinks for a moment, but nothing comes to him.

‘Who is Eilís?’ he says.