A magic lantern was flickering in his head, bombarding him with a succession of images. This was no zöetrope with an endlessly repeated little visual anecdote: this was a juddering bombardment of infinitely varied moments. Isaac was strafed with a million scintillas of time. Every fractioned life juddered as it segued into the next and Isaac would eavesdrop on other creatures’ lives. He spoke the chymical language of the khepri crying because her broodma had chastised her and then he snorted derisorily as he the head stableman listened to some half-arsed excuse from the new boy and he closed his translucent inner eyelid as he slipped beneath the cold fresh waters of the mountain streams and kicked towards the other vodyanoi coupling orgiastically and he . . .

“Oh Jabber . . .” He heard his voice from deep inside that cacophonous emotional onslaught. There were more and more and more and they came so fast, they overlapped and blurred at the edges, until two or three or more moments of life were occurring at once.

The light was bright, when lights were on, some faces were sharp and others blurred and invisible. Each separate splinter of life moved with portentous, symbolic focus. Each was ruled by oneiric logic. In some analytical pocket of his mind Isaac realized that these were not, could not be, grots of history coagulated and distilled into that sticky resin. Setting was too fluid. Awareness and reality intertwined. Isaac had not come unstuck in others’ lives, but in others’ minds. He was a voyeur spying on the last refuge of the stalked. These were memories. These were dreams.

Isaac was spattered by a psychic sluice. He felt fouled. There was no more succession, no one two three four five six invading mindset moments clicking briefly into place to be illuminated by the light of his own consciousness. Instead he swam in mire, a glutinous cesspit of dreamjuice that flowed in and out of each other, that had no integrity, that bled logic and images across lifetimes and sexes and species until he could hardly breathe, he was drowning in the sloshing stuff of dreams and hopes, recollections and reflections he had never had.

His body was nothing but a boneless sac of mental effluent. Somewhere way away, he heard it moan and rock on the bed with a liquid gurgling.

Isaac reeled. Somewhere in the flickering onslaught of emotion and bathos he discerned a thin, constant stream of disgust and fear that he recognized as his own. He struggled towards it through the sludge of imagined and replayed dramas of consciousness. He touched the tentative dribble of nausea that was indisputably what he was feeling at that moment, held fast, centred himself in it . . . Isaac clung to it with radical fervour.