It was no use. The dreams were in Isaac’s mind, and there was no escape. He dreamed that he dreamed other people’s dreams, and realized that his dream was true.

All he could do was try, with a febrile, terrified intensity, to remember which of the dreams was his own.

There was a frantic chirruping coming from somewhere close by. It wound its way through a skein of the images that gusted through Isaac’s head, then grew in intensity until it ran through his mind as the dominant theme.

Abruptly, all the dreams stopped.

Isaac opened his eyes too quickly and swore with the pain that gushed into his head with the light. He reached his hand up and felt it lolling against his head like a big, vague paddle. He laid it heavily across his eyes.

The dreams had stopped. Isaac peeked through his fingers. It was day. It was light.

“By . . . Jabber’s . . . arse . . .” he whispered. The effort made his head ache.

This was absurd. He had no sense of time lost. He remembered everything clearly. If anything, his immediate recollection seemed heightened. He had a clear sense of having lolled and sweated and wailed under the influence of the dreamshit for about half an hour, no longer. And yet it was . . . he struggled with his eyelids, squinted at the clock . . . it was half past seven in the morning, hours and hours since he had fought his way onto the bed.

He propped himself on his elbows and examined himself. His dark skin was slick and grey. His mouth reeked. Isaac realized that he must have lain almost motionless for the whole night: the covers were a little rucked, that was all.

The terrified birdsong that had woken him started again. Isaac shook his head in irritation and looked for its source. A tiny bird circled desperately in the air around the inside of the warehouse. Isaac realized that it was one of the previous evening’s reluctant escapees, a wren, obviously afraid of something. As Isaac looked around to see what had the bird so nervous, the lithe reptilian body of an aspis flew like a crossbow bolt from one corner of the eaves to the other. It plucked the little bird from the air as it passed. The wren’s calls were cut short abruptly.

Isaac stumbled inexpertly out of bed and circled confusedly. “Notes,” he told himself. “Make notes.”

He snatched paper and pen from his desk and began to scribble down his recollections of the dreamshit.

“What the fuck was that?” he whispered out loud as he wrote. “Some cove’s doing a damn good job of reproducing the biochymistry of dreams, or tapping it at source . . .” He rubbed his head again. “Lord, what sort of thing is it that eats this . . .” Isaac stood briefly and glanced at his captive caterpillar.

He was quite still. His mouth gaped idiotically, then worked up and down and finally shaped words.