The fat aerostats patrolled the skies over the city with restless, clumsy menace.

Arguments broke out with bizarre ease. Fights were common. The nocturnal misery reached out and took victims from the waking world.

In the Bleckly Refinery in Gross Coil, an exhausted crane operator hallucinated one of the torments that had ripped up his sleep the previous night. He shuddered just long enough to send the controls spasming. The massive steam-powered machine disgorged its load of molten iron a second too early. It spewed in a white-hot torrent over the lip of the waiting container and spattered the crew like a siege engine. They screamed and were consumed by the merciless cascade.

At the top of the great deserted concrete obelisks of Spatters the city garuda lit huge fires at night. They banged gongs and saucepans and shouted, screaming obscene songs and raucous cries. Charlie the big man told them that would keep the evil spirits from visiting their towers. The flying monsters. The dæmons that had come to town to suck the brains out of the living.

The raucous café gatherings in Salacus Fields were subdued.

The nightmares pushed some artists into frenzies of creation. An exhibition was being planned: Dispatches from a Troubled City. It was to be a showcase of art and sculpture and soundwork inspired by the morass of foul dreams in which the city wallowed.

There was a fear in the air, a nervousness at invoking certain names. Lin and Isaac, the disappeared. To speak them would be to admit that something might be wrong, that they might not just be busy, that their enforced, silent absence from regular haunts was sinister.

The nightmares were splitting the membrane of sleep. They were spilling into the everyday, haunting the sunlit realm, drying conversations in the throat and stealing friends away.

Isaac awoke in the throes of memory. He was recalling the extraordinary escape of the previous night. His eyes flickered, but remained closed.

Isaac’s breath caught.

Tentatively, he remembered. Impossible images assailed him. Silk strands a lifetime thick. Living things crawling insidiously across interlocking wires. Behind a beautiful palimpsest of coloured gossamer, a vast, timeless, infinite mass of absence . . .

In terror, he opened his eyes.

The web was gone.

Isaac looked around him slowly. He was in a brick cavern, cool and wet, dripping in the dark.

“You awake, Isaac?” said Derkhan’s voice.

Isaac struggled up onto his elbows. He groaned. His body hurt him in a variety of ways. He felt battered and torn. Derkhan sat a little way away from him on a ledge of brick. She smiled absolutely mirthlessly at him. It was a terrifying rictus.

“Derkhan?” he murmured. His eyes widened slowly. “What are you wearing?”

In the half-light emitted by a smoke-seeping oil-lamp, Isaac could see that Derkhan was dressed in a puffy dressing gown of bright pink material. It was decorated with garish needlework flowers. Derkhan shook her head.