At the entrance to the cemetery, with its gloomy lodge and war memorial, I hesitated. The plume was no longer there – it was pointless to go in. And I did not want to go in. There were no lights to guide us inside, it was a nature reserve, not a landscaped park, a place for birds and bats.

I scanned the surrounding rooftops, to see if the plume might have popped up in another direction. ‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked Pierce.

‘Are you sure?’ Pierce replied. ‘You look lost. Are we going the right way?’

My hunt for the plume continued, but its absence was as stubborn and disturbing as its recurrence had been. Time was slipping by. If I was going to find a place to sleep, I should do it soon. Then I could call my parents, or my sister, and try to make some longer-term arrangements. Make my ruin official. Pierce had evaded me to the last. Polly might still try to get a draft out of me, but even if I wanted to do the work, I doubted I could. I took out my phone to look at the time. Tamesis would know about hotels. Quin: he was the one I wanted to confront, but I could not imagine getting close to him.

A wisp, within. The plume would not simply disappear like that. It had meaning. It had to have meaning. I had shunned it and turned from it, and it had persisted, and that persistence had been a promise, that it would reveal itself. And it had not gone as soon as I told Pierce about it, it had been fuller and stronger and angrier than ever, dominating the sky above him, indisputably centred here, at the cemetery. And it had not vanished when we set out to pursue it, but shortly after, once we were committed.

‘Never mind,’ Pierce said. ‘I see it.’

He was staring past me, into the forested dark of the cemetery. When I turned, I saw he was telling the truth. A pillar of smoke climbed avidly above the trees, twisting and bulging with a fierce hunger, underlit by an infernal orange light. It was not the vast, distant cataclysm I had seen before, but it was, beyond question, real. And I fancied I could hear it: a keening whooping on the icy air.

‘You see that?’ I asked Pierce.

‘Plain as day,’ he said. He was transfixed by it, the expression on his face the same as when he had stood and watched his map burning. I was reminded of the ghastly fascination the plume had exerted over me the first time I had seen it.

‘That’s not possible,’ I said.

‘It’s close,’ Pierce said. ‘Can’t you hear it? It’s so close.’

Thick lines of crooked headstones like fans of fungus. Headless infants, handless angels. Tombs tipping into the dirt, or rearing from it. Even winter-bare, the trees and undergrowth hissed at our intrusion – this was not our place.