Jasmine shook her head. ‘He lost his cellphone in the park, remember? Anyhow, I ain’t got no credit left. Incoming calls only.’ She hit some keys and waited. Then she sighed. ‘No messages.’

Woollard was rooting around in a ramshackle room that was part office, part living room. A bare light bulb dangled down from a flex in the ceiling, so low that Tom nearly banged his head on it. He stepped carefully; the floor was barely visible under piles of clutter and scattered papers. The walls were covered in arcane astrological charts, wax-sealed scrolls and ancient-looking pieces of parchment packed with strange scrawls in stranger languages. Incongruous amid all this mystical bric-a-brac was a dog-eared certificate in a dirty frame; Woollard’s doctorate in science from Yale University. The document had been signed almost thirty years ago, and looked as battered and faded now as the man himself.

Tom wondered what had happened to the bright scholar to bring him as low as this dank, drink-stinking apartment. Suddenly, he felt lonely. It was still dark through the open blinds, and he wondered where Kate was right now. Weird. He used to think first of his family when he felt low. Now it was Kate’s face that swam into his mind; that look on her face, soft and serious all at the same time …

With a grunt of satisfaction, Woollard finally seemed to find what he was looking for: a dirty glass. He poured himself a generous measure of Jack Daniels, then drained the glass in one gulp. ‘I’m sorry that I can’t offer you any,’ he said, looking at Jasmine and Rico in turn, ‘but you’re not over twenty-one.’ Then he squinted at Tom, as if noticing him for the first time. ‘Who is this?’ he asked Jasmine.

‘A friend,’ she answered.

Tom felt vaguely flattered. ‘My name’s Tom,’ he added.

Woollard smiled coldly, then poured himself another drink. ‘You’ve noticed my unusual interior decorations?’

‘They’re, uh, a little hard to miss,’ Tom confirmed.

‘And now you think I’m just a pathetic old lush who hangs garlic around his windows and uses black magic to shore up his ruins, hmm?’

‘No, sir,’ Tom said uneasily.

Woollard fixed him with those burning eyes. It was as if they alone held his vitality, and the rest of his body had quietly withered away around them. ‘There are many dark things in this city,’ he said. ‘Phantoms and fiends and creatures of the night. I’ve heard them, seen them. I’ve seen such things …’ He glared suddenly at Jasmine. ‘Sleep does not come easy to me. These charms and doctrines, fragile though they might seem, lend me a little security.’