‘You have some nerve,’ the woman says. ‘You can’t come into people’s dreams and terrify us half to death. Paralysing us. Sucking the air out of our lungs. It’s sick. Get out of my head!’

‘I’m not in your head, madam. You’re in my head.’

‘No, that’s called feedback, you pillock,’ she says, poking him with a bony finger.

‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about. We’re just trying to improve cognition.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my cognition! I have some memory lapses, that’s all.’

‘Actually, you are being treated for dementia, Gladys,’ says an upright old dead man in a chunky cardigan and red turban.

Bernard finds himself up against the brick wall with its ovens. The dead are around him, their rotting faces and drooping eyes and wagging fingers all trained on him. No one sees me.

‘You come into my room at night. You have a white face and a black cloak and you crush my chest and I can’t move and I can’t breathe,’ Gladys says. ‘Maybe I can’t remember what I had for breakfast but I remember that.’

‘I do nothing of the kind,’ Bernard says stiffly, trying to ward them off without touching them, which should be comical but is really just disturbing. ‘I assure you, all of you are very important and I have your best interests at heart, but I can’t work when you harass me this way!’

This crowd reminds me of the corpse I encountered when I tried to dreamhack the Creeper. And I am dreaming them in colour . . . are they all conscious inside this dream of Bernard’s? Is that even possible?

‘Who are these people, Bernard?’ I say.

He rolls his eyes. ‘Oh, not you a-bloody-gain.’

‘What have you been doing to them?’ I look around at the faces in the crowd, and that’s when I see a familiar face. O’s sister Daphne is here, and I realise that the man in the cardy and turban is an elderly soldier from her care home, what was his name? Captain something. Captain Singh!

‘I want to wake up now,’ Bernard says. ‘I know this is a dream because in real life people’s arms don’t fall off. Get away from me, you zombies!’

‘We’re not zombies,’ says Captain Singh in frigid tones. ‘We are human beings, but you, sir, are a disgrace to science.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You’re a disgrace. So I’m not the only one you did this to? What about Melodie? You terrorised her and she ran away from you but she wasn’t dreaming, she was really running. Right off a rooftop to her death. You’re . . . I didn’t use to believe in evil, but you’re evil.’