He had the upper hand there for a second, but he’s thrown it away.

‘So now I’m a muppet, am I? Charming. Where’s the coffee?’

I go back to the sitting room and he follows me. He’s on the defensive again. He stands awkwardly, pretending to look at the titles on O’s bookshelves before he realises most of them are in Cyrillic. Eventually he gives up.

‘Look, let’s just stop fighting, can’t we?’

‘I’m not fighting. I’m not even properly awake.’ I guzzle coffee.

‘OK, good. Because I need to explain something. I haven’t wanted to bring this up before because I don’t expect you to be receptive to it, but it’s becoming important now that you’ve been attacked personally.’

‘What? Spit it out, Roman.’

He starts ticking off points on his fingers.

‘I’ve talked to all the sleep researchers. I’ve talked to partners of victims, I’ve talked to witnesses. And I’ve concluded that . . . the Creeper isn’t a person. It’s a natural phenomenon.’

At first, I laugh. Then I realise he’s completely serious and my laughter goes cold. Freezing cold. His presumption. It makes me so angry, after everything that’s happened, that he thinks he can tell me my own business. My eyes narrow.

‘You’ve talked to people, have you? Aren’t you clever. Well, maybe you’d like to consider that I’ve seen the Creeper. I’ve had it in my dreams. I’ve had it crushing me down trying to suck the life out of me, trying to devour me. It’s a person, and it’s a bad person. A malevolent person. I know what I’m talking about. You don’t know anything. You should be the one taking me seriously.’

‘I do! I do take you seriously. Just . . . OK, I get it. You’ve experienced it, you know. But can you entertain what I’m saying for one moment, just hear me out? Please?’

I don’t want to hear him out. But now I’m embarrassed about my tantrum so I pout and say, ‘Fine, talk.’

‘OK, so there’s this thing called R.E.M atonia, right? It’s a mechanism that stops us all acting out our dreams every single time we sleep. And of course it’s imperfect – people twitch in their sleep, talk in their sleep, even do coherent things like walk around and try to perform everyday actions. But it’s just a physical mechanism. Think of it like the brain taking itself offline to work on problems internally, without actually putting the body at risk. That’s what dreaming is.’

‘Thanks for the mansplanation, bruv. Mel’s problem was that she should have had R.E.M. atonia and stayed in bed, but she didn’t.’