The door is made of steel with an iron ring for a handle. I jerk it open and fall through onto a scrap of lawn cloaked in darkness. The wind is blowing strongly in my face and I can see a metal gangway leading across a canal to an island dominated by vegetation. Bruised and wobbling, I run across and the gangway deposits me in a hedge maze.

I don’t want to go in there.

Where am I really, in real life? I try to picture the layout of the lobby. I haven’t encountered anybody in the stairwell, but people probably take the lift. If I can manage to sleepwalk into the reception area, someone will see me and call the police.

But if I’ve descended all the way to the basement, I could be fucked. It’s just impossible to tell. Is the wind in my dream also in reality, or am I just standing by a ventilator fan?

‘Martin Elstree, show yourself. You won’t, will you? You’re afraid to face me here because I’ll be just as strong as you are, if not stronger. You’re afraid.’

No response.

‘Murder by remote control is for cowards,’ I say to the air. ‘Where are you? Give me the satisfaction of a fair fight.’

Now the maze is all around me. No gangway, no island, no canals. Hedges, everywhere. They are privets, dense, impenetrable and trimmed to bonsai-standard precision. They look like Minecraft hedges, but they’re real.

I wander through the stupid thing for a long time before I find my way to the centre. There’s a flagstone courtyard in the middle of which is a trapdoor that opens in a patch of blue sky. It’s painted white with the Creeper’s morphine symbol for decoration and another iron-ring handle. Being in the middle of the sky, it appears to go nowhere.

This makes me suspicious. It’s too neat. Real dreams are messy and don’t make sense, they’re not paint-by-numbers. This is more like a VR game.

I grab the iron ring and open the trapdoor to reveal a stone wall with a steel ladder fixed to it, ascending through into a tunnel of utter darkness embedded in the surface of blue sky. Cold wind blasts into my face and I hear gulls up there.

I start up the ladder, all the while pressing mentally against the confines of the scenario. I need to turn this dream to my advantage. It’s not very sophisticated; I should be able to use it to punch through to Martin Elstree’s psyche and take control. The dream is weak; it’s not convincing. He’s got to be lurking around here somewhere, pulling the strings of my subconscious.

‘Come on, Martin,’ I call. ‘You’re not so scary now, are you? You want a fight, you got it. Stand and face me.’