I’m torn between the compulsion to wake Meera and save her, and the need to hunt down the entity that has got hold of her. I have to find out who is really behind the killings. I can’t keep peeling the onion. Sooner or later, I must arrive at the centre.

‘Stay awake, Meera. Something has hold of you. Everything you do in this dream, you’ll do in real life. I’ve seen too many people die. You need to sit down and stay still.’

She doesn’t listen. Now she’s wearing a mask – the same symbol-covered white mask, distorted like a scream. With an icy grip, she seizes hold of my arms. The navy suit she was wearing has morphed into a long black dress. She’s looking more and more like the Creeper. I want to break away from her grasp but at least if she’s holding me, she can’t throw herself off any heights.

‘Charlie. At last we meet.’ It’s the American voice from Mel’s dreams.

In a shaky voice I ask, ‘Who is speaking?’

Meera’s arms come around me. Her white mask bends over me. The American voice is laughing, too. I take one more step back in reflexive horror, but I haven’t realised how close we’re standing to the edge of the Sweet Dreams platform.

I go over the edge.

The platform, the scaffolds, the ledge of safety provided by BigSky are gone. Meera and I are tumbling arse-over-teakettle through the darkness. Her body goes slack, like a puppet’s, and as we fall it deflates, so that by the time we hit the water she’s just a black dress and a mask. Like the witch from Oz.

It doesn’t hurt to hit the dream water. So there’s that. I go under. Bubbles. Cold green. I come up in an impotent fury. I’m in a canal, still in the dream, clutching the empty black dress and the white plastic mask.

‘Where are you?’

No American voice. No answer.

I’m angry with myself for stepping back off the platform’s edge when I should have stepped forward into Meera. Now I’ve lost her. It’s like Mel all over again.

I’m not waking up yet. I have to trust Shandy to do her job. My job is to get inside the Creeper, find out where it really lives, what it really is. I’m so accustomed to running away and hiding that I must force myself to hunt, to pursue, to aggress. I swim to the bank with burning muscles and labouring breath. I haul myself out.