It is on me, literally. The – I don’t even want to say it – what comes out. Of the baby. And the baby is so real, even more real than a real baby, if that’s possible. Blood, intestines, part of a dark and shining liver, and the baby stops crying and she looks into my eyes, tears catching the light on her miniature perfect cheeks. She looks about one year old. Her juice cup falls on the floor. Her toy lion is covered with grey blood.

I’m full of rage.

‘No you don’t.’ I say it over and over as I put my hands on her. I push her insides back where they belong like I would handle a spilled handbag, refusing to be dismayed. I am determined to heal it up, make it as right as if the injury never happened.

‘It’s going to be OK,’ I tell her, and I mean it. ‘Just a bad dream.’

Undoing something that is already done is hard, but I do it. I overwrite. This is my dream. I am in control. Her parts go back inside. The bleeding stops. The wound seals.

‘You’re OK,’ I say to the baby, in my talking-to-babies-and-puppies voice.

But I hear a ticking sound, like a stopwatch.

And the baby explodes in my face.

Flowers for Algernon: the club remix

Flowers for Algernon: the club remix

I am glad to be awake, but I’m physically shaking and it takes me fifteen minutes in the shower to calm down. Luckily it is almost morning. I feel I’m under an evil shadow. I tell myself no actual babies were murdered in the making of this dream – what kind of disclaimer is that? When I think about some innocent sleeping child being terrorised I feel sick and somehow at fault. Then I remember that some stupid parent must have put their baby to sleep using Sweet Dreams even though it’s not licensed for children. Shandy won’t be up yet, but I leave her a message asking whether she knows about this sort of thing happening and what can be done. Almost as an afterthought, I tell her about O finding Bernard Zborowski working in a start-up, too.

But the feeling of guilt lingers. I know I’m only diverting my attention away from the possibility that the Creeper is the creation of my own imagination. What if the Creeper is just an archetypal darkness? It started out as Mel’s darkness personified, and now maybe it’s my darkness personified – as if I’ve caught the Creeper from Mel like a virus. Ugh. Horrible thought. That would mean that some part of me cut that child open, that somewhere in London a baby is crying inconsolably because of me. I can’t stand it.

A message from Mel is also waiting for me.