Someone’s in the room. The door is shut. But someone’s here. There’s a shadowy person-shaped presence in the darkness. Its edges are indistinct, and its arms and head appear to be moving as though a current of water is going through it. The arms wobble and detach, then reattach, like it’s a dark and scary version of Morph the claymation dude – but Morph is friendly and this thing is most definitely not friendly. The longer I look at it, the more alarmed I feel. There’s a deep sense of the unnatural about it – like I’ve opened a crack to a place that no person was meant to see. And here it is in my room. There’s a shrivelling inside me, followed by the full-on slap of panic. I want to crawl out of my own skin, run up the wall, back myself into the corner. Get far away.

Run, run, scream, open the window, bang on the wall, get help!

But I can’t move. I can’t even move my eyes. I can’t not look at it. I can’t open windows in my AR – which would enable me to awaken O or to call someone – I’m completely frozen.

It has control.

I can hear my own squeaking breath. Why can’t I move? I try to raise a hand, move a foot – anything – but I feel like I weigh a thousand kilos and none of my muscles work. I can hear my heart in my ears. Sounds like that time Shandy made me run a 5k Race for Life with her and I had no idea how far 5k actually is, but it turned out to be a lot farther than just running for a bus, which was all the training I had ever done. Now I will never see Shandy again and I will never run again and when they find my body I don’t know what they’ll say, but—

Roman. Roman needs to know about this. I’ve seen the Creeper. It’s in my room. It wants me.

That means this is a dream. I am in my room and I’m awake but I’m not awake, this is still a dream, and I’m a dreamhacker. I have to fight back. If it’s a dream I can make things happen.

Levitate, I tell myself. Flying’s one of my favourite things to do in dreams, and it’s easy if you’re lucid.