He limps along the endless length of the Rue de Vaugirard, wincing at the throbbing blister on his heel, past throngs of students and housewives and businessmen enjoying the sun-kissed air. As he approaches a cinema, he slows to study the films on show.

A few people trickle out of the theatre with a desultory air and blink like moles in the light filtering through the lindens. A strange time to see a film, he muses, on such a beautiful afternoon. But perhaps, like him, they are desperate to escape their lives.

As he turns away, a man steps out of the cinema and tilts his head to look at the sky. In that instant, at 16:39 on 18 May 1969, the world as he knew it shatters into bits.

A man steps out of a cinema. He can scarcely breathe when their eyes meet for a tantalising second then flick away. With a grim set to his mouth, the man lights a cigarette and exhales the blue smoke into the air. He glowers as he looks at his watch. Merde. Spits on the pavement, walks away.

He follows. Sucking in air as his heart crashes against his ribs. When the man stops at a kiosk in front of the Pasteur Institute to buy a newspaper, he studies his profile. The aquiline nose, the flared nostrils, those agate eyes. How could it be? He’s supposed to be dead. But there he stands, jaw clenched, rage oozing from his skin, very much alive. A familiar silver ring, intricately carved, glints on the man’s finger.

There’s the proof.

He’s older of course. He hasn’t seen that face for nearly ten years. But he knows that face as if it were his own. Every line of the cruel visage is etched in his brain. The voice thick with venom. That villainous madman who’d tortured his mother. He was supposed to be dead.

Blood pulses in his ears; his hands curl into fists. He longs to leap at the man’s throat and squeeze until his eyes bulge in terror.

The man continues down the street, walking faster now. He follows, nearly running to keep up as the golem ploughs onward, weaving through the crowd, as if he senses he’s being stalked.

He tries to close the distance between them without attracting attention. But the man is thirty metres ahead when he steps to the curb and hails a taxi. The look on his face is one of contempt. A dagger to the chest. His hands shake, he can’t breathe. As the man reaches for the handle of the taxicab, he begins to run.

‘Monster! Traitor! You’re supposed to be dead.’

The man’s chin jerks up and they lock eyes briefly before he steps into the taxi and speeds away.

He drops to his knees, gasping for air as the pavement spins and the world goes black.