Once I woke up briefly, in a darkened nighttime room with two beds and a door and a man in a blue suit standing outside the door with a gun. The man in the bed next to me was familiar. He was asleep, and I remember thinking that there was something very urgent that I had to tell him, but I couldn't remember what it was and the file was missing—

Then the alarm went off and the medics came and they made me go back to sleep.

I don't remember much after that. Which is a mercy—the dreams were bad.

Mo tells me that for the first week they kept me heavily sedated—if they eased up on the chlorpromazine I started screaming and trying to eat my own fingers. She visited every day. She sat by my bedside and fed me, spooning mush into my mouth and making sure I didn't choke on it.

Angleton recovered much faster. Two nights under observation and they released him. Then he heard about me and kicked up a stink. They were planning on moving me to St. Hilda's. Angleton had a better idea of what was wrong with me and refused to take no for an answer; so after nearly a week in hospital (with my head wrapped in the pink fluffy haze of a major antipsychotic bender), a private ambulance picked me up and deposited me in the Village.

The Village used to be called Dunwich, back before the Ministry of War evacuated it and turned it into a special site. It was allocated to the wartime Special Operations Executive, part of which later became the Laundry and inherited this small coastal community with its street of cottages and decaying pier, its general store and village pub. Today we use it as a training center, and also as a quiet place for taking time out. There's no internet access, and no mobile phone coverage, and no nagging from head office about time sheets and sickness self-certification. There is a medical doctor, but Janet is sensible and very patient, and has seen an astonishing number of cases of Krantzberg syndrome (and other, more esoteric sorcerous injuries) over the years.

They billeted me in a tiny seaside cottage and Janet took me off the chlorpromazine, substituting a number of other medications—not all of them legally prescribable. (MDMA helps a lot when you're suffering from the delusion that you're one of the walking dead.) After three days, I stopped shivering and hiccuping with fear; after a week, I could sleep again without a night-light. At the weekend, Mo came to visit. I was glad to see her. She knows what it's like where I've been, to a good first approximation. We spent a lot of time together, just holding hands. It feels very strange, touching someone who's alive. Maybe in another week I'll be able to hug her without recoiling because I'm terrified I'm going to accidentally eat her mind.