Unfortunately, the truth doesn't end there. The things we sometimes refer to as elder gods are alien intelligences, which evolved on their own terms, unimaginably far away and long ago, in zones of spacetime which aren't normally connected to our own, where the rules are different. But that doesn't mean they can't reach out and touch us. As the man put it: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Any sufficiently advanced alien intelligence is indistinguishable from God—the angry monotheistic sadist subtype. And the elder ones . . . aren't friendly.

(See? I told you I'd rather be an atheist!)

I push the button on the dishwasher, straighten up, and glance at the kitchen clock. It's pushing ten thirty, but I'm wide awake and full of bleak existential rage. I don't want to go to bed; I might disturb Mo, and she really needs her sleep right now. So I tiptoe upstairs to check on her, use the bathroom, then retreat downstairs again. But that leaves me with a choice between sitting in a kitchen that smells of bleach and a living room that smells of sour fear-memories. I can't face the inanities of television or the solace of a book. I feel restless. So I clip on my holster, pull on my jacket, and go outside for a walk.

It may be summer but it's already dark and the streetlights are on. I walk down the leafy pavement, between the neatly trimmed front hedges and the sleeping cars parked nose to tail. The lichen-stained walls and battered wheelie bins are stained by the stale orange twilight reflected from the clouds. Traffic rumbles in the distance, pulsing with the freight of the unsleeping city. Here and there I see front windows illuminated from within by the shadow puppet play of televisual hallucinations. I turn a corner, walk downhill under the old railway bridge, then left past a closed back street garage. Cats slink through the moonless twilight with nervous stealth; the smell of night-blooming pollen meshes with the gritty taste of diesel particulates at the back of my throat. I walk through the night, wrapped in my anger, and as I walk I think: