Black doorway before me and I have to force myself to cross the threshold. But I am stupid and weary, not my legs they never tire, but my mind is too tired to sleep but then I will. I enter, my feet scraping loudly on the floor, and lie down not far from the door. My gaze wanders out over these tiny, carefully laid tiles, leaves and fishes; I wonder about the hands that laid them, what a waste now. Thrushchurl tosses and lifts his matted head looking for mice. A wind I don’t feel makes the metal casement creak, the window sways. I close my eyes and feel a familiar rushing sensation, like canting forward down a steep hill, just begin to.

Now I am asleep. My breast rises and falls, pulling and tossing little mouthfulls of this spellbound air. My face has slackened, and the night’s lustre confuses my face and makes it a corpse’s—if I could see myself how horrifying I would find this sight, I look like someone who’s been broken on the rack.

The sound of my breath, stealing in and out of my empty nose, is the same breath going over itself without stifling me—but I do sink a little each time—the breast falls deeper, rises lower; not dying away, but almost sinking into the ground. What I am is seeping up like wisps of vapor—remember placing drops of alcohol on small pieces of ice, watch, the viscous steam ooze from the alcohol bead ashen with frost and just so the essence of me climbs in a suppressed breath from snow white writings and flows among the marks.

You are made of the strongest stuff, icy matter and black ichor, and as a follower you are always the first to arrive. You were summoned to be an eyewitness, but in being summoned you were cut off from the underworld that is the only place you actually can live in, that allows you to enter any place and see any scene. Some witnesses are called to see and testify, and others to be watched and kept, although it’s not always only the one way or the other.

Now he’s asleep—draw near—your life is in him—draw on it, with rootlike fingers outstretched, and the wrenched crescent of your sickle mouth slopping ink down a scored face.

A hand on my shoulder wakes me and I gaze madly up into the lieutenant’s quizzical face, sallow and blue in the dark.

“It’s only me,” he says a little irritably, some sleep still in his voice. “We’re on duty now.”

No Thrushchurl there on the floor as I collect myself—where has he gone?