Now. I had been advancing slowly. That tiny fragment of dirty blue stone fell a yard in front of me and I stood on my right foot, about to put the left one down but I kept it there in the air and looked at the stone. It was less than half an inch square. It lay directly in front of me. I put down my left foot and stood. Mountains throw cannon balls at me, churches drop a bit of stone the size of a finger nail. Well, I thought, remembering what had happened because I didn’t take any notice of the mountain’s warning, we’d better go carefully here. You don’t want to fall off the edge. What is more, there was something about that cathedral, an atmosphere. It was, now I saw in the absence of sunglasses, still darker than it had any right to be, seeing that the sun was brassy outside and most of the windows stark plain. You could call it a complete absence of gentle Jesus meek and mild. I didn’t like it and was in half a mind to leave but knew that if I did I should only find myself in an endless stream of time with nothing to help me forget it. I went on.

How long did all that last? I sat on the surround of a pillar for a bit and was hot inside by contrast with the church’s coolth. I had a strain inside my chest like being held up on tiptoe. The strain made sitting down to rest quite, quite pointless, so despite the bit of mosaic that had fallen in front of me, I went on.

It was in the north transept. It faced me across the whole width. It was a solid silver statue of Christ but somehow the silver looked like steel, had that frightening suggestion of blue. It was taller than I am, broad-shouldered and striding forward like an archaic Greek statue. It was crowned and its eyes were rubies or garnets or carbuncles or plain red glass that flared like the heat in my chest. Perhaps it was Christ. Perhaps they had inherited it in these parts and just changed the name and it was Pluto, the god of the Underworld, Hades, striding forward. I stood there with my mouth open and the flesh crawling over my body. I knew in one destroying instant that all my adult life I had believed in God and this knowledge was a vision of God. Fright entered the very marrow of my bones. Surrounded, swamped, confounded, all but destroyed, adrift in the universal intolerance, mouth open, screaming, bepissed and beshitten, I knew my maker and I fell down.

I believe it was the fat woman who had been spinning outside the door who found me. She wouldn’t have heard my screams, I think, not in that place. She wouldn’t have listened anyway, having her ears pricked for a belly rumble from the other island. But there must have come a time when she did her rounds of the place, checking perhaps that I hadn’t run off with the church plate. So she must have found me.