The platforms on the DLR were airy glassed-over tubes, raised well above ground level. As he rode the escalator towards his homebound ride, for a few terrifying seconds he thought he’d made a mistake and that it was still daytime: everything looked preternaturally bright, the shadows diffuse and lacking in concealment. But it didn’t burn, and as he calmed down he realized it was the ochre London overcast, lit from beneath by a million lights. I must be photosensitive, he realized. A migraine? That would explain the visual distortions in the mirror. Of course; and there was mild nausea, too. But he’d occasionally suffered from stress-related migraines before, and this felt different.

Alex’s current home was a spare bedroom in an old and damp-smelling maisonette owned by a pleasant middle-aged couple (a nurse and a police support officer). They still thought he was a counter clerk, because he’d bottled out of telling them precisely what kind of bank he worked for, or in what capacity. It wasn’t much of a home: it was more of an ellipsis between student squalor and the penthouse off Mayfair that he planned to take out a subsidized mortgage on the moment his first annual bonus came in. In the meantime, it allowed him to save up frantically in case his bonus didn’t come in and he ended up having to look for another job while picking up his burden of student debt again (the golden handshake not being due to vest fully until he’d put in two whole years).

He was about to turn the corner onto his street when a knot of deeply intertwingled thoughts brought him up sharply. Someone spiked my drinks led to I’m hallucinating, which by induction allowed him to derive I don’t want Sam or Valerie to think I’m a user. Knotted around it like a venomous snake was another strange loop of concepts: But if I’m not hallucinating I really shouldn’t be around them. Because: vampire. Right? Alex quite liked his landlords, at least to the extent of not wanting them violently dead: the imminent prospect of sprouting fangs and ripping their throats out was profoundly, mortifyingly embarrassing. Nor could he risk them bursting into his room and opening the curtains to check whether he was sleeping through the afternoon or needed urgent medical help. I need a hotel, he realized.