There was a madness in the tone this time, a childish petulance that was unstable and out of control. It looked at the naked area around Sam’s neck where the amulet had been, and smiled weakly, the anger and something else, something like confusion, hidden again, the composure of a torturer resumed.

‘Well now, my degenerate son of a drunkard …’ It paused as if waiting for a rebuke, then spoke quietly and with satisfaction. ‘Do you know my name?’

Sam clutched the sheet, grasping it to remind his paralysed spirit that he was still alive, that though the world had gone spinning out of control, the rough linen touch of the sheet was a constant. Real. Here. Under his fingers.

‘Do you know my name?’

No. Not this. Not this madness from the past when sticks and rocks and herbs ruled his intellect. When spirits spoke and the air trembled under Calvin’s outstretched arms. Not that insanity. He would not submit to it again.

‘Do you know my name?’

Such menace in the quiet voice this time. That undertone of madness. Did it think that his silence was a trick? That to deny this horror, a horror that had been predicted as though it were merely a summer storm by his grandfather and his shaman, was a calculated trick? It was no trick. He wanted no part of it. It was the only way.

I survive. I breathe in and out. I will not listen. I will not believe.

‘MY NAME!’

The force of its rage blew him back onto the pillow, and he lay gritting his teeth, his hands over his ears, eyes screwed tightly shut. He knew the thing in the room was changing, that it was abandoning its form for another that Sam could not bear to see. He would not see it. Would not speak to it.

The air in the room changed its pressure as it was filled with something solidifying. Something massive.

No. No. He would not. And yet, he could not deny it. He knew its name. Of course he knew its name.

Eden. Looking at him from his cheap chair.

‘Say them again, boy.’

‘They sound the same.’

‘They ain’t the same. They be different.’

‘Why I need to know them?’

‘’Cause he be clever in one way and real dumb in another. He only ever be rememberin’ his oldest name. You gotta tell him his other names, then he be knowin’ who he is for sure and who you be.’

‘What if I don’t tell him who he is?’

Eden had laughed.

‘Then he just kill you.’

The sweat was pouring down Sam’s brow, the sheet beneath his body already damp with the same from his back. The room was full of a roar whose frequency rattled the bed and shook the walls.