But there was more to Alice Nimrod than her fear and her five years of service. She was not yet twenty and sometimes she stood at the shore and watched pods of dolphins playing in the bay, she observed the great ships that had crossed oceans to slip inside the heads and dock in her city, she gazed at the flocks of yellow-crested cockatoos that filled the sky at dusk.

Tonight Alice Nimrod put her head down and ran through the rain.

The road had begun to flood. A growing torrent surged along both gutters, carrying with it a detritus of mud and refuse, running off into the mean dwellings on either side of the street, dwellings that became meaner the further she travelled from Darlinghurst Road and the closer she came to Surry Hills. Something in the darkness fetched up against her foot and lodged there. She saw it was a dead rat and kicked it away; it swirled for a moment, caught in a whirlpool, and was gone. But she was on Riley Street now, and despite the rain her steps slowed.

The road had been constructed on a high piece of ground but here, at the corner of Riley and Albion streets, the earth plunged in a sheer cliff face to a crater some thirty feet below as though it had been dynamited, or perhaps dug out of the rocks with their bare hands by men in chains as, not so many decades before, so much of the city had been dug. A creek that had once crossed Riley Street to feed this pool of swampy ground and the frogs that once dwelled here and had given the Hollow its name were long gone. Instead, mean tenements, loosely constructed of rotting timber and broken bricks, of rusted sheets of tin and sometimes just mud, sprouted from the stinking mire at the bottom of the Hollow, growing one on top of the other in a chaotic and confused fashion. Frog Hollow existed on the fringe of the city, a part of it but violently separated from it, the home of the poorest and the most desperate, a place of opium and blindness-inducing homemade grog, of brutality and disease, of unwashed barefoot urchins, of rabid dogs and rats and fleas and every sort of vermin, of narrow unlit passages a foot deep in mud upon whose environs the sun never shined.

This was the place to which Alice Nimrod hastened.

Three flights of stone steps, steep and crudely carved, provided the only access down—though why someone had thought to dig out such steps and what kind of person might use them to enter such a place, who knew? Certainly the constables of Surry Hills police station did not, and nor did the various members of the clergy from the many churches in the parish.