She decided at last on one and eased the gate open. Yes, here was the yard, seen now in daylight, squalid and strewn with rubbish. From a fence post a brace of dead rabbits hung by their feet swinging gently in the breeze and festering with maggots. The yard backed onto a squat and crumbling single-storey cottage built of disintegrating sandstone and dating from the earliest decades of the settlement and unlikely to make it into the new century. It was a building as unlovely and unloved as any in the colony. The sort of place folk gratefully left behind in their overcrowded and wretched cities in the old country and then, inexplicably, set about re-creating in this new land. It had a solitary window which was boarded up. The back door, its timbers rotting, was approached by a step that was all but crumbled away. Above, a precariously leaning chimney, from which no smoke came, poked uneasily from its roof.

This was surely the place, though the cottage next door or the one beyond that could just as easily be it too, for the uneven rows of houses went on and on, and the people who lived in them went on and on, and the horror Alice Nimrod felt was the horror of someone who had escaped.

But the cottage was strangely silent.

And that was odd, for all about the laneways teemed. Not with life, exactly, but with the half-living that passed for life here—the drunk and the insensible and the destitute and the dead all piled one on top of another, some in silence and others in an ecstasy of commotion, enough to pierce the ears and bring the crumbling buildings crashing about their inadequate foundations.

But this cottage was silent.

Alice went up to the door and listened. She pulled the door and it creaked, opening perhaps halfway before becoming stuck in its ill-fitting frame. The smell, too, was different this time. No smoke or cooking or the stale odour of unwashed bodies, just a foetid, rotting stench of decay and human waste and the mustiness of rodents. Alice waited. She listened for the slightest sound that might indicate someone lurked within. But nothing stirred.

Except for a scratching and a rustling. And so Alice forced her body through the gap and half-a-dozen rats scurried into the shadows.

Light spilled in behind her and she saw that she stood in a mean little kitchen or scullery, now abandoned. Some previous occupant had installed shelves, a lop-sided cupboard and a three-legged table. Piles of rubbish—food scrapings, old newspapers, spilled wax, straw—covered the floor and the one or two surfaces, but nothing of value had been left behind. She stepped cautiously in the half-light, going through to a second room at the front of the cottage. This was a larger space, she sensed, and similarly abandoned, but it was in darkness, the window boarded up, the door onto the street shut.