He started with his stomach and heart. Like a rich, warm soup, he felt it slowly spreading through his body, pushing itself to his limbs and right into his fingertips. He wiggled them. He found he could move easily, though the sea was strong.

He was now directly underneath the black disc. If the storm had come from it, he wondered if it was also a portal.

He had to reach it. Could he move through the air? Was it possible?

He looked upwards, and imagined a flow of energy coursing through him, pushing him up. Rain pounded his face. I am not feeling this, he thought. The rain is an illusion.

And it passed. Then it redoubled itself, and suddenly he was floundering again.

Not this time, he thought. He gathered himself together, gasping once more for air and steadying himself. He found a solid point and forced himself to stay there. Now.

Through the fierce rain he forced himself up into the sky, and suddenly he was in the air, and he felt the wind rushing over him, and the sea was beneath him, the upturned boat, the floating lifejackets, through the air onwards towards the source of the storm, towards the source of everything that had ruined his life, reaching upwards and upwards, the hull of the boat now tiny and remote, the bodies of his parents bobbing, face down, below him.

He had to reach the black disc, the terrible emptiness, the horror.

It felt like an age. He lost concentration, his body slipping back into numbness.

No, he thought. No.

Then he was at the edge of it, and something was pulling at him, pulling him through. The edge of it was there, it was just a hole, a hole into something strange and terrible. He scrambled onto something like solidity, and then he was through.

He did not fall. He simply stumbled, and then he was upright.

He was dry. He patted himself. He was alive, whole.

The noise of the waves and the thunder had gone. He had a moment to look about, but he did not recognise where he was.

The sudden silence was unbearable.

A room, another room, almost bare of ornament, with white walls and nothing on them, wooden floorboards, and, standing with his back to him, the looming black figure of James Swinton, and behind him, a mirror, in which Tom could see James’s face.

At first Tom was struck with terror. A paralysing numbness spread through him. But then, as James smiled, the numbness left him and was replaced with a vitalising anger.

‘You did it!’ The words were clear in Tom’s mind, the horror of them so large it felt as if he were spitting out stones. ‘You killed my parents! Monster!’

With a roar of unbearable rage, Tom threw himself at Jack, beating at him with his fists.