Dead Men's s Boots

I took the latter, turning off the main drag into a maze of terraced streets and narrow alleys. The sense of being watched – watched and followed – ebbed and flowed as I walked: that wasn’t something that had ever happened to me before, and it made me wonder if I was experiencing some kind of after-effect from my contact with John Gittings’s ghost. All ghosts impinge on my death-sense, but geists have an intense, indelible presence that you can’t just shake off afterwards. Maybe it had been lurking in the background of my perceptual field ever since.

I took another street, another back alley, tacking alternately north and west so that ultimately I’d break out onto Seven Sisters Road somewhere past the reservoir. Meanwhile the darkness leaked down out of the sky to cover the Earth, and the prickle at the back of my mind became an itch, and then an itch with a sick heat underlying it like the raw tenderness of sunburn.

I turned again, along an alley that ran between the back yards of a row of terraces and a high, blind wall that presumably had the reservoir on the other side of it.

I took ten steps forward, then pivoted on my heel and waited, looking back the way I’d come. Now that I wasn’t moving any more I ought to have been able to hear the footsteps of anyone approaching the corner I’d just walked around, but the silence was absolute.

Before me was thick shadow: thick enough so that if something dead or undead rounded the bend I might lose the initiative because I couldn’t get a clear enough look at it to know what it was.

Impatient, I took a few steps back towards the corner I’d just turned and my foot came down on something that moved. A black shape streaked past me with a whuff of air that I felt even as I yelled and jumped aside. The squawl of protest reached me a moment later.

Tom cat, big and fat, out on the pull.

With a muttered curse, I ran to the corner, then round it and back out onto the street.

Nothing and nobody in sight. I’d have been surprised if there was, after the early warning I’d just given out. As ambushes went, it was a sod of a long way from the Little Big Horn. And as if to confirm the futility of the endeavour, the extrasensory prickle faded out again into nothingness.

Which, for something so liminal and barely-there to start with, wasn’t a long haul at all.