Unable to go south, and as if thrust by an invisible force, the swineherd staggered, soaking wet, hauling his bones slowly north, his choice to move anywhere on his own volition sabotaged by the curse. He had a thousand years to make good but was still too young to have any notion of a life beyond thirty, let alone sixty, or ninety. Now he faced what seemed like an eternity adrift. A life bereft of all those he had known, who knew him or his people. Everyone on the road was a stranger; few if any of the men and women who lived in Willesden had any reason to travel these roads. Having failed his family, he now had his own path; the demon had set it out for him and the rules were clear. Life was his even if it had been denied to them. Within an hour, he had reached the village of Hendon, a lurching puppet, staggering where he was led.

On the corner of Birchington Road, bending busily over the apples arranged on a fruit stall in the lea of the supermarket, Harriet Dawe. Busy, busy. This one no, that one yes, too bruised, too – what’s that on it? Put it back, put it back. Apples, it has to be, that’s what it said, apples it is, green and ripe, one on the windowsill, one by the fire, one by the door and one on the pillow and quick, quick, fruit of the tree, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen; apples keep the nightbeasts from the manplace, say it nightly, nightly speak it, darkly, nightly keep the creeppe cripp craw creppie crawthings out of the bedplace; seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Harriet Dawe placing the apples in a green plastic carrier bag carefully so as not to bruise them, stooped in a beige mackintosh and towing her pushcart, strawberry blonde hair dye almost grown out, paying in cash for the twenty pieces of fruit she will drag home to the third floor flat on Kingsgate Place which she shares with voices that never rest, a dried lizard and a jar of mouse skulls.