He fumed for a few seconds, then grimaced. “Anyway, with this other shit going on, we may as well forget about the stairs. Let the lunatic have his way. Finish your shift, then do whatever the hell you want the rest of the week.”

“Fair enough.”

“And pass on the word, would you?”

“You’re the boss, Frank.”

“Ha!”

I saw the shift out, then took an elevator down to the basement and made for my locker. It had been a long night and I was looking forward to changing clothes and getting home. When I opened the door, something rolled out of the bottom and spun away down the floor. I thought it was a coin and I wasn’t going to bother with it, but then I noticed the dark sheen of the rolling object and hurried after it. I stopped it with my foot, then picked it up and studied it with incredulous suspicion.

It was the small black marble I’d found in the trout’s mouth and then lost. Only now the golden squiggles down its sides no longer reminded me of worms. They’d been broadened and touched up. Now they looked like snakes.

3

The marble bugged the hell out of me and I slept fitfully. By morning I knew I must have had it on me all along, and was only imagining the change in the squiggles, but part of me wasn’t convinced. I laid it on a wad of cotton wool on the mantelpiece in my living room and kept a close eye on it for the next day or two, but when nothing further happened I forgot about it and concentrated on work.

Wednesday was another busy day. I didn’t get home till two in the morning. Spent the last four hours covering for a sick colleague on the fifteenth floor, one of seven Troops guarding the elevator doors. A further ten soldiers would usually be on each of the three stairway openings, and more patrolling the corridors, but due to The Cardinal’s recent instructions the floor was largely deserted.