Hunter laughed and clapped him heartily across the shoulders. ‘Come on, let’s get tooled up.’

While Hunter went to his flat to get a shower, Hal wandered the maze of quiet streets in the ancient quarter between Cornmarket and Longwall Streets. In the long shadows cast by the Divinity School and the Bodleian Library, it was possible to imagine he was back before the Fall and that sooner or later he would bump into some students making their way home after a late-night party.

As he rounded on to Catte Street and approached the Radcliffe Camera, he was met by a strange sight. Although it was night, four thrushes sat side by side on a wrought-iron fence, silent and immobile, while a fifth hopped around in a circle on the pavement. Hal came to a halt, curious at the bird’s antics, but he was even more surprised when the bird on the pavement appeared to notice him. It hopped up to his foot and stopped before raising its head to stare at him. Hal looked from the strange visitor to the four birds on the fence and back; all of them were staring at him, or so it seemed. He waited for the bird at his feet to fly off, even shook his leg slightly to encourage it, but the longer it remained, the more his curiosity gave way to an unsettled feeling. In the end, he walked off himself. Ten yards away he glanced back. The birds were still where he’d left them, but they had turned to watch his departure.

Hal laughed it off, but the unnerving sensation clung to him like autumn fog. Soon after, it was compounded. On the first storey of a building on the High Street, five windows in a row were lit, but one had a blind half-pulled down. Further on, four bicycles leaned against a wall, while a fifth lay on its side in the gutter.

Coincidence, his rational mind insisted, yet an age-old instinctive part of him couldn’t help feeling slightly uneasy at this pattern manifesting itself in the most mundane things. His mind conjured an image of the universe as one living creature, breathing slowly like a man at rest, an entity that had, at that moment, chosen to notice him in particular, and to communicate some incomprehensible but vital message to him alone. Shaking his head at the odd turn his thoughts had taken, he continued along the main thoroughfare.