'What are you doing?'someone asked him. They were outside the walls but he didn't know where…

He stumbled through the arteries of his home, his brain buzzing and vibrating with a new vigour, discovering chambers and oubliettes he had never seen before. At every turn hands beckoned him in…

Here, organic towers, tall shapeless masses of tissue cultured from the plasm of ancient mammals, trumpeted and moaned across the abandoned wastes of another continent, their huge cynical voices modulating on the wind, now immensely distant, now close at hand. Natural philosophy, they maintained (holding him to be in heresy), is a betrayal of invention. It is an edifice of clay. It was always night there…

A city spread itself before him in the wet, equivocal afternoon light like interrupted excavations in a sunken garden. It could be reached by a ladder of bone. 'I will go down into that place!'

With these poor and misleading relics of a dead culture he tried to create a past for himself and so achieve, like any other human being, some experiential perspective from which to judge his own actions; crouching, as it were, on the banks of his own internal stream and scooping from the water those things which floated closest. They rarely helped him in dealing with the new reality of the Evening Cultures. And at least one of the catches he made in this manner came to haunt him, a dead thing risen from the bottom-mud of one incarnation to infect his perception of the other. It was not a normal memory, rendered as an image – a sound, a scent, a vision of a face or place: rather it came as an act he felt compelled to perform – or one which his body might perform quite of its own accord, as if his muscles remembered what he did not – and in performing, recall.