It didn’t help. Visibly it didn’t help.

“There’s something I’ve never got,” she said, with unnerving evenness.

I had a terrible feeling of energy leaving me. “What?”

She paused. Wanted to get it right. Wanted to make it as hard for me as possible.

“Why don’t you drink from people all the time?”

Ah.

“I mean, if blood from the living lets you … I mean if you can see the meaning of things, the connections … If you can see the goddamned story life’s supposed to be, why stop? Why not live like that all the time?”

Ah, again.

I took a moment myself. There are moments when twenty thousand years catch up with you.

“It’s unbearable,” I said.

She looked at the floor, jaws bitterly clamped.

“It’s too much,” I said. “We can’t stand it. Why do people who read Shakespeare still spend hours watching shitty TV or staring out of the window or arguing about whose dinner party to go to? Seeing what we see brings … It brings the reality of life too close. It brings death too close. You can’t live with the reality of death at the centre.”

I remembered the stone circles going up. One night in Britain in spring I came to an encampment. Humans had spent the day dragging a stone that must have weighed seventy tons. Now they lay by their fires, exhausted, breath going up in clouds, hands and feet bloody and scraped, eyes bright with the inscrutable purpose that had been revealed to them. They call the place Avebury now. There’s a pub and a car park and t-shirts. There are dozens of books in the gift shop. All with the same conclusion: We no longer know what purpose these megaliths had. We no longer know what they mean. Forgetting hadn’t even taken very long. I’d gone back there four hundred years later and people were already vague. Smiling, but vague.

“It makes you too curious about who’s writing the story,” I said, regretting it even as I said it. My mouth felt like a handful of dead grass. “It makes you too curious about death.”

There are these utterances that still and silence a room at the molecular level.

“There’s something going on here, Justine,” I said. “There’s a confluence, don’t you see?”

Justine shook her head. Not disagreement. Surfeit. Refusal. Annoyance.

“It’s just your thing,” she said. “It’s just your word, beguilement. It’s your word and you can’t even see it. You can’t even see you’re falling for it.” She walked over to the refrigerator and opened it, stood looking inside. Displacement activity. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You go and do what you have to do.” Then after a pause: “I’ve got things I have to do, too.”

The priority, immediately she’d said this, was to avoid making her do something rash. If I obeyed my impulse, which was to wrap her in my arms and tell her that we’d work things out and that I’d never do anything to hurt her and that I’d never go near Vali again, there was every chance I’d wake to find her gone.

“Can we agree something?” I said, quietly.

She didn’t answer, but thought IT DOESN’T MATTER, which, since she’d half-thought it at me, I got.

“It does matter,” I said—and felt the little thrill in her. First flash of invasive telepathy. FUCK FUCK THAT’S WEIRD BUT HOW BUT HE MUSTN’T DON’T DON’T—

I withdrew. I can turn it off. Perk of age.

“Listen,” I said. “All I want you to agree is that we don’t discuss this any more right now. It’s my stupid fat-head fault for bringing it up. I’m exhausted. I still feel like shit from last night. And whatever you say I know you’re tired too. We have this conversation now, it’s going to be pointless.”

“You wrote it as a bet,” she said, still calm, still staring into the fridge. “You wrote a bunch of prophecies as a joke, stoned, in a hut in the middle of nowhere.”

The image detonated: Me and Amlek, heads thick from the fazurya, cold dirt floor, curved walls of baked dung, firelight and the body of the witch-doctor we’d fed on. We’d been laughing (difficult not to) at the poor old fellow’s last thought: “I didn’t see this.” Amlek, between laughing fits, had said, I bet you I can see more of the future than you can. Which, whether I like it or not, was how it started. We began that night.

I see a mighty people from the north with yellow hair like rope.

I see sickness and death and rats fifteen thousand summers from now.

I see a leader of this country who eats babies for breakfast and his name is Jehengast Ka.

I see a man making visions on the ceiling of a cave like no other. There are white clouds and blue sky and naked humans.

I see a silver spear taller than the tallest tree with a tail of fire and smoke rising up into the air. There are humans inside it.

I see a thin man stuck with big thorns to a tree.

All those were mine. Amlek soon got bored. I don’t know why I didn’t. I started writing them down. One day I wrote: And in time Vali will come back to him and he will achieve fulfilment when he joins the blood of the werewolf. “He” was me, obviously. “He” featured in the prophecies, from time to time. I met Amlek in Jerusalem the night Christ was arrested. That’s another of mine, I told him. He’s the thin man. You watch. Not thorns, nails. Close enough, though, right? Don’t like to say I told you so, but …

I’ve counted them up, the ones that have come true. Less than a third. Just enough to keep the belief alive that I’m living in a story—the greatest detective mystery story ever written—that I’ve been given clues, that it’ll mean something, in the end. Just enough for that—and just not enough to do away with the thought that the whole thing’s complete random meaningless bullshit and that any village idiot could’ve cooked up prophecies so vague that some of them were bound to come true. Or rather “true.”

Just enough to keep the faith in Vali’s return alive.

Just not enough to stop me conceding my own idiocy in keeping it.

“Please,” I said to Justine. “Can’t we sleep first?”

She closed the fridge door, gently. More calm defeat.

“Come on, sweetpea, turn out the light.”

She stared at me. It didn’t need telepathy. What I’d said to her last night: I promise I won’t leave you.