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struck dead at any moment made me burst into tears. As I clutched the
tree with trembling fingers, a horrible thing happened: the bark turned soft and acquired a gelatinous texture. My fingers felt sticky. When I saw that maggots were squirming, not only over my
hands but over my entire body, I started to scream. And when it dawned on me that the tree and the whole rubbish dump were one big confection of beetles, maggots and worms, I yelled myself
awake.
    But the foul miasma of the dump continued to pervade my bedroom after I woke up. I dashed to the window and threw it open, but still I couldn’t breathe properly. What came flooding into
the room was not fresh air but another disgusting stench from outside. And although it was a sunny, cloudless Sunday morning, a shaft of lightning struck the tree outside the window, which exploded
into myriads of maggots. They formed a convulsively writhing column that flowed across the lawn towards our house.
    And then, just as the maggots were climbing the outside wall on their way to me, someone caught hold of me from behind and dragged me away from the window.
    My cries had woken Nicci and put the fear of God into her. I took a full hour to calm down, she told me later.
    ‘You were immediately put on medication,’ said Dr Roth, turning over another page in my medical record. ‘Antipsychotics were administered and your condition improved. The
symptoms disappeared altogether after a good two years.’
    ‘Only to recur yesterday.’
    ‘No.’
    Dr Roth looked up from the file with the same unaccustomed smile on his lips.
    ‘No?’ I said, surprised.
    ‘Look, I naturally can’t venture a definite diagnosis, given the brief time we’ve known each other, nor would I dispute the visions you say you’ve had. It’s just
that I strongly doubt that you’re still suffering from schizophrenia.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I don’t want to commit myself prematurely. Please give me until tomorrow. By then I’ll have the full results of your blood test and I’ll know if they confirm my
suspicions.’
    I nodded without knowing what to make of this. Any other patient would surely have welcomed Roth’s preliminary finding. I was only too eager to believe there was innocuous explanation for
my symptoms. But if I wasn’t suffering from some perceptual disorder, it would mean...
    ... that the voices were real. If so, the Eye Collector and I are connected in some way...
    My right ear rang at the thought, almost as if someone had applied a tuning fork to my head. I smiled with an effort and got up to give Dr Roth’s hand a parting shake, but I was finding it
hard to concentrate. I had already left the consulting room and was about to turn back and ask him for a prescription for some sleeping pills – I’d hardly slept a wink in the last few
nights – when the mobile phone in my trouser pocket vibrated.
    Call me! said the text message, and the ringing in my ear grew louder.
    Quick. Before it’s too late.
    In hindsight, I guess it was then that my race with death began.

75
    ‘What’s up?’
    Frank had answered after the first ring. He sounded even more agitated than I felt.
    ‘I’m worried.’
    Worried? I couldn’t remember a single occasion on which Frank had referred to his personal feelings. He usually went to great lengths to distract attention from his true emotional
state by being flippant. He had, for example, christened his article on the maltreatment of old folk in nursing homes ‘the geriatrics’ charter’. But I could read between the lines
and sense his underlying anger and despair, especially in the passage about an old woman with dementia and cancer of the breast who had been denied painkillers on grounds of expense. Frank had
quoted a remark made by a cynical nurse who was doing his national service at the squalid nursing home in question: ‘Who’s she going to complain to? Her children visit her once a
week, but she doesn’t make sense when they do.’