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of acres of unprofitable wheat and oil-seed rape, unviable villages, uneconomic copses and unfeasible water meadows. People did not like the idea. On a long chalk escarpment named Strankley Ridge stood a Neolithic stone circle which had become the focus of protest against the plans. It was an archaeological site entangled in protective legislation more hostile than razor wire.
    The original path of the 34 veered to the southwest of this region, grazing the hallowed university town of Whitbridge. As Whitbridge University became a world-renowned centre for information science, the 34 swiftly became a principal artery of commerce, encrusted with bright plastic-cladded parks of modern enterprise. Ted visualised the earth thick with cables, the air crackling with radiation, a dementia of polarised ions streaming in all directions like the commuters through Central Station at 8 am and 6 pm.
    The Coffin had no gaudy industrial parks. After riots, the government had targeted parts of the Coffin for urgent programmes of urban renewal. The putative investors demanded fast access to the 34 corridor; the pension funds which owned the farms in the way had been induced to sell.
    The government had not moved fast enough. The high-speed trains hurtling to the city from Whitbridge had already tempted a small herd of maturing yuppies to move into the abandoned countryside dwellings. The husbands commuted every day, the wives colour-washed the farmhouse walls and limed the old oak beams, the children grew sturdy and freckled on honey sandwiches and country air. With all the cunning their MBAs suggested, these settlers were now fighting the road scheme, and with them ranged a motley army of native inhabitants, Green party anoraks, Iron Age researchers, a famous actress and two hundred eco-warriors who were encamped close to the stone circle on Strankley Ridge. This was the neighbourhood Chester Pike had selected for a new Magno supermarket, and where a supermarket appeared homes sprang up like mushrooms.
    The face of one of the protestors, a veteran of several earlier demonstrations, had caught the eye of the media. Radiant as a dirty seraph, his photograph accompanied every report on the inquiry’s progress. He appeared on TV shows next to fashionable comedians who were entranced by his innocence of shower gel and the name of the Transport minister. They called him Crusty and, to some sections of the population, he was a hero. Ted remembered that his daughter Cherish had his picture on her bedroom wall, in pride of place between the wet-eyed seal pup and Leonardo DiCaprio.
    As he closed his notebook and sped out to his meeting, Ted’s shoulders sagged in apprehension. He felt the shadow of public attention. He sensed his wife’s sorcery looming close. Sixteen years he had shared his life with incubi like Crusty, ephemeral monsters summoned by the media to ravish the public mind until the day a fresh demon appeared to supplant them. Ted was forming the idea that his wife too was a creature of that half-life, and had just taken mortal shape to entrap him.
    He was afraid of these gremlins and of the process which spawned them, he had an instinctive fear which nagged from his subconscious and would not be silenced by reason. Jealousy played a part, for he saw that his wife had the gift of calling up the devils and giving them names, and was rewarded for it. He had blamed those rewards for changing a fond girl to an ice queen whose contempt blasted to dust his naïve dreams of a family. It seemed as if some evil breath emanated from Channel Ten through his wife to his home and himself. Every time he and his children were rounded up for a magazine photograph a little of their lives drained away, while the media thing got stronger and tightened its grip on them all. Straying towards Strankley Ridge felt to Ted like yelling into the mouth of the dragon’s cave.
    He left his office, and his dead tree, and the sickly thicket behind his