When the police located his car near the bridge they’d assumed the obvious. His camping gear had been stuffed inside the boot. There had been no note, which was odd, and Lincoln’s body was never found. But bodies weren’t always recovered when people jumped from that bridge, the police had told her and her mum.

The more he thought about potential accidents, the more Ray also wondered why more vehicles out there were not suddenly crashing. Or why the entire network of roads did not become one long sequence of traffic accidents. How did it all just keep going with such fallible, easily distracted creatures behind the wheels?

He had been committed, absorbed and unthinking. Intentionally, because the story was so good. So good he felt like he’d been damaged by it, permanently.

You sure? No one will know we’re down there.’ ‘Makes no difference. The Environment office was closed when we left, and I never called ahead to the Porjus branch. It’ll be fine though.

A foetal abhorrence. A postnatal blasphemy.

Our entire existence was contingent on forgetting horror. Maybe the repeated infractions of our species were a direct result of us not remembering the horrors of our past infractions.

Some people say the white house on the hill was once a place where old, rich people lived after they retired from owning the industry, the land, the laws, our houses, our town, us.

The least remembered gods still haunt the oldest forests.

How little do we know of anyone, let alone ourselves?

Perhaps enlightenment, technology and secularism haven’t cleared Europe of the oldest science of all – the occult.