PART ONE

Trevor's eyeballs were bleeding. That was how it felt; as if the insides of his eyes had turned to flaming blood. He struggled to keep up with the boy-that-was-not-a-boy, the demon-indisguise, grabbing the doorframe to haul himself out of the room. Minutes ago (hours ago?) he'd been standing in his own bedroom, trying to explain to the boy why the Pilgrim was no longer there. Struggling to find an excuse.

It had all happened in seconds, like some drug-induced vision. One instant he was standing there, before the mirror that had served as his new houseguest's prison and the next he was being pulled into that same mirror by the boy – just like Alice, in his favourite childhood book, he was being taken through the looking glass.

Once there, on the other side of the glass, everything had been different. Not just his surroundings, but whoever he was on the inside of his body had also changed. He had become… what? Nothing. He had simply become.

Standing in this unfamiliar house, looking over the shoulder of his new master, Trevor knew that he had travelled beyond madness. He had lost his mind and then found it again, on the other side of the mirror. That's what it was, the mirror-side: the discovery of a new way of existing, another state of mind that fell between the cracks of the rational and the irrational and into a brand new reality.

His body had been ravaged by the journey: his flesh had peeled away, exposing white patches of bone, and pieces of the mirror had embedded itself into the bleeding mess of his frame. But Trevor had felt no pain. He was above and below and beyond all of that. Nothing could touch him, not even the angel, the Pilgrim, the lost one… the one who had now been found.

"Thomas!" screamed the strange girl, and then she tripped down the stairs, her head slamming against the wall and her back twisting into an unnatural position. Trevor heard the bones crack. His hearing was hypersensitive now. He had listened to the heartbeat of the universe, and been stunned to find that it matched the rhythm of his own black heart.

But with one major exception: the heartbeat of the universe was not organic; it was clockwork.

Dragged kicking into the insane alleyways between separate realities, Trevor had seen his brother, Michael, and the boy had teeth like a sabre-tooth tiger. His eyes had burned yellow; golden fur had rippled at his throat. Then Trevor had heard the ticking of an infinite clock, a conceptual timepiece that kept the time of the ages and then turned it backwards, sideways, forward once again.

Drugs paled into insignificance before such experiences as these. Manmade drugs were nothing, a mere trifle. This was the ultimate high, the kick beyond all kicks. Trevor was taken past the nagging, doubting flesh and into a realm of spirit, and all he had to do was believe.

"Mama," he said, not even knowing what he meant by the word. "Dada." Blood poured from his eyes, warming his cheeks. "Bruvva! Bruvva Michael." His gashed lips struggled to form the words, but it didn't matter. Not at all. The words were for Trevor and for him alone – nobody else even needed to understand them. They were his; little gifts to the ghost of his sanity.

"Hummybird!" He half-remembered the safe-word, the one he'd used to gain entry to Sammy Newsome's chicken ranch. Quite why it had come back to him now, in extremis, he had no idea. But it tasted nice in his mouth… like roast chicken.

His thoughts were alien to him now; he had no notion of what they meant. The words in his mouth, between his teeth, were random and meaningless, but they meant everything in that other place, the wonderful and terrifying gap he'd found between realities. Perhaps this was the language of infinity, and if he learned to speak it well he could return there and join his beloved sabre-toothed bruvva.

Trevor no longer believed in this reality, so it bent and buckled beneath the weight of his gaze – he was slowly unbelieving, unpicking the stitches of his own reality. He watched the walls go rubbery and the stairs flip like a giant tongue, and the girl who had fallen began to sing something beautiful in Latin. He couldn't stop this now, even if he wanted to. He'd come too far to falter.

It's me, he thought. I'm shaping this. He was at least sane enough to know the truth of his condition.

He wondered if the others saw what he did, but then he realised that he didn't care. Anything he wanted, whatever he could imagine and believe in, would appear before him and be as real as anything else that might be conjured.

Dimly, barely enough to make an impact on what was left of his mind, he registered that this belief was what held everything together. Without it, the entire universe would fail, and all the other realities would blend into the same point in space and time, creating a chaotic soup of interchanging nonsense.

The world – his world – was transforming into a string of sensual non sequiturs.

"Oh, Trevor. What have you done?" The Pilgrim was speaking to him from a wavering doorway. "Why did you bring them to me?"

The boy-that-was-not-a-boy – not really a boy at all – cocked his head. Dried blood crawled along his hairline. Then came the voices, two of them from a single mouth: "When you switched skins, We felt you. We saw you expose your true form, so We followed you though the mirror."

The Pilgrim's face was sad; his bald head drooped and sagged and melted. "None of what you're seeing exists anywhere outside your own little bubble of reality, Trevor." His voice was a swarm of bees. "You've become trapped in a bubble, and now you're no use to anyone."

The boy, the weird little bloody-headed kid, held up both hands to the Pilgrim. "We've found you now. This must come to an end. You've gone too far."

The Pilgrim smiled a liquid smile. He laughed a bubbly laugh. "Just wait and I'll show you who's gone too far. Come and see, and then I'll come with you… if you still want me. I'll return to our designs." His words made shapes in the air: tiny hands with flies' wings for fingernails. Buzz-buzz-buzzy-fly. Shoo fly; buzz away. Be gone.

Trevor buzzed too, but in a different way. The scraps of his mind were drifting back towards the shattered mirror, looking for a way back to the other side.

Then, like a vision from some other kind of heaven, Thomas Usher appeared half way up the stairs.

"Shoo fly!" said Trevor, lurching forward – or what he thought must be forward; it was difficult to tell in this buzzing state of flux. "Long pig bruvva!"

Then, thankfully, the boy with the dry-blood hair reached back, reached around, and sent Trevor flying back into the place behind the mirror.

THIRTY-TWO