SIMON KURT UNSWORTH

Qiqirn

Becker wasn’t what Pollard expected. He was younger for one thing, baby-faced and clean-shaven and without a tie, and there was no desk or drawers in the room, just the chairs and a small table that held a jug of water, a box of tissues and a small vase containing a single flower. Becker sat in an easy chair in front of the window and indicated that Pollard should sit in the chair on the other side of the room, a leather wingback that looked old and proved comfortable. He made no notes as they spoke and referred to no paperwork, simply steepling his fingers and looking at Pollard over the spires he had created, listening as Pollard talked.

It took a while, because at first Pollard found it hard. His voice had dried, to catch like dust in his throat, and he drank three glasses of water from the jug as he told Becker about what had happened, about the panic and the running and the cold. About the fear, and the thing that had taken up residence in his home. Becker kept nodding, not interrupting, not moving apart from those little bobs of his head, and when Pollard had finished, he said, ‘So this has been happening for a few weeks?’

‘Months, really,’ said Pollard. ‘Building up. The last few weeks have been the worst.’

‘Tell about the first one again.’

Pollard had been coming down his stairs when he first felt it, a prickle across his skin as though something had exhaled along the hallways of the house. Gooseflesh rose on his arms despite the warmth of the day and he shivered, suddenly cold. A quick, reassuring glance told him that the front door was still closed, things were in their places; nothing appeared amiss. So, why was his heartbeat increasing? Getting faster, harder, more urgent? Why was the hair across his body refusing to lie back down, the follicles tightening further so that his skin felt covered by hard little nodules like scales? Why did he feel cold? He took another step, down off the stairs and onto the carpeted floor, uncomfortably aware of the rub of his flesh inside his clothes, of the accelerating movement of his heart, of the way his hand, holding his empty cup, was shaking. What was this? The hallway was empty, the sunlight dropping into it through the open doorway from the kitchen, the house as silent as it had been these last months.

There was something in the kitchen.

As soon as he thought it, Pollard knew it was true. Something was in the kitchen, something awful, hiding just on the other side of the doorway, out of sight and waiting for him. He gasped, unable to help himself, his hand flexing sharply, opening and closing so that he dropped his cup. It bounced on the thick carpet, unharmed, knocking against his foot, and the cold porcelain bite made him scream and the next thing was, he was running.

‘And you stopped where?’ asked Becker.

‘At the end of my path. I was barefoot and I must have trodden on something. It, I don’t know, startled me back into myself or something because suddenly I wasn’t scared or cold anymore, and I couldn’t remember quite why I’d felt the way I had.’

‘How did you feel?’

‘Embarrassed, mostly, in case any of the neighbours saw me; I was only dressed in my pyjamas. They all pity me anyway, and I don’t want to give them other reasons to talk about me. The sympathetic looks and little nods of concern are bad enough.’

‘And when you went back in the house?’

‘It was fine. The feeling that something was in the kitchen was gone. Everything was normal.’ Pollard paused before saying the word normal, and then wondered if Becker had noticed. What’s normal any more, he thought? There’s no such thing.

‘Good. Mr Pollard, what you’re experiencing isn’t pleasant, but I can tell you, it is entirely typical. The feelings and reactions you describe are symptomatic of panic attacks and phobic reactions; in your case, although it’s unusual, I’d be inclined to treat this as a phobia. Your panic is related to a specific thing, to a fixed point, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Each time?’

‘Yes. Every time, there’s something that frightens me, terrifies me, and it’s specific. It’s in the kitchen, or the lounge, or the hallway or landing, just out of my sight. I just don’t know what it is.’

‘Then, for all intents and purposes it’s a phobia, and we’ll deal with it as such. There are two main ways for dealing with phobias: flooding and graduated hierarchies. Flooding involves, essentially, placing you somewhere with the thing causing your phobia and not letting you leave until you simply can’t sustain the panic any more and you calm down. Quite apart from the fact it’s not at all pleasant, it’d be hard to achieve with you because we don’t know what specific thing the phobia is focused upon, so that leaves graduated hierarchies. We approach the thing that’s causing the feelings small step by small step until you have the ability to deal with it, to not panic any more.’

‘That’d be good,’ said Pollard, remembering the fear he had felt, the sheer terror. ‘I’d like to not be frightened any more.’

‘There’ll be homework each week, a new step to take’ said Becker, ‘things for you to think about and come prepared to talk about. This process will only work if you’re honest, you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. I’ll see you next week, and we’ll talk a bit more about how these phobic attacks make you feel, what happens to you when they’re occurring.’

Pollard had risen, was at the door, when Becker said, ‘And Mr Pollard? I know we’ve not talked about your wife at all, but we will. Next week, Mr Pollard.’

 

‘So, how have things been?’

‘Awful,’ said Pollard, ‘much worse. I’ve had three attacks, each worse than before.’ The office was warm and bright again, Becker in the same place and the same position, everything the same except for the addition of a piece of folded paper on the occasional table, held down by a small glass paperweight. Becker made no mention of the paper.

The worst of the attacks had been the previous evening. Pollard had been making himself a cup of tea when, standing at the counter waiting for the kettle to boil, he suddenly knew that something was behind him. Its head was just at his shoulder, its breath against the back of his neck, cold and fetid. The temperature in the room dropped violently and he shivered, and then he had been at the door, knocking it open and dashing hectic and thoughtless into the hallway, accelerating along it and to the front door and out. Running had been automatic, uncontrollable, driven by something that came before thought, by an unwillingness, a desperation not to see the thing behind him.

‘And you stopped running at the end of the path again?

‘Yes.’

‘And when you went back in?’

‘Nothing. There was nothing there, no feelings of anything. I made my drink and went to bed.’

‘Tell me about your wife,’ Becker said.

‘Mary? She died,’ Pollard said automatically, ‘seven months ago.’ His standard response, the emotions practiced out of it.

‘I know. Did you love her?’

‘Yes. I still do.’

‘Did you get on well? I mean, were you friends?’

‘Yes.’ Pollard was unsure were the questions were going, where they were taking him. Becker was leaning forwards slightly now, his hands no longer steepled but crossed loosely over his lap.

‘Tell about how the phobia makes you feel.’

‘Frightened,’ said Pollard. ‘Out of control, threatened. In danger.’

‘Tell me the three things you miss most about Mary.’

Pollard didn’t answer. Thinking of Mary was hard, painful, but he tried and eventually found things he could verbalise. ‘Her smell after she’d showered,’ he said, ‘it was so clean and fresh and nothing else ever smelled that way. Her laugh, how loud it was, too loud for someone so petite but never intrusive. The way she felt when I held her in bed and we talked.’

Becker nodded, as though Pollard had confirmed something for him, and said, ‘Please read what’s on the paper on the table.’ Pollard picked it up, unfolded it and saw, printed neatly in black, THE ATTACKS WORSENED DURING THE WEEK. ‘I’m not showing off,’ said Becker. ‘What you’re experiencing is awful but it’s also understandable and to some degree predictable. I wonder, why did you have to pause before you could tell me the nice things about Mary but not before you told me about how the attacks feel?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I do. It’s because the attacks are the most important thing for you now, more important than your wife because they’re more real, more immediate. All the good memories of Mary are tangled up with the unpleasant memories of her death; thinking of her pulls up not memories of the good times, but of the bad time, the awful time when she died. Those memories are like scabs covering the things you should be able to remember about her without pausing, the things that should be your primary memories of her, the good times and the happiness and the love. In a funny way, the attacks are healthy because they represent the positive memories trying to reassert themselves, trying to regain their rightful place of importance in your brain. In your life.’

‘Why are they so frightening?’ Pollard said. ‘Mary wasn’t frightening, I loved her. I still love her, I’m not frightened of her.’

‘No,’ said Becker, ‘but you are frightened of remembering her fully, because doing that means facing fully how much you’ve lost and how that makes you feel. It means facing the rest of your life without her. You’re frightened because the way to stop these phobic attacks is to take control back, to face the panic and pain and fear and the terrible memories of Mary’s death, peel them away and allow Mary, the memories of Mary and how she made you feel, to regain their rightful place in your mind and your imagination. Those are the steps you have to take to stop this happening. That’s where we have to go, together. Next week, Mr Pollard, we talk about how Mary died.’

 

‘If the paper says ‘had an even worse week’,’ said Pollard, nodding at the new folded sheet lying on the table, ‘then it’s right.’ He felt greasy with tiredness; the attacks had been coming almost daily since his last session with Becker, at all times of the day and night. The previous night’s had been repellent, leaving him ragged and queasy with terror and tiredness.

Pollard had been half gone, in that state between sleeping and wakefulness, when his whole body spasmed violently. That, in itself, wasn’t unusual; it was a lifelong, though occasional, thing, as though he was walking and had tripped. Mary used to laugh about it and say the startled look on his face as he popped awake was one of the funniest things she had seen. This was harder though, almost painful, a savage jerk that yanked him awake. He rolled, tangling himself in the duvet as he went and then thing sitting on the bed next to him shifted, leaned in towards him.

Pollard remembered screaming. He threw himself from the bed, the duvet clinging to him, and fell to the floor. He was cold, terrified, the muscles in his legs jittering spasmodically as he tried to kick away the heavy, tangling duvet, struggling out from under it as behind him something moved across the bed. It was huge, blocking the night’s half-light coming in around the edges of the curtains as it came and then Pollard was free of his bedclothes and he ran without looking back.

He had ended up in his back garden, standing at its far end in the shadows of the apple tree that he and Mary had planted when they first moved to the house over thirty years ago. His panic receded in shuddering waves, the world seeming to swim back into reality around him. He was still cold, although not as cold as he had been in the bedroom, and his legs ached from the running but had stopped twitching. Embarrassed, Pollard covered his genitals with his hands and went quickly back down the garden path and into the kitchen. Smells lingered, the residue of his food that evening, a microwave meal from the local supermarket. Suddenly, bitterly, he missed Mary, missed the smells of her cooking and the times they cooked together, peeling and cutting, chattering, drinking wine. The feeling was almost anger, rage even, hot in his chest.

‘And the house? The bedroom?’ asked Becker.

‘It was fine,’ said Pollard. ‘I could feel even from down in the kitchen, the frightening thing was gone. I went back to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. Although it was gone, every time I closed my eyes I saw it move again, the way it leaned over as though it wanted to get closer to me, to catch me.’

‘Let me ask you something,’ said Becker. ‘Why did you run to the garden?’

‘Because I wanted to get out of the house,’ said Pollard.

‘Did you pass your front door to get to the back door?’

‘Yes,’ said Pollard. He hadn’t thought of that before, had just run.

‘So why not go out of the front door?’

‘I was naked,’ he replied after a moment. ‘I didn’t want to be naked in the street, people might have seen.’

‘So,’ said Becker, ‘even though you were terrified, the fear of being naked was greater?’

‘Yes,’ said Pollard. ‘No. I don’t know.’

‘You do,’ said Becker. ‘It might not feel like it, but you’re making progress. The phobic reaction, the attacks, are getting worse, yes, but your inherent rationality is beginning to break through. All of the things you experience can be explained physiologically: you feel cold because your body, having entered an extreme ‘fight or flight’ reaction, is drawing the blood away from your extremities in order to protect and feed your muscles. The thing you saw moving was your eyes adjusting to opening and the pupils widening very quickly, the movement and change in light being taken in by your eyes being interpreted by your brain, an interpretation fed by fear and adrenaline. We make patterns where none exist; it’s why we see shapes in the clouds. The pattern you made was fearful, terrifying, because that’s how you were feeling at the moment of interpretation. Consider this, though, Mr Pollard: you went past one potential exit from your home to a further one not because it was a better exit, but because you’re starting to take control, to set the attacks within the context of your wider life. You didn’t want to be seen naked, so even without realising it you were assessing with the situation, considering your options, acting on them, reducing the possibility of that happening. You may have felt out of control, but you weren’t, not really.’

‘But it was so real,’ said Pollard, remembering the weight on the bed, the shift of the mattress, the cold, the sight of it surging forwards at him as he struggled in his duvet.

‘Of course it was,’ said Becker. ‘The feelings that are causing it, all the pain and fear, all the grief you feel about Mary’s death, they’re real. You don’t want to experience them again, to even remember them; who would? So, unconsciously, you’ve trapped them down and converted them into this other fear, something powerful but ultimately irrational, an externalised point, a thing to flee from, to allow you a literal running away. The feelings fade when you’re run because you’ve vented them, released some of the pressure, but it builds up again. The attacks are a sign that, whether you realise it or not, you are ready to deal with those feelings now, to get rid of them, to uncover Mary and let her back into your memories. Not as a painful thing but as something good, something positive.

‘Tell me how she died.’

The question surprised him, caught him off guard, and Pollard couldn’t speak. That day, that miserable, dreadful, awful day, was the most terrible memory he had, and it was scraped and raw when he probed it. Fragments of the day jumbled together inside him, fighting to free themselves, each one bad, worse, the worst; the phone call from the police, the trip to the hospital, the doctor in her white coat with the voice as sympathetic and absolute as cold mercy, being left alone with Mary but not for goodbye, no, for identification, to know that she was dead and to be able to confirm for the world that he knew she was dead. Mary, who joked she’d kill him if he went first, Mary who wouldn’t eat olives but who loved anchovies, Mary, whose mouth and eyes were open as she lay on the morgue’s viewing room table as though she had been caught by surprise, frozen staring into the distance, mid-speech. Mary, who was already going cold when he kissed her for the last time. Mary, who was dead. ‘She had a heart attack in the office behind the gallery, unpacking crates,’ he said eventually.

‘This was an art gallery, yes? She worked there?’

‘She owned it. She set it up six years ago, after years of working in a job she hated. She mostly showed contemporary artists, and imported and sold ethnic art. Most of our holidays these last years have been business trips.’ He smiled at the memories, Mary excitedly telling him about the new pieces she had found somewhere off the beaten track, of the deals she managed to do. ‘She was good at finding things that were unusual, that people liked enough to buy. She was successful, was getting a good name for herself.’

‘She had a heart attack?’ asked Becker, gently steering Pollard back to the subject he was trying to skirt around.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But it didn’t kill her, not straight away. She fell. She was unpacking some Inuit pieces at the time, little stone carvings, and they fell with her. Most of them broke on the floor, all except one she was holding. Mary, she . . . she rolled in them, and the pieces cut her. She had scratches and punctures all over her arms and face, so many that the police thought at first that she’d been attacked and stabbed. There was an autopsy and an inquest before they decided she’d died of natural causes.’

Pollard took a deep breath, painful and sharp, and said, ‘They think she was alive for at least a few minutes after the heart attack. There was a lot of blood and marks like she’d tried to crawl towards her desk, towards the phone. That’s the worst of it, I think, the thought of her being alone and scared and in pain for those few minutes. I wish I’d been with her.’

‘Yes,’ said Becker, ‘I’m sure. Have you told anyone that before?’

‘No.’

‘Then well done. This isn’t easy, I know; you’re peeling back these layers, all of those miseries, but it’s for a good reason. Mary’s there at the centre of it all, Mr Pollard, the positive Mary, the good memories. I know I keep saying it, keep repeating it, but I have to know you understand, that you trust me. We’re getting there, getting closer.’

‘Yes,’ Pollard said. He was suddenly exhausted, sick with tiredness.

‘Tell me, the object that you wife was holding, do you know what it was?’

‘No. The police gave it me back once the inquest was over, but I’ve never looked at it.’

‘Then homework for the week, Mr Pollard, is to look at the object and find out what it is, and tell me about it next week.’

 

The day before his next session with Becker, Pollard ate his lunch outside. The square in front of his office was busy with businessmen and –women, scurrying, eating, talking, smoking. He liked it here, liked its busyness, the bustle of it. The concrete benches that ringing it faced in, which he and Mary had laughed about that lunchtime all those years ago. ‘Business only wants its people to look inwards, at other business sorts,’ she had said, ‘God forbid they look at the world outside even for a moment!’ Pollard, who had worked in finance since he was sixteen and was used to her teasing, had laughed with her and kissed her and poured her another glass of champagne. Sitting here now, he remembered her leaning into him, whispering about the future, the smile on her face evident in her voice. Ah, but he missed her, more every day it felt like.

It had gone cold.

On the other side of the square, something black moved. It was large, stalking behind the curtain of people so that Pollard couldn’t get more than a glimpse of it. He had an impression of flanks, of fur sleek with wetness, of a head that swayed from side to side as though sniffing at the floor.

Of eyes as black as obsidian and of teeth the yellow of ivory left in dark places.

It’s an animal, he thought, although what, he couldn’t tell. It was high at the shoulder, almost as tall as the people around it, none of whom reacted to it. Couldn’t they see it? Feel it?

It was even colder now, and steam was rising from the thing as it moved around the edge of the square, coming to towards Pollard. A gap opened briefly between two of the hurrying people, allowing him to glimpse a head whose flesh was crenelated and raw-looking. Pollard dropped his half-eaten sandwich and rose, knowing that he had to go, to go now, to escape the thing, to not let it any nearer. He heard it, a noise like the snuffle of some giant carnivore scenting its prey, heard a sound like freezing rain hitting glass, and he ran.

‘I don’t remember much after that until I was in the office,’ said Pollard. ‘I must have run up the stairs, though, four floors. My legs still ache now.’ In fact, Pollard did remember one thing; as he knocked open the door from the stairway onto the fourth floor, startling some of his colleagues, the thing had been at the bottom of the stairwell. It was long and lithe, slipping around the corners with a sinuous grace, peering up at him. In the bright electric light, its black eyes glinted with flashes the colour of burning grass. The sight of it, of those glittering and depthless eyes, made his bladder clench and he had felt a hot splash of urine escape him.

‘Did you do your homework?’ asked Becker.

Pollard, momentarily startled by the conversation’s change of direction but beginning to recognise Becker’s tactics, didn’t answer. Becker looked at him expectantly, forcing him to speak. ‘Yes,’ Pollard said. ‘I did my homework.’ Homework, he thought. Some homework, to investigate the last thing my wife held on this earth. He had opened the bag the police had given him several nights before, tipping out Mary’s purse and phone and the other thing, letting them tumble onto the table in front of him.

The thing was in his pocket and he took it out now, putting it on the table between himself and Becker. It was a small dog, carved out of dark rock. ‘It’s an Inuit carving of a qiqirn,’ he told Becker. ‘I remember Mary telling me about it when she originally ordered them. Most Inuit art is stories, they were originally nomadic and didn’t have much use for carvings and statues, I don’t suppose, so she was excited to find them. Qiqirn are supposed to be malicious spirits, unpleasant, taking advantage of the lonely.’

‘A dog?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the thing you saw, could you say it was a dog?’

‘Maybe,’ Pollard admitted. ‘A big one. It’s hard to say for sure.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Becker. ‘You saw a version of the thing Mary was holding when she died, this Inuit qiqirn, not because it’s real and not because Mary was cursed by it, but because it’s a representation of her death. Those bad layers, Mr Pollard, they’re fighting as hard as they can to stay in place but you’re winning.’ He gestured to this week’s piece of folded paper. Pollard picked it up and read A BAD WEEK IN WHICH YOU HAVE SEEN SOMETHING.

‘We’re getting closer, Mr Pollard, closer to the heart of it. Closer to Mary, moving through the layers of bitterness and mourning and anger and hurt that surround your memories of her. Those layers have helped protect you these last months, kept you safe until you have the strength to move forwards, but they’ve done their job now. These attacks are evidence of that, of that fact that the rational, loving part of you is beginning to assert itself, to free Mary from their shackles. Let me take a guess at something: the square in which you saw the qiqirn, it was somewhere that had significance to you and Mary?’

‘Yes.’ It was where he and Mary had gone after she had signed the lease on the art gallery, where they had had the conversation a year earlier about her quitting her hated job and setting up the gallery. Where they drank champagne at lunchtime and smiled at other and looked forward to the future.

‘The kitchen, the bedroom, other places of importance where this thing happens, the qiqirn makes its presence felt in those places because it’s a thing of negativity and it can have its greatest affect in places that are most positive for you.’

‘It felt real,’ said Pollard, not sure which was worse, the idea that the qiqirn was real or that he wanted to it to be real because the alternative was that was holding onto his negativity so tightly that it had made him see things.

‘Of course it was, because it is real,’ said Becker. ‘Where our brains are concerned, our perceptions, there are no metaphors or similes, there’s simply real and not real. Did it physically exist? No. Was it real? Yes, yes it was, a manifestation of all your unhappiness and loss and sadness and fear.’

‘I suppose,’ said Pollard, remembering steam rising off grey flanks.

‘You’re doing well, Mr Pollard, so well. Time for the next stage, I think. All the steps you’ve taken so far have been around the edges of the attacks. Important, yes, vital even because it’s been about helping you to understand what’s happening, but now we have to deal with the things themselves. Small steps, Mr Pollard, or in your case, no steps. When the attacks come, try to stand still for a second before you run, for five or ten or thirty seconds, as long as you can manage. Try to stand for longer and longer each time. Take control of them, rather than letting them control you. Will you try, Mr Pollard?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and thought again of flanks and teeth and eyes that flashed through the darkness of four floors, black and cold and glistening.

 

‘You look tired. I’m assuming this hasn’t been a good week?’

‘No,’ said Pollard, thinking that these sessions were making him monosyllabic. It had been a terrible week, with at least one attack each day and sometimes more. He had tried to stand in the face of them, he had, but they were simply too strong. The fear, the thought of seeing that thing again, the qiqirn, was simply overpowering and he had found himself running within seconds of the attacks starting. He had cowered in his garden, come to a halt in the street, even locked himself in the bathroom once, pushing towels into the gap between the floor and door and knowing as he did so that it was a ridiculous thing to do.

‘I did some research on the Inuit, on the qiqirn,’ said Becker. ‘You were right, they’re malicious dog spirits. Most cultures have similar things, from the Native American tricksters to the Japanese kitsune, even the Christian devil. They represent all those forces beyond our control, accidents and disasters and bad luck and the like. According to most mythologies, they latch on to someone when they’re at a low ebb, when they’re mourning or scared or upset, take root, fester. They cause fits, sickness, misery. Does that sound familiar?’

‘Yes,’ said Pollard. ‘It’s me. Mary and me, my memories of her.’

‘Yes. Qiqirn are supposed to be ugly, bald, vicious, to cause fear and panic and disgust, to carry the cold of their native land with them wherever they go, all the things you’ve experienced. I found something else out as well: the angakkuq, what I suppose we’d call the spiritual leader of the Inuit group, had advice on how to deal with a qiqirn if you found yourself haunted by one. ‘Turn and face it’, they say. ‘Walk towards it, taking small steps. Be steady. Look it in the eye. Recognise it. Shout its name.’ Does that sound familiar as well?’

‘Yes. It’s the advice you’ve been giving me.’

‘We think of psychology and psychiatry as new sciences, but they aren’t, not really. The Inuit have a saying about their mythology: ‘We don’t believe; we fear’. It’s how we cope, by fearing, by putting our fears into shapes that we can categorise, name, understand, and by doing so, we give ourselves the tools to overcome them. Religions, particularly older ones, have always understood that we have to force our fears into view to get rid of them. Each step we take away from them strengthens them; each one we take towards them weakens them. Walk towards it, Mr Pollard, using the smallest steps if you want, but walk towards it. This qiqirn, these negative emotions and fears, they exist because you’re allowing them to and for no other reason. Keep walking, Mr Pollard.’

‘Yes,’ said Pollard, feeling a swell of helplessness. Becker made it sound easy, practically sweated confidence, but he hadn’t seen it, hadn’t heard the noises it made, hadn’t felt the numbing fear and the electric twitch in legs that had to run.

‘I know it sounds hard,’ said Becker. ‘It is hard, but it’s not impossible. Call it a qiqirn, a phobia, a panic attack, whatever you like, but you can defeat it, Mr Pollard. You can.’

Pollard didn’t reply. He hoped Becker was right.

 

Pollard hit the door hard, yanking at the handle, but it refused to open. He had locked it earlier, he remembered, casting his eyes about for the keys. Where were they? He had locked the door and then gone to the kitchen, putting the keys down on the counter by the kettle. They were in the kitchen.

Where the qiqirn was.

The attack had come suddenly, faster than any of the others. Everything was fine, he was getting ready to go to bed, and then it was there, in the kitchen, behind him. He had a vivid, frenzied image of it sitting on its haunches, its black lips curled back in a grin from teeth that were slick with saliva, its bald head a pale, sickly pink, ridges of flesh crawling across its crown, its ears laid flat. The temperature plummeted. Pollard ran.

Hitting the locked door brought him back into himself slightly, the door’s solidity and immovability cutting through some of the terror. Pollard heard a moaning sound, realised it was him and forced himself to stop. This can’t go on, he thought, I can’t keep on like this, it’s killing me. I want my life back. I want Mary back, she’s dead and I want her back, not this, not this terrible fear.

He turned, keeping himself pressed again the door. The kitchen was almost dark, the lights off inside, low illumination coming in from the night beyond the window, from the moon and the streetlamps and the stars. From the normal world.

Pollard took a step towards the doorway, his legs shaking so much that his knees actually knocked together. I wonder if Becker knows that it’s not a cliché? he thought to himself randomly, and took another step.

Another. The thing in the kitchen growled, low and glottal.

No. There was no growl, there was no thing in the kitchen, no qiqirn, no trickster demon feeding on his pain and fear like some fat parasite, there was only air and memories buried under layers of grief and anger and sorrow. He took another step, and the urge to run was terrible, his muscles sick with adrenaline and unspent energy. He reached out, taking hold of the kitchen doorframe, anchoring himself. I will do this, he thought, I will. In the room ahead of him, claws clicked softly on linoleum as the qiqirn shifted and he imagined it readying itself for him, crouching, bringing its bald, ugly head close to the floor and drawing its lips back even further from its teeth to reveal gums that were flushed and dark, the colour of wet slate.

No.

There is nothing there, Pollard told himself again. I will step forward into my kitchen, my kitchen and there will be nothing there, no demons except my own and the empty spaces they create. He took another step, pulling himself against the doorframe. He was cold, the house was cold, his life was cold. More sounds from the kitchen, the spatter of saliva dripping from teeth and tongue to floor in thick, lazy strings, another low growl. I will face it, Pollard thought, and made the last step through the doorway.

In the kitchen it had started, gently, to snow.