She went into the kitchen to fetch the key from the dresser.

But it had been removed. Undeterred, she searched for something with which to force the door. She had settled on a large screwdriver when she heard the front door open.

Mrs Cywynski was hanging her hat up in the hall as Victoria burst out of the kitchen.

'Oh, thank goodness. I think one of the cats is trapped in there.' She pointed to the shrine door. 'I heard it...' She tailed off as she saw the old woman's face.

'What have you been prying after? That room, it is private.'

'I know. I couldn't find the key.'

'What have you been doing? You certainly weren't expecting me home so early. Coming down into my home like this!'

'But you always let me. I was worried about the cats.'

'The cats, the cats. Impossible. The door stays closed. They cannot possibly be in there.'

Victoria was stunned. 'Well, something something is,' she insisted. is,' she insisted.

'Nonsense! n.o.body goes in there. n.o.body! n.o.body! ' '

'I'm sorry,' said Victoria and went miserably upstairs.

Half an hour later there was a knock at her door. She let Mrs Cywynski knock several times before answering.

The landlady was there, all smiles. ' Kochano Kochano. It is I who should apologize. I have checked and that wretched ginger Thomas was in there all the time. Please forgive me. I've brought you some biscuits.'

Victoria took the plate of fresh piernicki piernicki and closed the door. She was not convinced. When she had been looking for the screwdriver, 'that wretched ginger Thomas' had been sitting outside on the kitchen window sill complaining that he had not been fed. and closed the door. She was not convinced. When she had been looking for the screwdriver, 'that wretched ginger Thomas' had been sitting outside on the kitchen window sill complaining that he had not been fed.

The next morning at the museum dragged itself so slowly that she thought it might expire totally before it ever reached lunchtime. She had taken to spending her lunch hour in the hallowed rotunda of the Reading Room. She still had a century of history and culture to catch up on and the library was too good a place to waste.

The usual gathering of academics and researchers were there poring over their various ancient tomes, but she found a corner and began to study a copy of Karl Marx's Das Kapital Das Kapital.

She had seen a man cleaning daubed paint off the huge bust of Marx on a tomb at Highgate and had decided to find out what all the fuss was about.

She was just dozing off when there was a disturbance.

From somewhere in the room, she could hear a droning sound, like someone chanting. There was a chorus of indignant shushing. Various researchers were staring across the library in the direction of the droning.

Victoria stood up to see better.

A dishevelled old man was sitting at one of the central tables, a heavy book open in front of him. He had unkempt white hair and a dirty white beard. He was staring blankly ahead as he ran his fingers lightly across the pages of the book. He looked like a blind man reading braille. His chanting was becoming more p.r.o.nounced, like a h.e.l.l-fire preacher d.a.m.ning all sinners to the flames.

It was years since she had seen the old man, but she knew him immediately. She went cold as she recognized Professor Edward Travers, late of the Yeti invasion in the London Underground, and further back on her original visit to Det-sen.

And somewhere more recently than that, she was sure...

She intended to wend her way through the academics, but suddenly felt very faint and forced herself to sit down again.

Two attendants were already descending on Professor Travers.

As they tried to remove him, the frail old man picked up a white stick and lashed out wildly with an extraordinary fury.

The weapon caught one attendant on the head with a resounding crack. The second was caught across the stomach and keeled over in agony.

The white stick seemed to lurch to the left, pulling Travers after it. The occupants of the Reading Room fell back to let him pa.s.s.

Victoria hauled herself up from her chair and called, 'Professor Travers' after him. He faltered, his back to her.

Then he threw back his head in wild unnatural laughter and vanished through the doors.

There were general looks of astonishment. Several people stood round debating what to do and one very hasty person began to help the two attendants.

'Extraordinary,' observed a professor with a green bow-tie, who was next to Victoria. 'I'd say you were absolutely correct.'

'I'm sorry,' she said weakly.

'Travers. Yes, absolutely incredible. Definitely Travers.'

Victoria was feeling faintly nauseous by now.

'Of course, you're wrong,' continued the professor.

'Couldn't possibly be him. Ted Travers died...ooh, at least a couple of years ago.'

'Four years,' added another professor. 'Went to the funeral.

Same week that my paper on Etruscan viticulture came out.'

'Must have been some sort of double then,' suggested the first. 'Extraordinary. I wonder what the odds are on that?'

'Excuse me,' said Victoria and made her way slowly across to the table where Travers had been sitting.

'Ah, fascinating stuff,' commented another academic who was leafing through the yellowing pages of the volume Travers had been reading.

'What is it?' asked Victoria.

The script was in symbols resembling Sanskrit. 'All about the Bardo,' said the academic. 'The astral plane. Out-of-body experiences. It's The Tibetan Book of the Dead The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the original, of course. Do you know it?'

Victoria excused herself from work and went home. When she reached the house, she saw that the hole in the pavement had been filled in. There was now an uneven mound of earth bigger than the hole it had once filled. Someone had stolen the paving stones.

The house was unnaturally quiet with no sign of cats anywhere. All she wanted was to lie down and sleep, but she was frightened of where her uncontrollable dreams might take her. There was something lying on the stairs inside her front door. It glinted in the late afternoon sunlight a shred of web.

She was too tired to pick it up. She shut the door, only too glad to shut out the world. Once upstairs, she lay down on the ancient settee and tried to sleep.

She could hear the grandfather clock ticking downstairs and the familiar gurgle of the central-heating pipes. Nothing else seemed real. A sudden gust of wind tore copper-coloured leaves from the chestnut tree outside and threw them at the window. Then the wind subsided and there was a dead calm.

' Victoria, Victoria, ' whispered a voice. ' whispered a voice.

Something moved downstairs.

'Mmm?' she murmured, only half awake.

' Victoria! Victoria! ' '

She was wide awake. It was nearly dark outside.

' I need you, Victoria. You promised you would help. You I need you, Victoria. You promised you would help. You came to me... came to me... ' '

She sat tightly on the settee, unsure if the voice was real or only in her head. 'What do you want?'

' ...so I have come to you. ...so I have come to you. ' '

'Where are you?'

' Here. Waiting. Here. Waiting. ' '

She rose and went to the door that led down to Mrs Cywynski's flat. It was open. She could barely see down into the hall below. A cold draught was coming up out of the darkness to meet her, carrying the smell of mustiness with it.

Everything was slow and smooth, like a dream she had dreamed a hundred times before. She turned away and walked into the kitchen. In a drawer, she found a candle and lit it from the gas cooker. Then she went back to the door and started down the stairs.

The candle flame flickered in the draught. Its glow caught on swathes of web that hung from the hall lamp and draped across the windows and walls. The candle guttered and went out.

An ashen light was seeping into the hall. It came from deeper within the house. Victoria reached the foot of the stairs.

At the end of the pa.s.sage, the door to Mrs Cywynski's 'shrine'

was ajar. The unnatural light came from within. She advanced slowly and pushed at the door.

The room was filled with trophies for golf and bowls tournaments. On the sideboard, there were photographs of Mrs Cywynski and a man who must have been her Andrzej. His pipe was set there with the tobacco tin he had kept since the war. They were all covered in web.

Across the room, in a high-backed leather chair, his stick at his side, sat the old man from the Reading Room. His face was curiously young for someone so long dead dead. But it was not alive, it was animated. The head twitched up at her and he gave a strange cry, half moan, half laughter.

When she saw his watery eyes, staring blind through the cracked lenses of his spectacles, all her other thoughts and fears fell away from her. Charles Bryce, Roxana Cywynski, St John Byle, the Harrises, the cats, Jamie, the Doctor. She would not forget the past, but she must look to the future. She had made her promise to him, travelled to find him and release him. Her leap of faith was complete. She had things to do. A new world to discover. And there would be things he could teach her too.

She took his frail hand, icy against her own, and let him run his dead man's fingers over the contours of her face.

'Yes. Yes, you understand,' he croaked, a smile beginning to twitch at the sides of his mouth. 'It begins here.'

She smiled gratefully and said, 'Welcome home, Professor Travers.'

5.

Geneva.

Deadline: The Intermediate Future oddammit, Bonderev! What the h.e.l.l's going on?'

'G 'I think the machines are winning, sir.'

'What's that?' The face-shape on the phone-screen was in New York, but the interference scrambling the definition could be coming from anywhere between the States and Geneva via the UNIT ComSat over the Atlantic. 'We have a Level Nine security breach, mister. There's someone in your system. And it's taken a whole half-hour to speak to you. I e-mailed you four times. And your fax has a communication error.'

Major Semyon Bonderev glanced across the Comms Centre. In the dimmed emergency lighting, he could see a fax machine sitting smugly in a tidal wave of spewed blank paper.

'Sorry, sir. Nothing's responding to us. But we're working on it. I'll be...' He hit the 'hold' tab, hoping that New York Ops hadn't seen, and then hung up. Then he tapped up his second line, answered its incoming call and left both phones to talk to each other. He sat back, pulled on the stub of his Turkish cigarette and tried to access the Overview System.

The terminal froze again as it checked for trojans and variants. Seconds later, the screen went green and hundreds of tiny glyphs began to can-can cheekily across the surface.

Bonderev pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose tightly.

There was a little red cursor flashing behind his eyes. Soon it was going to print 'MIGRAINE' all the way through his head.

He rebooted and tried another system. Why did you join the Army? he wondered. So that you didn't have to spend all day in the Moscow queues for employment or bread, he reminded himself. And if he was seconded out to the UN, because Russia had to send somebody as part of its commitment to the Security Council, that was OK too. Better than being sent to shoot people in Grozny.

Toni Diaz slid in beside him. She planted two fresh bottles of mineral water on his desk. 'Well?'

'Lousy,' complained Bonderev. 'Our intruder's right inside the mainframe. All the servers are blocked so we can't get at them. I think I'll go back to Moscow now.'

'Great,' said Diaz. 'I can't go home to Mexico City. My granny would miss the Swiss chocolate.'

They sat and looked at the terminal screen. The can-canning glyphs had settled into a less manic, more stately berserker-mazurka. 'I don't know where to start,' confessed Bonderev. 'Where's the DO?'

'n.o.body's sure. But there's a lift stuck between levels Eight and Nine.'

'Crafty b.u.g.g.e.r!'

'If he's any sense, he'll stay there,' chanted Diaz.

Her pager bleeped. She glanced at Bonderev, who shrugged his knotted shoulders in defeat. She replaced one of his phones and then answered it with her code. 'Sorry, he's busy,' she said, grimacing at the Russian. 'No. It just chucked us all out.