I found a bottle of vodka on a table and I unscrewed the top. I breathed in its sharp fumes, then raised the bottle to my lips.

The strange-looking man was standing behind me. He put a hand on my hip. His breath was hot on my neck.

"You must remember me."

"Who are you?" I whispered.

"We know each other inside out."

His long, wet tongue was in my ear. I pushed him away. He stood frozen against the wall, a monstrous, painted grin over his face. I realised we were alone. All the couples had gone.

"Hi," I said. He didn't seem particularly surprised to see me. The sky was bleached and shot with black cloud.

"Hi. Are you the person who lives over there? I thought I saw you in the window yesterday."

"Yes. Sorry, I didn't mean to be nosy."

"That's okay. You don't mind me traipsing around here?"

"No. No, of course not. Why should I mind?"

"I don't know. Perhaps you've got somebody buried here, a relation, a friend perhaps."

"No."

"Some people don't take too kindly to others trampling across graveyards, taking photographs." He laughed. "My name's Kieran."

"I'm Alice."

He extended a hand. I shook it. I noticed his eyes were like fine black gla.s.s. I pushed a strand of hair behind my ear. The wind moaned through the cemetery, sweeping dead leaves between tombstones.

"I guess it is kind of disrespectful."

"Disrespectful?" I was miles away.

"Walking over graves. Taking photographs. Disturbing the dead." He spoke in a mock Bela Lugosi accent. We both laughed.

"So... why do you?"

"I don't know, to tell you the truth."

He edged towards the angel under the willows. He raised the camera and took a photograph.

"I guess I'm fascinated by death. G.o.d, you must think I'm morbid. Well you're right, I suppose. I am."

"Are you a professional photographer?"

"No. I do this because I want to."

He lined up another picture, squatting in the tall reeds and purple nettles.

"She's beautiful." I nodded to the angel. Then Kieran said a very strange thing. I thought he was joking, but there was a peculiar light in his eyes that convinced me otherwise.

"She's alive," he whispered. The wind rattled the trees. "I really believe she's alive." Just as he took the photograph, and as the flash danced on her body, I noticed some stone flake away from the statue.

Kieran didn't have a job. He lived in a bedsit in Wickham, close to the multi-complex cinema and TGI Friday. He earned money busking in the shopping precinct. He played popular songs to shoppers with a beat-up acoustic guitar. Occasionally he modelled for sixth-form art students at Wickham College. He caught buses to different suburbs in the city, taking pictures of cemeteries and churches, sometimes dead birds and road-kills decomposing in the asphalt of major roads.

I guess I kind of latched onto him. There was nothing else to do. I scanned The Locksley Chronicle and read the council was already pulling down trees on East Knell common. Everything that mattered seemed to be dissolving around me. I didn't even like my apartment. There was nothing between the damp, rotting walls except my own languishing impression. My writing deteriorated. It was as if words no longer made sense. I read and re-read my poems and stories but found them meaningless, so I tore them to shreds. Kieran didn't mind me hanging around. I'd wait until the evening, then sit in the cemetery. He'd arrive just as the chocolate sun melted behind the old church spires.

One night I dreamt I was in a room I vaguely recognised. The night built up like a wall around me. Outside the window, the streetlights gleamed and the moon grinned between houses like a cracked skull. I knew somebody was in the room with me. I could hear breathing. I sat up and for a second saw the form of a man in the corner of the room struggling to tear a plastic bag from off his face. He was thrashing his limbs but the bag just sucked in tighter and I knew he was going to suffocate. I wanted to do something, but I couldn't move. I felt like I was under water.

The strange-looking man was standing at the end of the bed. He smiled at me. His eyes were smudged with make-up and his lips were dark, dark crimson.

"Do something," I said.

The strange-looking man laughed. It sounded like a pig squealing.

"You are mine," he said. "I made you. You belong to me. You always will belong to me."

One dreary morning Kieran and I met in a cafe.

We sat in the corner, under a print of Van Gogh's Cafe Terrace at Arles. Like all of Van Gogh's work, it burned with feverish, otherworldly life. When we weren't talking, the violent hiss of the rain filled the void.

"Why do you take all these weird pictures?" I asked.

Kieran stared at me, then stirred his coffee with a plastic spoon.

"Alice," he whispered across the table, "some people can't face the darker things in life. They pretend that bad things don't exist. They shut them out."

He discerned the puzzled look on my face. He gazed at me with his black gla.s.s eyes.

"Come with me," he said.

He took me to his bedsit. It was a five-minute walk to Wickham. We cut across the old disused railway bridge and the rain-swept park. As he struggled with the key in the lock, I turned and caught a black cat watching me from underneath a gutted Escort. Overhead, in the direction of the multi-complex cinema, came the low rumble of thunder. The rain made hypnotic circles in puddles. He pushed open the door, turned, and smiled at me.

"Come in. It's not much, but it's home."

The room was bare and so dark, furnished only by a couple of chairs placed close to the sink. There was no television, no ornaments, no books, no table. The walls were dirty and yellow. I noticed apparatus for developing photographs in the corner. Photographs hung from pegs on a clothesline that stretched across the length of the room; I identified pictures of tombstones and memorial sculptures from Locksley Cemetery. There were photographs of half-lit streets and ancient, shuttered houses. A dead bird. A long distance photograph of a child crying. I recognised the places but Kieran had created a mood through lighting and detail to make them different somehow.

"They're brilliant," I whispered. "You should be professional."

"It's something I want to do for me. n.o.body else."

"But that's such a waste."

"It's the way I want it to be."

"Do you have a job? Friends? Family?"

"No. I've never worked. I'm not close to anybody really. I can't fit in. Out there."

"Why?"

I pushed a strand of hair behind my ear. Perhaps I was being silly and immature; perhaps I was a sixteen-year old girl again, but it felt as if I had found a soul mate. Someone who thought and felt like me.

"I'm not sure. I like to be on the outside of things. To live around what we see and know. It's not that I don't want to connect with society. It's just that I can't. I can't do it."

He stared out of the window. The rain obscured his reflection. I walked to the furthest corner of the room. There were hundreds of photographs of Locksley Cemetery. It didn't look like the same place. The otherworldly lighting made me think of spirit planes and places I had only walked in dreams.

Kieran opened a bottle of wine.

"Why are you so intrigued by me, Alice?" he asked.

"You're interesting, I guess. Different. I think I'd like to know you better."

"I'm not interesting." He took two gla.s.ses from the sideboard. "There's nothing profound about me." He laughed and leaned back against the wall. "People need anchors in life. Just to keep them sane. People need truth and certainty to give their lives happiness...and stability. I can't offer any of those things, Alice. I can't believe in anything that I see around me so I kind of create my own worlds."

I wondered what had made him this way.

"Why are you so fascinated by death?" I looked back at his photographs. "Is this a way of confronting your demons?"

He looked uncomfortable. He stared down at his hands. I felt embarra.s.sed, and frightened that I'd grieved him with my question.

"I don't know," he replied with a slow shrug of his shoulders. "Perhaps someday you'll be able to tell me. What frightens you, Alice?"

"The Spook," I answered. He narrowed his eyes.

"Who?"

"He's this strange-looking guy who appears in my dreams. I call him The Spook. I think he knows everything about me."

"Everything?"

"It's like he can open up my soul just by looking at me. I think he knows more about me than I'll ever know about myself."

We were silent. There was just the rain.

After we'd finished his bottle of wine, we made love in his bed.

That night I was wandering a street that I almost recognised. I climbed an iron-cast staircase and disappeared into the shadows of a building that smelt of long lost days and dead things. There was a mirror on a wall and I caught my own petrified reflection floating in the darkness. I could hear laughing. It sounded like a pig squealing.

Somebody flicked a switch and a lurid crimson light illuminated the room. The bulb flickered and hissed above me. I noticed that somebody was bound to a chair in the corner of the room. He had a plastic bag stretched over his head. Gnarled tree limbs scratched against a windowpane, but I couldn't remember there being trees outside. The squealing was louder now, and I could hear metal sc.r.a.ping against the dried-up old bones of the building. The plastic bag was clotted with thick dark blood and vomit.

I woke in the morning to find Kieran had gone. I got dressed and watched the rain sweep across the common. It felt like I'd been alone all along. The thought of returning to my apartment overwhelmed me with dread. Kieran had left a note tacked to the door. It read: Alice, see you soon. Kieran.

We were reunited that evening, in the cemetery.

Kieran stood staring at the angel under the willows. I leaned against some railings and wondered why I felt so jealous. He took several pictures of her, then hung his camera around his neck and walked away.

I pulled away a curtain of sharp branches and gazed into her eyes. Her face seemed different somehow; the lines of her features less defined. I pressed my hand to her face. Slowly, softly, some more stone flaked away beneath my fingertips.

"Kieran, when will I see you again?" I asked.

He paused at the cemetery gates. He looked tired and so pale. Nettles and twigs clung to his coat and hair.

"Can I come back with you?"

"Sorry Alice. I want to be alone this evening. I'm not in the mood for company tonight."

"Oh. Okay." I felt crushed. He smiled and stroked my face. "You'll be back here tomorrow, won't you?"

"Perhaps."

It began to drizzle. I wrapped my white cardigan around me.

"I like you, Alice. You remind me of somebody I once knew. You're a special person and I like you very much." The rain came down harder, tearing through the trees. "It's that... it's harder for me to get close to people these days. I find it hard to give pieces of myself away."

"It's okay. We can take our time." My voice trembled. He stooped and kissed me, running a hand through my hair. Then he was gone, into the rain.

I sat on my bed, staring at the four walls. Slowly, the shadows lengthened across the ceiling and floor. I began to see things in the half-light. Transient images of shapes and faces distorted like fleeting reflections in a broken mirror. I lay my head down on the pillow.

The street was utterly empty. The night's sky reflected back the lurid light of the city, masking the moon and stars. I saw no signs of life in the buildings around me, heard no traffic, no voices. There was a phone box on the corner. I had to call Kieran and warn him about the danger he was in. I opened the door and squeezed into the cubicle. The light above my head flickered on and off. Every time I gazed at the smooth black gla.s.s of the booth I saw my pale, translucent reflection disappear then reappear, disappear then reappear. I picked up the receiver.

"Kieran?" I whispered down the phone. There was no answer. Just an empty, mind-numbing hiss. Then the voice.

"I'll be here for you, Alice."

"Who?"

"Stop playing games."

The laugh. I saw a flash of disjointed images. A door opening. The darkness spilling into a silent room. Kieran trying to free his hands and the polythene bag over his head. A painted grin. The glint of a knife.

"Have you ever felt slighted, Alice? Do you think sometimes that you're just walking one long, dark corridor for the whole of eternity?"

"Where are you?"

"I'm with you now, Alice."

I slammed down the phone. I ran a trembling hand through my hair. Then I saw him standing outside the booth and I screamed. He was staring at me with those dark, monstrous eyes and his lipstick was smudged over his face. He was hissing like a cat.

Something sparkled in the night and I saw he was holding a coin between his fingers. He began to scratch it against the booth.

"It's always the past with you, isn't it, Alice." He scratched harder, peeling away black slivers of gla.s.s. "Always the f.u.c.king past."

"Don't come in," I cried, grabbing the door with white-knuckled hands. "Don't you come in."

Then I was awake, staring at the night pouring through the window. I crossed the room to fetch a gla.s.s of water. I turned on all the lights to chase away the shadows, half expecting The Spook to be waiting, but I was quite alone. When I looked into the mirror minutes from dawn, I saw a laceration across my neck. I touched it with my fingers and it opened like a wide red mouth.