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Catcher had taken it all remarkably well, except possibly for the ‘irrational’ part. He’d frowned, just for a second, the first time Erskine had seen that happen.

‘Are you a rational man?’ he’d asked, with deadly seriousness.

Erskine had laughed once, loudly, and tried to ignore the funny looks he was getting from the other Society members.

‘Of course I’m a bloody rational man. Jesus Christ and his big Negro brother, Catcher, what kind of doughy-eyed stargazer do you take me for?’

Catcher had nodded, and Erskine could almost have heard the cogs and wheels turning in his head. ‘Good,’ the man had said, humourlessly. ‘Good.’

And he’d promptly invited Erskine to his house.

It had taken Erskine a while to realize that he was being formally invited to a meeting of Catcher’s ‘inner circle’. Well, how could he refuse an invitation like that? He’d get to the bottom of the man’s madness, ohhh yes, even if he had to walk through the blistering gates of Hell to do it.

But then it had all started to go wrong. When he’d arrived at the man’s disgusting house, Catcher and his little band of followers had been waiting in ambush. They’d blindfolded him – or rather, drawn some kind of cowl over his head – then tied his hands behind his back and led him, protesting in words of four letters or less, around more corners than he could count.

‘Catcher! Catcher! ’

He’d been right, all the time. Catcher was no better than a buggering Freemason. He’d heard the stories of the rituals the Masons put each other through, humiliation and symbolic execution, vows made until death, gullible idiots blindfolding each other and swearing to slaughter those who crossed them with fish-gutting knives –

– oh, damnation.

‘I’m warning you, man! If all this ends with my good self tied naked with a spit up my arse, I’ll chew every inch of skin off your body!’

No good. He was alone now, he was sure of it, no doubt locked in Catcher’s cellar or some such vile locale. Erskine felt his arm brush against something solid, a pillar or a door-frame. He rubbed his head against the shape, pushing the hood up over his forehead until it fell away from his face.

The first thing he saw was a column, like something out of an ancient Greek temple. Not cheap-looking, though, not like those ghastly mock-classical houses on Burr Street. Erskine squinted. Beyond the column was another, then another, then another...

With a start, he realized that he was in a corridor, lined with pillars on both sides. The walls looked like marble, shot through with veins of some unrecognizable foreign material.

He turned his head. The passage stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions, occasionally branching off into side-tunnels. The corridor was longer than Catcher’s entire house.

Where in the name of sodomy was he?

Io Ordo Io Io Ordo, a voice whispered in his ear.

Erskine Morris felt the muscles in his legs begin to grind together, and noticed – almost as if it were happening to someone else – that he was moving, stumbling down the passage with his hands still bound. He had absolutely no idea where he was going. In fact, he had absolutely no ideas at all.

Something cold and hard shifted inside Roz’s pouch. She tried to ignore the illusion that the shape was alive and impatient.

Her stomach started singing protest songs when she came within sight of the church on Paris Street, so she drifted into the nearby general store and wasted the morning’s earnings on a pocketful of something edible and vegetable-based, hoping this would be the last time she’d need local currency. The shop was swamped with the usual festive decorations, the owner intent on pushing the local laws of commerce to their very limits and staying open right up until the dawn of Christmas Day.

‘Not just celebrating Christmas,’ he told her from behind his polished counter, speaking slowly as if talking to a child.

‘It’s the anniversary.’

‘Really,’ she growled.

‘Ten years since they signed the Constitution. Give or take a few months.’

‘I’m happy for you,’ she said.

‘ And sixteen years