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I tried again, this time touching the wood of the door frame rather than the knob. The effect was exactly the same. Indeed, if anything, it was stronger. A terror-inducing ride through dimensions of agony and torture. The voices were all indistinct, but you do not need to be an expert in unknown languages to understand when someone really wants you to know what it is that they are saying. I backed off to the solid comfort of the far wall and stared at the locked door for a long time, thinking about Edgar Allan Poe and The Tell-Tale Heart and dreading what manner of fiend, what monster, what thing could be hidden behind there.

I was trapped in amber. I could not go forward and I could not go back. My legs turned to treacle and I watched, bemused, as they seemed to melt into the floorboards.

I tried to speak, but my tongue was tied. Was this to be my eternal prison too?

A disembodied face appeared in the doorway of Cabin 672. It seemed to drift through the solid matter and, once outside, to congeal, with a sucking sound, into a recognisable shape. Solidity from the mist. Ordinarily, I would have been startled by such a manifestation, impressed even. I considered applauding the trick. But I was getting quite used to

such occurrences by now and passed it off with a shrug.

The ghost was berating me for my cowardice.

I stared at the pinched and sour-looking face, and it stared back at me defiantly, eyes wide, mouth leering, a grin of sadistic satisfaction etched upon it. It appeared to be a woman in her forties, wearing severe spectacles and a look of manifest discontent.

'Men are all a bunch of weak and helpless bastards,' she said, angrily. 'Never prepared to make the right decisions. Always willing to look for easy answers.'

I didn't disagree. Indeed, given my present situation, that sounded like a pretty good idea to me.

'I hate you and all your kind and every solitary little thing that you all stand for. All three billion of you in your male Kingdom of Right and Majesty. I spit upon your tarnished, beer-stained throne. What else can we expect from a disgusting collective mass of lowlife, no-conscience gangsters like you? You and your whole sex. I'd throw you in the sea for all the decent world to watch you drown and cheer as the bubbles rise and your thrashing stops. Men with your groping and drooling and enslaving and laughing, indulging the same tired and worn-out misogynist urges until the final second of time.'

'Have you quite finished?' I asked the woman, who merely scowled back at me. Her face, beneath her jet-black hair drawn back in a tight bun, was red, angry and agitated.

Not being human, I didn't feel the need to defend mankind. But, within a blinking, the woman's face was replaced by another. A man with a deep, gaping wound in his neck, livid scarlet against the white of the rest of his manifestation. 'You don't belong here,' he told me. 'No-one belongs here. Except us.'

'Who are you?' I asked again, my voice cooperating with me at last.

'We are many,' he said. 'We are endless. We are we.' I shook my head in confusion. 'We exist,' he continued, 'to tell you what you are doing is wrong, even if it is right. We are the ones who whisper to you in the night as you drift between the waking and the dreaming. We are the spiteful piece of grit in your shoe that cannot be shaken free. We are the lying thieves who steal your peace and quiet and continue to torment you until you can take no more. We are the dirty and unstoppable accusations that cannot be silenced or sued.'

Briefly the angry woman's face reappeared. 'Remember whose fault this all is,' she shouted accusingly. 'Remember our faces when you close your eyes each night and weep your piteous head to sleep. Remember at whose door the blame lies. It's yours.'

'Oh, go away you silly woman,' was all I could say, annoyed that her interruptions for nothing more than spite had stopped the flow of, potentially, some real information.