The sound began as the faintest of vibrations, the merest alteration in the still, as a flutter, a slight tremble.

She would turn from me, move noiselessly across the room, close the door.

The gears, the teeth of the cogs in the machine bit into one another, locked together tight.

The Polyp, the jaws of the disgusting serpent’s head, gripped the back of the Sailor’s neck.

The water, the sea, swelled over my face. Stinging eyes and throat, hair wrapped itself close in tentacles about my neck and I saw him.

It was Einstein who gave us to understand that space is the same as matter, and with that realisation the limits of our perception of the universe fell away.

That summer the heat was dry, that sticky, creeping, kind that turns the flies to ghoulish fiends and hastens all the fruit towards a shrivelled end before its flesh has even had chance to swell.

It took Mrs Dorey several months to complete the baby, almost as long as if she had had to wait for it to grow naturally in her belly.

Now husband and wife. We picked our way amongst the sodden earth and toppled graves stepping out onto shifting wet leaves.  The Reverend sealed the church doors behind us.