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"I was picking up something, but it wasn’t much: a dimly flickering filament of consciousness like a 25-watt light bulb left burning somewhere in the basement rooms of Kenny’s mind - the psychic equivalent of a pulse. But I was getting nothing else: not memory, not emotion, not even the raw light-dark strobe of an untranslatable dream. Kenny wasn’t a good sender, and the conditions were almost as bad as they could be. It seemed I’d spent a lot of effort and ingenuity to no good end.

But then, acting on an impulse I didn’t consciously examine, I slid my hand across Kenny’s palm until the tip of my index finger touched the line of one of his old, half-healed wounds.

Instantly, that faint pulse opened up like a hot red flower and I flinched from the shock of the contact, almost pulling my hand away.

What I was feeling was a mixture of contradictory emotions that turned around and through each other without merging, like oil in water. There was pain in there, sharp and real and narrowly focused: but the pain was shot through with a restless hunger that was almost erotic in its intensity, and riding on the hunger there was a sense of urgency, a formless conviction that translated as NOW, NOW, NOW, LET IT BE NOW.

It took a real effort not to step back, not to break the contact, because the emotions were so alien and so powerful: someone else’s excitement, someone else’s suffering and need flooding my synapses. I felt as though I was collaborating in an assault in which I was simultaneously victim and accomplice.

Images began to surface in the flow of emotion like corpuscles in plasma or felled trees on a rolling river. I saw a small, cramped room barely big enough for a bed and a chest of drawers, the top of the chest piled high with CDs and empty CD cases; the towers and walkways of the Salisbury, by day and then by night; and a hand, probably male, touching the surface of a broken mirror in which a face was reflected in jumbled jigsaw pieces. The face was eerily familiar, but I didn’t have time to reassemble that jigsaw before the ceaseless rush of thought carried it away from me again, brought me instead a razor, a bitter taste, a drumming, repetitive song.

I got the sword

I’m good because

I got the sword

I’m good because

I tried to screen the music out but it had an insane, viral insistence: it overwhelmed and effaced the other sensations one piece at a time until there was nothing else left but the pounding drumbeat.