Richard wrote a mental diary in his head. Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiance, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as an life makes sense). Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement and I tried to be Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiance, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruit fly.

Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside.

The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.

There are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

Is there any person in the world who does not dream? Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?

If you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up.