Part One

Three weeks after he'd seen the building, he was throwing up again. In he middle of the night. Sweating and shaking, he resurfaced, and stared at the face in the cracked mirror. It looked whiter than he remembered, and a hell of lot more scared than he could ever remember. He glanced down. There were more teeth in the vomit. Small ones and spiky ones. He poked at them. There were five this time, floating on the sick like pearly icebergs. His stomach lurched, and he grabbed the edge of the sink, but there was nothing left to give.

The door shook, and he heard voices over the ringing in his ears.

'Hello?' People were banging at the door. 'Hello? Mr . . . Raifer? Is that right? Sam Raifer?'

And then a harsher voice, interrupting the other. 'Open the door, you little prick. This is the police.'

'Oh, thank God,' said Sam.

He tried to wash the teeth down the drain, more out of habit than any hope that his wretched sink would take any more. He shook his head. Let them arrest him. Let them lock him up in jail, for Gods sake. After the past few days, it'd be a nice way to run out the rest of his life. He staggered over to the door.

'Yes,' said the voice outside, 'open the door. Because we're the police.'

Sam heard smaning. 'Yeh,' said the other voice. 'Let us in, or we'll huff and we'll puff and we'll blow your house in.'

'How does it go?' mused the other. 'Not by the hairs on his chinny-chin-chin?'

Sam froze. Every nerve in his body screamed at him to move, but he didn't. He just stared at the door. They said they were the police, he thought desperately. Then his legs, obviously realising his brain wasn't up to the job, threw him to the floor.

The bullets started. They went on for a long time, until all that was left was the dust and the silence. Sam lifted his head carefully. His door was gone. They were in his office and looking around with great interest, at the newspaper over the windows, at his name on the desk and his books and broken chairs, and into the sink.

'Mr Raifer,' said one. 'It's taken us a time to find you.'

'Twenty four hours,' said Sam, still on the floor. 'Not really.'

'Ah, ah,' the other said, waving a long finger delicately. 'We didn't say a long time, now, did we?'

'No,' said Sam. 'Sorry.'

'Good. Now. You have something that belongs to us.' They pointed at the sink.

Sam shrugged. 'You want it, you can have it,' he said.

'The teeth, Mr Raifer. Not your sink, the teeth.'

'Oh,' said Sam. 'Right.'

'Very good. Come on, then.'

Sam shook his head wearily. 'No,' he said. 'Not back there. Please.'

They laughed. That's what they all did. They always laughed.

Three Weeks Earlier

He saw it just as he was waking up. He opened his eyes, then jerked upright, suddenly terrified he'd missed London and slept all the way from Edinburgh to Penzance. But they were barely out of the York Shire, said the girl next to him, in mild alarm, and nowhere near London.

He stared out of the window. Couldn't be bothered to say thank you. The girl had been eyeballing him since she fell onto the train at Newcastle, and he couldn't decide, or really care less, if she wanted him or just wanted him to get out. Probably, he thought dourly, the latter. He was wearing clothes that'd been on the floor for a week. His hair was rumpled, his eyes were dark, and his luggage had been nicked by a lurcher with a shotgun in one of the arse-fuck nowhere towns they seemed to stop at every five minutes. So he wasn't a basket of roses, or chocolates, or whatever she wanted. And the journey to London would take three ponderous days, travelling at an average speed of, oh, at least ten miles an hour.

Sam sighed, and leant his head against the window, feeling the vibration of the train through his hair. He'd only managed to get this train thanks to a group of tourists on the platform at Edinburgh. They'd been listening gravely to their tour guide explain how this island once was called Great, and hadn't noticed Sam when he lifted all the wallets, cameras and sunglasses from their loose pockets, one by one. If not for that, he'd only have been able to afford the freight trains that carried battery hens and passengers south, and reached London in about a week.

As it was, he was in the first class cabin of the cross country train, sitting on a damp wooden bench. Most of the windows were missing, driving cold York air into the train. There were no luggage racks. And most of the other passengers appeared to be insane.

And then he saw it.

It went by slowly; a huge black building in the middle of endless empty fields. It was a warehouse. Just a warehouse. Dark except for one light in one window, and the lamp that illuminated the sign that had caught Sam's eye: Self-access storage. Storage for hire. No thing is too small. Pretty unremarkable. Sam watched it out of sight, and idly wondered who the hell would use it, and what the hell for. Then the window he was sitting next to blew out of its frame in an explosion of glass and rain, and he spent the rest of the journey wondering how you knew when you'd developed pneumonia.