8 hours ago:

There was a lot to come to terms with. There were a lot of threads to sort through – and they were all tangled tight about him, trying their hardest to saw through his flesh.

What Jack had actually said or done while sorting through these threads was a mystery to him. He would have the occasional moment of clarity – where he would wake up, drenched in sweat, and just know that he had killed Ellini. It was the kind of thought that stopped all other thoughts, and he would stare blankly into its recesses for a long time, feeling the cold strike into his bones.

But something must have been directing his steps while he was semi-conscious, because, during one of those moments of clarity, he found himself lying on the floor in a bare, unfurnished room, with moonlight streaming onto him through the leaded windows.

Unwittingly, he thought of Ellini's habit of lying on the bedroom floor, just outside the squares of sunlight. And it was as if someone had stomped on his stomach. He rolled onto his side and curled up around the pain, trying to contain it. He felt as though it would rip him to shreds if it burst free.

And, as the world swam back into focus, he realized where he was. It was the cursed room – the empty apartment in which Lily Hamilton had hanged herself, and which her landlady had never been able to let out since.

Dimly, he tried to ascertain whether he was injured, but the pain was too ubiquitous to tell. If there were certain parts of him that hurt more than the rest, he couldn't pick them out. He couldn't move his fingers much, and his knuckles were puffy and raw, but there was no blood. Presumably, he'd been punching solid objects – maybe even windows – on his way here. He pictured a trail of intermittent fist-marks on every wall between Broad Street and the High. It brought something like a smile to his lips.

Was it sympathy that had led him here? These drab, papered walls must have soaked up a lot of angst in their time, and misery loves company. He wondered if Miss Hamilton had stared up at the ceiling exactly as he was doing now, panting with despair, waiting for the next fit to take her.

He wondered what Ellini had stared up at, in her last moments, and the thought tipped him over the edge again. It had been the damp, sagging Oxford skies, hadn't it? No perfect Indian dark, with stars so bright you could see them pricking through the roof of the tent. Those horrible Oxford skies had hemmed her in right up until the end.

She'd had the music perhaps, from that pianist she loved to listen to – the man who had comforted her when he hadn't.

There was nothing left to throw up by this point, but Jack stiffened and retched anyway, watching as the world blurred out of focus. He wasn't going to shut his eyes. He would only see worse things if he did that.

When the blurred shapes in front of him started to re-solidify, he realized he was looking up at the window again. But it took a few more minutes of dull, dead-eyed staring before he realized what it was that had caught his attention.

The amulets were still there. They had removed all the furniture, but they'd left the amulets hanging in the window, as though they thought the room would get even more cursed if proper precautions weren't taken.

They were the usual assortment of metal discs and crystals. Lily Hamilton had been a shop-girl, hadn't she, so there would have been no money for anything fancy. Most of them were lacquered and gaudy. They reminded him of the painted plaster statues you saw for sale at Catholic shrines.

But one of them was a dagger. Not shaped like a dagger, but a proper dagger, with a handle of bone or ivory, and a blade that was almost blinding in the moonlight. It was the only thing in the window that wasn't painted or rusty.

Jack got to his feet and approached it tentatively, dreading the possibility that the knife would evaporate as soon as he clasped the handle. He felt like Macbeth. What if this moment that he'd thought was clarity turned out to be the first of many hallucinations? What if he was insane even in the calm moments? What if he was more insane in the calm moments?

But it was there. It was solid. Carefully, he untied it from its ribbon and carried it back to his little pool of moonlight on the floor. He tested the point against the tip of his finger. It was sharp. He wondered why a girl with a dagger this good had ended up hanging herself.

It wasn't that he wanted to punish himself. He wasn't thinking clearly enough for that. And it wasn't an outpouring of disgust or anger, like the actions – whatever they had been – that reduced his knuckles to a reddened pulp. It just seemed like a release, or at least a focus for the self-hatred boiling up inside him. He felt as though there was poison under his skin, and if he cut himself, he could let it out.

At first, he assumed the blade hadn't been as sharp as he'd thought – or else he was just weak from all the anger and exertion – because, no matter how hard he pushed, he couldn't seem to break the skin. Then he threw all his weight behind it. He positioned the knife point-first on his wrist and leaned against the handle until stars burst in front of his eyes, but still, there was no blood.

And yet he could feel the pain. It just didn't seem to be doing any damage.

Then, for the first time since waking, he noticed the silver shackle round his wrist. Moonlight was pouring into each of those deeply-carved letters. Unbreakable.

Was it related to his unbreakable skin? She had said – well, OK, no thinking about what she had said, but she had snapped it round his arm, and said he would soon find out what it was.

In design, it was very simple – just two thick semi-circles of silver, joined at one edge with a hinge, and at the other with a little pin. But the pin must have been rusted into place. It looked perfectly pristine, but it wouldn't budge when he tried to remove it. Jack struggled with it for a few seconds, fighting down a weird sense of urgency, and then took up the knife and tried to lever at it, ignoring the pain and the unnerving lack of blood.

It was unmovable – as though it had been bolted, soldered and riveted shut. And only then did he go back to the inscription, trace it with shaking fingers, and wonder whether it referred to the bracelet, or its wearer, or both.

After a few minutes of sitting on the floor, the wider implications of this new development burst in on him. He staggered into the street, lifted up a manhole cover, and retrieved a pistol from behind one of the loose bricks underneath. He had weapons stashed like this in hiding-places all over the city – for emergencies that he had fantasized about to keep his mind busy, but that he had never really thought would occur.

Somehow, even in his state of panic, he knew that the sound of a pistol-shot would attract attention to him, so he dropped down into the sewers and waded through the cold, knee-deep water until the tunnels joined up with the Trill Mill Stream, which he knew to be under Christchurch meadow, well away from the more inhabited areas.

It was beautiful down here – a gallery of red-brick vaults and arches, all covered with green-black moss. There wasn't much light, but new-breeds had excellent night-vision. And besides, hadn't he once tried to navigate Trill Mill blindfolded, just by the feel of the bricks under his hands? God, he'd been bored that night.

When he reached the middle of nowhere – underneath the middle of nowhere, which was even more inconspicuous – he paused for a moment, wondering where to shoot himself. After all, he was just testing a theory, wasn't he? What if he tried to shoot himself in the head and he wasn't really bullet-proof? Then it would be over.

But it was already over. Ellini was dead. 

And so, moving stiffly because of the cold, he lifted the pistol to his temple and fired.

It was the sound of his chattering teeth that woke him up. He was lying on his back in the dark water, shivering violently. Apparently, neither bullets nor hypothermia could put an end to him.

As he stared up at the rotting brick-work, it suddenly occurred to him that, if someone had asked the people who knew him best – Robin, say, or Alim – for a list of all the things most likely to drive him insane, even they couldn't have come up with something this complete.

For a moment, he amused himself by picturing how you'd ask them, or who would be interested in having a complete list of his worst nightmares anyway.

Perhaps it would be one of hell's architects – someone who had been charged with creating a circle of hell specifically tailored for Jack Cade. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, but if you cared enough to torment someone for all eternity, why cut corners?

The architect would approach Robin and Alim in a pub, maybe. He would sit them down, buy a beer for Robin and a tea for Alim, and ask them how – if you really wanted to – you could make Jack Cade's worst nightmares come to life.

He pictured them for a moment: Alim raising his eyebrows in that careful, calculating way of his, Robin probably carving another notch into the handle of his beloved knife. Maybe they would share a glance and then quickly look away again, because they prided themselves on being different from one another, and couldn't bear the idea that they were both thinking the same thing.

"Well," Alim would say, after a sufficiently uncomfortable pause. "You'd have to make him kill Ellini."

"But slowly," Robin would add. "Horribly. Blood all over the place. Oh, and make sure he knows she died hating him."

"Anything else?" the architect would ask. "Remember, I'm looking for something that would drive him insane. Not just a bad dream, but a worst nightmare."

At this point, there would probably be a meaningful silence, until some further incentive was offered. In Robin's case, it would only need to be another drink. He enjoyed his work for its own sake. Alim would be tougher. What would the questioner have to put on the table to induce Alim to be more explicit? It would have to be something upright or religious. A holy Muslim relic, perhaps, or a solemn promise to feed five thousand starving children. It didn't matter. He would be the first to speak, because his mind worked a lot faster that Robin's did.

"He would have to know that she had needed him desperately, and he had let her down," Alim would say. "That, while she was hunted, tormented, and more alone than she'd ever been in her life, he had been drinking whisky, playing cards, and dallying with other women."

"Oh, and throw some rape in there," Robin would say, now using the pen-knife to pick the dirt out from under his fingernails. "Rape and torture – that usually does the trick."

"And, instead of protecting her, he was whoring and drinking," Alim would add.

By this point, the architect would be scribbling frantically, making sure none of these appalling details were left out. But Alim and Robin would be warming to their theme. They wouldn't need any more prompting. They both – for very different reasons – liked to see a job well done.

"You would have to take away his free will a little, but not completely," Alim would say. "Make him do and say things which he would never contemplate if he were himself, but which are still not entirely out of character. Make him treat her the way he's treated other people. That way, he wouldn't be able to shrug off responsibility, and say he hadn't been in his right mind."

Here, Alim would glance at Robin with mock-courtesy, as though inviting him to jump in. But Robin wasn't much of a one for theorizing. Inspiration just came to him in the moment, when he had a knife in his hand. He would shrug darkly, and Alim would go on, almost enjoying himself now.

"Let him find out – for the first time in his life – that she loved him. But only when it's much too late. And make sure he knows that, right before she died, all that love was extinguished. Not only did she stop loving him, she stopped looking back on their time together with fondness. Let him realize that she was the most patient, loving person in the world, and he ruined things so badly that he defeated even her ability to forgive."

"This is all getting a bit subtle for me," Robin would say, examining the finger-nail dirt on his knife-blade. "How about we make it so that he's in constant pain, but unable to die? That's a nice touch."

But there was one thing that not even Robin would be depraved enough to suggest, and not even Alim would be foresighted enough to consider. And, though Jack was in no position to single out the most painful aspect of his situation, perhaps this was tormenting him more than anything else.

He had never liked, or respected, or wanted her this much before.

In all those weeks when she had needed him desperately, and he'd been drinking, playing dice, pursuing Alice – oh god. Jack felt another fresh, bright blossoming of pain. He'd forgotten about Alice. He had asked Ellini to marry him, and then stuck his tongue so far down Alice's throat that it should have choked her – would have choked her, if she'd been a regular human being, instead of the devil incarnate.

It was like remembering something he'd done when he was drunk, or in a high fever. He could remember doing it – he could even remember his reasons for doing it, and they had seemed reasonable enough at the time. But they were half-baked madness now, crumbling apart in his hands. He felt as though someone had crept inside his head and made him do things he couldn't even stand to think about – things that weren't like him.

But it was like him, wasn't it? Pursuing horrible, empty, well-formed women, breaking hearts, even stabbing people in the chest – it was all like him. He just never would have done it to Ellini, no matter how many times he might have wanted to, or... or how many times he might have pictured it...

Oh god. He was no better than Robin – or even Bill Cade – was he? He'd been clinging to that curtain of black hair as though it was his salvation, but it hadn't prevented him from doing horrible things – it had just prevented him from doing horrible things to Ellini.

And, in the end, it hadn't even managed that.