Only at night did Ellini break her rule, although she hadn't meant to at first. A few days after her arrival, she had fallen asleep on the floor of the slop-house – dead tired, plain exhausted, expecting no dreams – and found a black doorway taking up all the space in front of her eyes.

She didn't mean to go through it. Even while unconscious, she dimly remembered that curiosity was part of her old life, and was not to be indulged in anymore. But the doorway sort of stretched, so that it was immediately in front of her no matter which way she turned. She felt as though she was on a small, round platform, surrounded by darkness, and the only way to move at all was to leap into it.

So she did. 

There was a long, dark corridor – so black that she had to navigate it with outstretched hands – and then a bedroom.

It was bare and unfurnished and falling apart, but she got the feeling that the destruction had been sudden and violent, rather than the gradual result of neglect. The floorboards had been torn up and wrenched apart, making the floor look like a ravaged landscape seen from above, with jagged peaks and bottomless canyons. There were also crumbling indentations in the plaster, as though someone had been repeatedly thumping the walls.

She looked down and saw that, not only had her wound re-opened, but she was back in the satin dress – dyed red with her blood – that she'd been wearing on her last night in Oxford. It was wet and scarlet and clingy. Her hair had come loose and strands of it were sticking to her bloody neck. She looked like a creature from a nightmare.

And then she saw the figure on the bed, and realized whose nightmare she was in.

He was asleep on top of the bed-clothes, curled up on his side, like a man with a terrible stomach-ache. There was a vertical furrow on his forehead – just at the top of his nose – and, even in his sleep, he had one hand curled around the bracelet at his wrist, as though it was a shackle he already resented.

He was sleeping angrily. She had seen him do this before, but never with a body so tense and taut and frowning. She didn't envy him the aches and pains he would have when he woke up.

Ellini repeated this sentence in her head and was instantly annoyed with herself. Aches and pains were the least he deserved! If she was going to be a tormentor in somebody else's nightmare, she would have to stop sympathizing with people.

Her footsteps must have been louder than she thought, because he began to stir. The frown-lines intensified and his eyelids fluttered open. It took him a long time to focus on her but, when he did, he didn't seem at all surprised to see her there. He just looked at her with mild, blurry eyes for a moment. And she looked back, without knowing how to snarl or sneer or spit in his face. Anger, she suddenly realized, was a completely new experience for her. As new as freedom, but not as nice.

Finally, Jack licked his lips and said, "Oh, please. Everything before was the dream, and this is the waking up."

Ellini raised an unsympathetic eyebrow. "Sorry, Jack."

She wandered over to the window, annoyed with herself for even saying that. Admittedly, she hadn't sounded very sorry, but it was still a stupid thing to say. It was too soon to torment him, perhaps. Or she was just bad at it. At least she hadn't tried to comfort him. That would have been worse than anything.

She picked her way across the ruined floor-boards and took up station by the window, hardly registering what she was seeing. After a few moments of gazing blindly across the street, she realized that the black shape in front of her was the ruin of the University Church, its spire like a crumbling stick of charcoal against the silver-black sky.

Oh god, how could he stand to see it? How could he stand to let it cast its shadow in here every time the sun set? He really didn't care. Even the return of his feelings couldn't make him suffer the way he deserved.

It dawned on her that Jack hadn't said anything for a while, and she turned back to him, her eyes still blurred with anger. He was sitting up in bed, staring at her, and the little frown-line had re-appeared at the top of his nose, as though he was trying to work something out.

It must have been something about the 'sorry' and the walking away, she realized. It wasn't what a creature from a nightmare would normally have done. A conviction of the reality of this moment must have dawned on him. She knew, because exactly the same thought was occurring to her. She was looking at Jack – not a dream-version of Jack, or a bittersweet memory. In her head, he was sharp and savage and handsome, but here he was bleary-eyed and uncertain.

He started towards her, but then appeared to change his mind. He scrambled off the bed and wrapped his arms tightly around one of the bed-posts, as though he was afraid of being physically dragged away.

He opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it again, as though daunted by the sheer number of things he wanted to say.

But he had to say something, that much was obvious. He couldn't just stand there, clinging on to the bedpost, watching her bleed at him. And, after a few seconds of swaying, the words tumbled out of him, as though they were only too happy to escape the chaos in his chest.

"She didn't give me any choice. You know she can get people to do whatever she wants. She said she'd hurt you if I didn't co-operate – and you told me you didn't love me – I saw you leave Lucknow with Robin – what was I supposed to think? What was I supposed to do?"

"Anything other than stabbing me in the chest," said Ellini calmly. "I could have forgiven you everything else. Everything else was a decision that got made for you. But you didn't have to stab an un-armed woman in the chest. From behind. In a church. While she was kneeling at the altar."

She stopped and watched him for a moment, wondering why he didn't argue back. He was just clutching the bed-post and suffering every word. It was so odd to see him helpless. She'd only ever seen it once before in her life. She had shuddered then, but she found it strangely alluring now. She supposed it was part and parcel of her new role as tormentress.

"But you know what?" she went on, drawing herself up, even though she was starting to feel sick. "That's my fault too. It would be one thing if stabbing people in the chest was out of character for you. But it's not, is it? Nothing could be more in-character. The fact that it shocked me to my bones means that everything I loved about you, I made up. I looked at you and saw exactly what I wanted to see – just like people have been doing to me all my life. If you're still fond of me, you should be happy that I died within an hour or two of making that realization, because living with it wouldn't have been any fun at all."

She knew she was hurting him. She knew she should stop. But he was just staring at her, with clenched jaw and red-rimmed eyes, not making any move to defend himself, or to shut out her words. And the whole time, he was clutching that bed-post, as though it was the only thing holding him up.

"Please," he croaked, when she fell silent. "It's not real. It's not real. There's been some horrible mistake. I'll find you, and I'll make it right."

She wanted to burst out laughing. She wanted to say, 'Find me where? In heaven? In the Underworld? What are you going to do, Orpheus? You can't even play piano anymore!'

But she couldn't. It would have hurt him too much. Oh god, she shouldn't have come here. She couldn't hurt him or forgive him. And, until she could do one or the other, her presence in this room wasn't doing either of them any good.

So instead she said, very quietly, "Dead is dead."

Jack took a deep breath and – from somewhere – mustered a smile. "You're here, aren't you? I wouldn't have had the nerve to hope for this yesterday."

Ellini stared at him, feeling foolish and infuriated at the same time. He would always be like this. He always had. How could you talk to someone so recklessly hopeful? Worse still, how could you torment them?

"Don't get used to it," she said, and walked out through the door she'd come in by.

But the next night, she dreamed the same black doorway. It expanded once again, until it was a band of black, hemming her in from every direction. She waited there, on her ever-diminishing platform of marble, for what felt like half the night, until it struck her that this was ridiculous – that he should be hiding from her, not the other way round – and she stormed through the dark corridor into his bedroom.

He was sleeping on top of the covers again, this time in an irritatingly peaceful pose that she longed to disrupt.

It looked as though he had made some attempts to tidy the room in anticipation of her arrival. Some of the jagged floor-boards had been pieced together and laid back in their grooves, like parts of a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps the walls were even looking smoother.

Could he just dream this place nicer, she wondered? If it was his nightmare, was he in control of it? And could she wrestle any control back, besides what she said and did? It was satisfying to think of the dream as a kind of shared imaginative property, with them both struggling for dominance over its finer details.

Except that he would win, wouldn't he? She hadn't even been able to stay outside on her platform.

She supposed his peaceful pose should have been a warning sign, because, as soon as she came closer – quite soundlessly, as far as she was concerned – his eyes snapped open, and he grabbed hold of her sleeve, half-sitting up in bed.

"I would like you to stay this time," he said, in a voice that was mild and patient and desperately cheerful, as though he was talking to an extremely dangerous child. "Can you do that? If only to call me names."

Ellini snatched her sleeve away and told him to go to hell.

"That's a good start, mouse," he said soothingly. "Difficult to see how hell could be any worse than present-day Oxford, but I'm sure you're just getting warmed up."

Ellii looked down and realized that she was wearing her terracotta-red dress tonight – a slight softening of the nightmare vision she had been the night before. It still hinted at blood, and they both knew it, but at least the terracotta dress was linked to some happier times. She wondered if his subconscious mind had dressed her in more bearable clothes, the same way it had laid down the floorboards and smoothed out the plaster indentations on the walls.

"I'm not here to shout at you, Jack," she said, taking a few steps back towards the door. She was pleased to see that each one made him wince.

"Why are you here?" he said, in a tone of brisk, lively interest that was infuriatingly familiar to her. He got up off the bed and moved into his customary position with his arms wrapped around the bed-post.

"Are you haunting me? Are you here to redeem me, like those three spirits with Ebeneezer Scrooge? Are you here to make me feel better? Shall I tell you how incredibly easy that would be? Just don't be dead. Don't be dead. You can attach as many clauses to that arrangement as you like. I don't care if you're alive and –" he waved his hand – "a lesbian, say, or alive and determined never to speak to me again. I wouldn't even care if you were alive and shacked up with Robin Crake, just as long as there was a starting point – something I could work with."

He had let go of the bed-post while he was talking and, without this to anchor him, he was drifting towards her, without even seeming to realize it. She had heard him talk like this before, when he was trying to recruit allies, or persuade troops to follow him into battle. Trying to re-make the world with the sheer force of his persistence.

And it worked, that was the infuriating thing. There was just so much wide-eyed, boyish energy behind it. He would spread his hands innocently and say things like: 'Am I asking the earth? Is it so impossible?' And the last, killer questions: "Haven't I worked wonders in the past? What makes you think you can doubt me this time?"

Ellini was suddenly even angrier than she had been when she came in. She wouldn't have thought that was possible, but it was. How dare he think that this was just like one of his military campaigns? How dare he think that death was some kind of fortress to be stormed? And how dare he almost convince her?

She started towards the door, but he reached out and pulled her back, still with that same desperate cheerfulness. "OK. It's asking a lot, I can see that. This, then. I could live with this. Come back to me in my dreams. Haunt me. And you can be as horrific as you like. I don't care if half your skull is missing and you're using your entrails as a lasso – it's all beautiful to me."

He stopped and looked down. It seemed to dawn on both of them at the same time that his hands were on her. He had seized her upper arms to keep her from leaving – and it had seemed perfectly ordinary at the time, but now it struck them both as horribly significant.

When he looked up again, there was horror as much as greed in his eyes, as though he hadn't meant to reach out, and wasn't sure he could let go.

"Take your hands off me," said Ellini.

He didn't move.

"Take your hands off me now," she said, her voice hardening, in spite of the rising panic.

When he still didn't let go, she tried to wrench herself away – and, for the barest skin of a second, he fought her.

It was over before she could even really be sure it had begun. He realized what he was doing and let go with a shuddering gasp, like someone surfacing from underwater.

But she could still feel the indentations his fingers had made on her flesh as she wrenched the door open and darted down the corridor.

***

Waking up from that dream was like surfacing from the quick-sand of amnesia all over again. Cold horror tingled on Jack's skin, even though he was sweating and tangled up in the bed-sheets. He tried to free himself, but couldn't manage more than a few steps across the room before his knees buckled and the floor-boards smacked into his shins.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. It had been her. He didn't know how it had been her, but it had been her.

There was just one level of depravity you hadn't stooped to – one nice thing she could still think about you – and you had to screw it up.

There was nothing left to smash – nothing left in his stomach to throw up. He could cry out and thump the floorboards a few times, but the neighbours would probably just put this down to the unquiet spirit of Lily Hamilton, and sink back into their damned peaceful, untroubled sleep – probably with a loved one – almost certainly with a loved one they hadn't stabbed.

He hated them – he hated them. Everything in the world was conspiring to deny him satisfaction.

But, after a few minutes – when the thudding nausea had died down, and the ceiling no longer looked so blurry – he realized that satisfaction had never been an option. It hurt too much even for anger. 

She didn't come back to him the next night, or the night after that. After a few days, Jack decided it was too painful to even go to bed. He concentrated instead on his plans to make everyone who'd hurt her – everyone who had conspired to take her from him – pay for what they'd done. Just because satisfaction was technically impossible, that didn't mean he couldn't try.