Paris, 1875:

The Bibliotheque Mazarine was gorgeous. It would have been gorgeous even to someone who'd never read a book in their life. But, for someone whose every joy from the age of fifteen had been very firmly lodged in the printed word, it was a Garden of Eden.

In fact, Ellini wondered if the library's designers had had the Garden of Eden in mind when they'd built it, because the halls and galleries were lush with green tones. The shades on the oil lamps were the colour of moss. The bookshelves were interspersed with golden pillars which stretched like tree trunks to the high, domed ceiling. And the upper galleries which overlooked the main hall were bordered by iron lace-work balconies, with the elaborately twisted look of jungle creepers.

And, best of all, this Eden had no Adam.

Oh, there were plenty of Guillaumes and Jean-Pierres—the main hall was busy with dapper gentlemen, even at this time of night, wearing double-breasted frockcoats, glancing at their pocket watches, parading themselves in all their elegant splendour. But Ellini was studiously ignored by most of them, because they'd had a long time to familiarize themselves with the consequences of looking at the awkward, shy girl with the long black hair.

She made her way to a gallery just off the main hall, where the books on Demonology were kept. It was a long room, with a lamp-lined table running down it. A few upper galleries overlooked it, but, by and large, the inhabitants of Paris had learned to avoid these too.

She turned to the shelves and ran her fingertips fondly along the nearest set of volumes. To her right was a ladder, twenty feet tall, ascending into the gloom, but she didn't stick to it. She had little feet and was used to clambering over the rooftops of Edinburgh, so she could keep her balance on the edges of the shelves.

Besides, she always had this wing of the library to herself. There were no librarians to tell her off. Val was extremely proactive in discouraging hanky-panky. The inhabitants of Paris had long since learned that it was safer to avoid 'la petite souris' because she was guarded by 'une grande éléphant'.

Ellini didn't mind, not now she was amongst her books. At first, she had read to escape, but eventually—because she was still young and alive and in possession of a beating heart—hope had crept into the endeavour. She had picked out little clues, the merest passing suggestions, that there might be a way to cure her of the curse that made her so endlessly fascinating to men.

Her logic went like this: New-breeds had no control over their demonic symptoms. The fangs, or the horns, or the prophetic visions, either appeared when they were frightened and hungry, or they were a constant that couldn't be switched off.

Demons, on the other hand—from the little that the terrified chroniclers of Faustus's time had been able to record about them—could shape-shift and slide into prophetic states at will. They could look like demons when they chose to, and like everyone else when they wanted to be inconspicuous. For them, magic was an art, rather than an uncontrollable hereditary trait. So the demons might know how to switch a new-breed's demonic symptoms on or off.

This wasn't, in itself, a very useful insight because it led to a much bigger problem. How did you get in contact with the demons? New-breeds had been trying to reach their ancestors for centuries, and nothing had ever worked. The gates of hell were emphatically shut.

So Ellini had tried to understand how they had first appeared, and why they had left. She read biographies of Faustus and reports of Eve's trial. Most of the latter were rash and excitable, seething like a cauldron, with words like 'whore', 'scarlet', and 'Jezebel' occasionally bubbling to the surface.

But she had never discovered anything worth knowing before she'd found the book she was about to reread tonight.

Now she used a ladder to get up to the eighth shelf, and tiptoed along it, feeling with her fingers in the gloom. She knew the spine of the book she was searching for—it was stiff with lack of use, even though she herself had read it eighteen times, from cover to cover. But it seemed that it had never appealed to anyone else. This was partly because the only relevant section of it—an essay by a wonderful French Cardinal—had been bound up with a series of dissertations on the process of paper-manufacture. Ellini had read every one of them, because she thought they might have contained hidden clues about the essay, but they seemed to have been written with the express purpose of boring their readers to sleep.

She supposed it was camouflage for the essay, which had the effect of interesting its readers to death. And this was not just a figure of speech, because every time she read it—or read any of the books referred to in its pages—someone would try to kill her.

They were always men—wiry and athletic and dressed in black. Val tended to swat them out of the air before they could get too close, but they kept on coming. There would be one tonight.

It was encouraging, in a way. The assassins seemed to think she was on the threshold of discovering something dangerous, even though she had no idea what that might be.

She took down the book and leapt from the eighth shelf onto the long, lamp-lined table that ran the length of the room. Her weight was so slight that the tabletop hardly even quivered.

She climbed onto a chair, settled herself in it, and opened the beloved, leather-bound volume, relishing the smell of the pages as she did so.

There was something else, too—some other scent making her heart beat faster. Armour polish. Ellini looked up, but couldn't see Val. She had probably taken up her usual station under the windows at the end of the hall. Ellini pictured her eyes burning like two lit cigarettes in the gloom, and bent over her page to try and dispel the image. On the way, her eyes briefly registered something—a figure standing on one of the lacework balconies above her, much too slight to be Val's. When she looked back, it had already melted into the shadows.

But her book was calling to her now—with the promise of a world that didn't contain assassins, or possessive lovers, or long-dead family members. Most importantly, it was a world that, for a few precious seconds, didn't contain an Ellini Syal.

She leaned over her book the way a parched desert wanderer might lean over the side of a stream, and started to read. The essay was entitled 'Brahma and the Historians'.

Historians are a rare and lovely breed of scholar. Of the chaotic jumble of events which occur in their own lifetime, they have no idea which ones will end up being significant to future generations. And so, the best of them—depend upon it, gentle reader, there are bad ones—just write down everything, in the hope that a more enlightened age will be able to pick out the salient points. It is as though they are saying to themselves: 'I don't understand this now, but, someday, there will be people on the earth who will be privy to a lot more information than I, and they'll be able to join up the dots'.

What a selfless form of heroism—to go to all that trouble just to give future generations something to work with. They could never get any credit for it. They wouldn't even receive the benefit of the future insights they were inspiring. They were just labouring in the darkness because they trusted that one day, there would be such a thing as light.

Indeed, the whole study of history has a questionable basis. Other scholars will tell you that it exists as a discipline in order that man might learn from the mistakes of his past. But the historians themselves believe nothing of the sort. If you are a student of history, then you know enough history to know for a fact that the mistakes of the past are endlessly repeated. Historians are in a position to know that mankind never learns the lessons of history, and yet they go on being historians anyway. This is admirable.

There was a thump on the tabletop, and Ellini looked up just in time to see a shadowy figure above her, before a huge fist closed around the figure's ankle and yanked him off his feet. He was dragged backwards, his fingers squeaking against the tabletop, and then thrown against the wall, where he collided with a marble bust. They both toppled to the floor—marble and man—with a lot of nasty crunching noises.

Val, still just a coppery outline in the shadows, stood over this wreckage. Her breathing was fast, but that didn't mean she was worn out. She had been watching Ellini with armour-melting intensity for half an hour now. In a way, it was good that she had someone to take it out on.

She offered the crumpled assassin a sword, handle-first. It was an honourable gesture, but it wasn't fair—not exactly fair. Val was so good with a sword that, when her opponent was armed, she effectively had his sword too. Any sword in the room would answer to Val sooner or later.

Ellini didn't see whether or not he took it. She had already turned her eyes back to the book.

And so it is that, through the efforts of these marvellous historians, we can connect the following events. In Ancient Egypt, a woman with 'sun-gold' hair arrives at Heliopolis with a retinue of followers who can turn into cats and birds. She is beheaded by the local priests, and, at the moment of her death, all her followers drop lifelessly to the floor.

In dark-age Byzantium, another mysterious blonde—one whom nobody admits to knowing—is accused of summoning demons in the catacombs beneath the city. And in Medieval Marseilles, a priest is in the Cathedral, saying the last rites over a dead body, when the doors are suddenly flung open, and a swarm of dark-winged demons, led by a yellow-haired woman, swoop down the aisle and start fighting over the corpse, each one apparently hoping to drag it away and drain it of its blood.

These are extremely disparate stories, but they all have one thing in common: the presence of a woman with golden hair, whose appearance immediately precedes the demonic incursion, and whose death coincides with the demons' retreat.

Let us leave that particular thread dangling for a few moments, and travel across Europe—via Marco Polo's Spice Road, of course—to the endlessly fascinating land of India. There, they have a story.

To the Hindus, the creation of the world—indeed, every creation of the world, for they maintain that there have been many—was a simple act of observation. The world came about when Brahma opened his eyes, and asked the question 'Who am I?' The material world of space and time was created by him in an effort to answer this question. He makes a daughter—Shatarupi, or 'she of myriad forms'—who represents the material world in all its beauty, terror, variety, and unreason. Through her, he—and, indeed, every Hindu—quests after his identity.

Ellini heard another marble bust shatter but didn't raise her eyes from the page.

Let us skip over the meat and bones of the story, as essayists are unfortunately obliged to do, and go straight to the ending. When Brahma has found the answer to his question—when he has attained self-knowledge—there is no need for the material world anymore. He shuts his eyes again, and the universe enters a state of inertia known as Pralaya: a sleeping state, which endures for uncounted centuries until awareness stirs again, Brahma reopens his eyes, and the universe begins anew.

With this in mind, let us return to the woman whom we shall refer to as 'the recurring blonde', and note the following points about her. She is always to be found in the company of demons. She is always described as a questioning, curious creature. And, most interestingly of all, at the instant of her death, her demon-followers die too.

This leads me to conclude (and I hope my readers do not consider it too drastic a leap of the imagination) that Eve has been alive before. Indeed, her appearances on this earth are somewhat regular.

At this point, something scythed past Ellini's shoulder, and the air around her was suddenly dark. Somebody—either Val or the assassin—had shattered the lamp she'd been reading by. Without much thinking about it, Ellini brushed the broken glass off her page and slid down the bench to the next lamp.

Let us suppose that Eve is Brahma to the demons—that their appearance on this earth, their very consciousness, is contingent upon hers. This would explain a curious thing about the demons and their realm: how both can disappear so totally from one century to the next. They are only awake when they are on earth, and they are only on earth to find out exactly who they are.

And, every time they appear on earth, we answer their question in the same way: they are creatures on whom we will blame things.

If we accept this, then the story of Eve's last appearance on earth takes on an air of desperate pathos. Unlike the other stories, in this one, she has a chance to escape—to go back into the subterranean realms and sleep—but she doesn't take it. Instead, she stays in Oxford, wears scarlet to her trial, paints her lips a deep red, and ensures that everyone's eyes are fixed on her, while her demon children flee into the other world, where they can sleep, and wait for her revival unmolested.

Pray God, when she next appears, we answer her question differently.

Ellini heard a voice nearby—too close to ignore—and reluctantly dragged her eyes from the page. She looked up to find Val standing on the other side of the table, cleaning her sword-blade on the library's curtains. At her feet was a crumpled heap of black cloth which must have been the assassin. It was amazing to Ellini—in a distant sort of way—that, in the space of a few short paragraphs, a whole life had ended.

"That's four this month," Val said grimly. "Seems to me, I could have a much quieter life if I kept you from reading."

From somewhere—God knew where, because her eyes hadn't left the dead assassin—Ellini managed a smile. "Come on, Val. What would someone like you do with a quiet life?"

Val just glowered, so Ellini stood up, and almost tripped over a soft heap behind her chair. Closer inspection revealed it to be another assassin, this one with an arrow neatly embedded in his chest.

"When did you kill this one?" said Ellini in vague horror, giving him a prod with the tip of her boot.

Val strode around the table, stared at the figure, and then looked up at the balconies on either side of them, her eyes narrowed. "I didn't," she said. "I think we'd better get you home. Now."

The 'now' was short and steely, and Ellini knew she'd have no chance arguing against it. She would have to finish rereading the essay at some other time. And perhaps another assassin would die for it, she thought, with a slight, swirling nausea in her chest. She wished she felt as enlightened as they seemed to think she was.

She clambered up to the eighth shelf, returned her beloved book to its space, and climbed back down again.

"Wait for me on the lawns," said Val—who, Ellini noticed, had not yet put her sword back in its sheath. "Don't talk to anyone."

Ellini wandered out of the Bibliotheque, down a flight of marble steps, and onto the gorgeous, moonlit lawns which constituted the library's gardens. In the dark, every flower was a glossy brown or black, but every possible shade of brown and black was represented, in a wave of variety that would have put the daylight world to shame.

She fastened her eyes on a bed of tulips—bright black tulips—and tried to keep her mind from wandering. Her feet wandered, though. There was nothing she had ever been able to do about that.

She pottered round the circumference of the lawn with aimless, nervous energy. And it was on one of these circuits that she heard a calm, quiet voice say the words, "Hello, little cricket."

Ellini stopped dead, in both body and brain. It really felt as though she had just slammed into a wall. Suddenly, she wasn't in the lofty halls of her imagination anymore. She was out in the night without a shawl on. The wind was finding out all the little gaps in her clothing. The light from the windows of the Bibliotheque was pouring onto the grass. And Jack was standing just a few paces in front of her, smiling.