Had I been a man of the nation's current paradigm I'd have convinced myself the vision an artefact of insomnia, or some other sickness of the mind, but I knew not everything could yet be explained away with the ... distinguished views of the likes of Aubrey Forrester.

Though, as it happens, on the eve of my dismissal I called upon another of my scientific accomplices, Frederic Emory, a laboratory assistant of the tender age of eighteen who worked under one Dr Jonathan Corgaine. As some kind of misguided choice in career, Frederic practiced what could only be described as 'the study of the dead' to the curious initiate. Shorn of this morbid pursuit, the boy remained the only other student of unexplainable horrors that I'd so far chanced upon – that is to say, my sample size of cordial encounters within the scientific community is still far from numerous.

He was displeased to see me arrive at Dr Corgaine's laboratory at so late an hour. The doctor himself had long departed back home to his curiously silent wife, and a meal set upon the table at the rigid time of 7:15. Corgaine had left his apprentice in the grips of sterilising their equipment in vats of carbolic acid; a tedious job it seemed Frederic did not mind doing so long as it proved him useful.

I did not waste my time knocking on the lab door before entry. The swelling rainstorm outside had rendered me sodden and irritable, though the sight of surgical needles and the pickled odour of formalin was as ever less inviting. My young accomplice hunched over an operating table when his gaze met mine with a mix of pleasant surprise and scorn.

"I need your advice," I told him, without greeting or delay, and I hung my hat on the stand out of habit. "Last night a terrible being came for me in the dark, Frederic; something I cannot stall speaking of any longer."

I described to him the ghoul I had witnessed the night prior. He paused for a long while following my clumsy torrent of information, studying the newly sterilised equipment as though my words might be inscribed on the face of them. "Frederic?"

"Are you certain of this?" he replied to a pair of forceps. "Because to me it sounds as if the split in your lip is not your only injury. How is your head?"

I had not expected Corgaine to have rubbed off on him so soon. "I'm certain," I replied, holding my tone to convince him of the same. "I saw a wraith as plain as can I see you are hardly listening."

"Even though it was the middle of the night?"

"Yes. When one hunts the paranormal, that is a given."

"Worry not, dear man. I believe you," he said, though more to himself. "The air feels strange in Glasten of late; Heavens, how the cold bites and the darkness suffocates. Forgive me, Redding, if I seem a little distracted. The good doctor has no end of duties for me, even when he's not here."

He finished up his task, though – as usual for Frederic – in no kind of hurry, and stood up from the operating table. "I must be home by nine," he continued, undoing his white lab smock. "If you would be so kind as to escort me safely as far as Glasten clock tower, I will indulge you along the way."

I obliged, and retrieved Frederic's coat and hat off the stand for him.

The storm outside revealed to us no hints of tempering, and the rain fell in cold, slanted sheets to our front, each drop a tiny pelt against the frozen flesh on my cheeks. The darkness of the surrounding grounds had grown alarmingly dense as Frederic had predicted, and the glow of his lamp did little to penetrate it. The sodden turf of the cemetery underfoot squelched with each step I took in haste, though whether from mud riddled with the soft threads of earthworms, or yet more ghouls crawling free of their graves, I cannot say I fancied either.

The hammering of the storm only served to douse Frederic's words, as his voice had not yet matured the robust tenor of a man's. "Historical records seldom give mention of wraiths of the like you swear by," he yelled over the rain, "though elements of your tale remind me of something Dr Edvard Haas once described as a vicche: a being said to possess the bodies and minds of handsome young men and women, using their youth and beauty to lure in admirers. For what purpose, I cannot tell you. No-one has lived to cite their encounter."

A fresh kiss of cold prickled the skin on my neck. "Perhaps I have not been as forthcoming with you as is necessary, Frederic. I didn't tell you why it came to be that I approached this girl."

"Was she not bothering you, as I recall?"

"Not only that," said I, remembering the curious urge to climb from my cot and touch her, "but my feelings towards this girl were far more ... acute, shall we say. Tell me, when was the last time you knew me to comfort just anyone?"

Frederic took a moment to consider it. "For you, Redding, that is most unexpected. Will you tell me what you felt so I might record it later in my journal?"

"Sympathy," I replied, though I could only speculate on the feebler emotions. "Apprehension ... and the lust for physical contact."

"Most unexpected," he repeated. "For you to feel as you did, it seems you are not as hardened to the unexplainable as I boast to my peers. Now, that is a surprise." He brought his fist to his lips in reflection. "And somewhat irksome."

"Irksome? Why?"

"You know full well I have been writing of your endeavours as a hobby, and yet it seems I've not quite captured every facet of your character."

"You glorify me, Frederic! I'm not quite sure I like it."

"Nor do you deserve it! Give me tonight to ruminate on all this, Redding. Perhaps there is more I may learn from Haas' archives about this vicche. When next we meet, I hope I might know more that I can tell you."

"Until then."

Short of farewell, I parted ways with young Frederic as we neared the clock tower. The bells pealed for nine and I watched his figure with its ghostly lamp fade from view into an alleyway off its parent street. The nights in this forgotten borough of London brimmed with the misdeeds of man and ghoul alike, and until I was sure I saw his lamplight aglow in one of the upstairs windows, my concern for his safety on this particularly dismal night would root my feet to the ground.

Or so I had thought.

As I turned to leave for my own shambles of an abode, it became apparent that I should not. Occupying the spot I'd last seen Frederic sprawled some manner of spindly, malformed creature squat upon the ground, motionless in impenetrable shadow, as though the light of the nearby street lamps should altogether forsake it.

I searched for its own shadow cast upon the cobbles, but there was not one to be found. I caught myself pondering what plane of existence the creature might reside in to altogether warp the physics of our own...

My first, yet unexplainably powerful instinct was to tear towards the thing. I cannot fully say why I felt it. Initially, I thought, out of fear I would find dear Frederic Emory at harm mere doors away from his family home, and yet the pull on me was more than that.

So enchanted was I by this extrinsic horror that the town around me blurred into wet shades of grey, and all that remained of it was a single street beneath the clock tower, with no other direction but towards the creature the other end of it. My peripheral thoughts obscured, I took a hesitant step forwards, and saw, to my relief and dismay, that the eerie grotesque diffused into the night sooner than my sole could hit the ground.

There was no doubt in my mind that what I'd seen was not meant for our world. Yet there arose one startling matter that disconcerted me more so than this. Even through the unremitting downpour as it spattered against every sodden yard of my surroundings, came the steady, solitary beating of another's heart as if snared on the cusp of death.

I knew best of all that not even the longest surviving wraith could lay claim to life stirring in their breast, though as I mentioned at the start of my tale...

The heart does not lie.