ONE YEAR AND FIVE MONTHS EARLIER

I'm mad. I'm going mad. I have to be.

Was this how Alice felt when she fell down the rabbit hole? Spiralling out of control with every step, every decision, every word?

Everyone I meet looks distorted. Picasso paintings with twisted Cheshire Cat smiles. Their features are too large and misplaced. Their voices are too loud and harsh. Their laughter is the coldest I've ever known.

I want the warmth of his laughter. I want the sound of his voice, soft and lyrical, like birdsong in springtime. I want his face.

God, his face.

I think about him too much, I know, except it's never the good stuff that lingers. When I'm lying in bed at night, listening to the maddening click of the hands of the clock, it's never his touch I remember. Or his eyes. Or his cute ears that he hated so much, but which I loved snagging with my teeth. I'm stuck in limbo, frozen in the moment of his death, unable to move forward.

But, how do you move on from a nightmare you cannot escape? Where do you go?

Outside frightens me. The people. The strange looks. The whispers. The name-calling. The darkened alleyways and the open streets. The great expanse of sky above my head where even the stars seem sinister to me now.

And yet, being inside frightens me more.

Inside, I have nothing left but the truth, and the truth terrifies me to the bone.

I miss Tom. Of course, I do. I ache for him every second of the day, but my grief has turned into a molten mess of paranoia and fear. I listen for people walking the corridor outside my apartment and spend way too much time looking out the spyhole in the front door. I think I see shadows moving when there's nobody there. I hear voices where there are none. I stand by the windows where the mould bleeds down the damp walls. I watch people go by and wonder which ones are real and which ones are not. I wonder if I'll wake up one day and the whole world has been taken over and I'm the only human left.

I've gone from fighting Tania and her lynch mob, to fighting what I know to be true and that scares me more than Tom's sister ever could. I know what I saw. I know that evil exists. That monsters are real. And I don't want them to be. I want to go back to living in that blissfully ignorant world of what I thought I knew; that world where creatures like the one I saw only existed in the wild imaginations of story tellers and film makers and the conspiracy theorists we'd humour for believing in little grey men and flying saucers and invasion of the body snatchers.

I want this to be madness. I wish this was just simple insanity more than anything. Somehow, madness seems easier to deal with. They could chuck me into a pristine bleach-stinking facility and shove pills down my throat. Put me through assessment after assessment. Humour me, the way we humour the alien conspiracy theorists. In time, maybe I'd get better. Maybe I'd be allowed to leave and live again, without the image of Tom's heels hammering against the floor. Without the sound of those awful wet gurgling sounds as he choked.

I've thought about trying to get myself admitted. I was going to call Monica, even though I know she won't answer my calls.  I wanted to tell her she was right and that I wasn't well. That maybe I needed to get some help. Her number was right there on my phone and my thumb had hovered over the call button, but then I thought what if the monsters are there too? What if I'm locked away for my own good in some institution, only for the nurse's eyes to turn black just as she's jabbing a hypodermic of god-knows-what into my veins.

I'm no more protected inside a facility than I am inside these damp walls. I'm not safe anywhere. None of us are. How can we be when we don't even know what lives among us? When we have no idea of what walks alongside us on the streets? When every face we meet could be a lie, a mask, a façade to hide a monster?

Evie, babe, damn it, get a grip.

That's what he would say now. My Tom. My love.

He would look at me in that way he always did, his brow crinkling, those eyes of his drowning me in his concern. He'd kiss me with his beautiful mouth and take me into his arms and I would know he was right. I need to get a grip. I need out of this rabbit hole of madness and monsters.

Sometimes, I even do manage to get partly out. There are these blissful moments of calm when I feel like I'm high. I'm floating. I'm free. I'm moving on.

And then, I remember the book.

The book. That damn book.

Tom loved the book. He used to hold it to his face and inhale the smell of the old paper and his eyes would always have this wistful daze about them whenever he looked up and caught me watching him. He was obsessed with the smell of old books and this one was his favourite, which is the epitome of irony in itself. It's a 1960's copy of The War of the Worlds by H.G Wells, published by Little Glass Library and illustrated by Edward Gorey. The hardback cover is barely clinging on to the pages. Once bright pink, its hue is faded and dulled with age. The Martians creep across the front and back cover, their monstrous mechanical tentacles looking as if they will burst free and reach out to grab you. I almost wish Tania had taken it when she'd cleaned out my house of all his things, but of course, Tania had no idea just how important this book was to Tom. But, I did. I knew and for that reason, I'm drawn to it, just as much as I'm repelled by it.

It's in my hands even now, as I stand by the window, looking up into the dark skies. There's hardly a star in sight. The night is so black, a solid impenetrable mass. I feel it pressing down upon me.

I feel them pressing down. The weight of their existence. The horror of knowing they are out there somewhere. Waiting. Endlessly waiting. Don't ask me how I know this, but I do.

My fingertips trace the written words; words I don't even need to look at now to know exactly where they are on the page.

"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

'Something is coming,' I whisper up at the dark, starless sky. 'We are not alone, and something is coming.'

I'm cold. So cold now that my breath conjures clouds on the glass.

In my ear, ghost Tom whispers.

'Get a grip...'