“I do say. But you and I are not here to have sex. I hope you are not disappointed if that was what you were expecting.”

“Devastated, Mrs M.”

“You are, I think, joking.”

“Not entirely.”

From somewhere in those bizarre clothes Mrs M produced two little pills. Smaller than any E pills I’d ever seen; nearer to sweeteners or something. She popped one herself, held the other out to me. “Please, take this.”

“What is it?”

“It is a form of lifebelt.”

“Well, that’s a new one.” I shrugged, popped it.

She watched my neck to see me swallow. Again, just a little worrying. She reached up and put her veil up at last. The light wasn’t great but I could see a little more of her face. A very beautiful, strong, semi-Asiatic, semi-I-couldn’t-tell-what face, with big, wide eyes. And with catlike slits for pupils, not round ones. Ah-ha. I’d heard you could have contacts like that and a few weirdos had even had eye surgery to get the same effect. Music thudded very distantly. She looked into my eyes and said quietly, “Nothing should go wrong, Adrian, but if we become separated I want you to think yourself back to here, to this room.” She waved one hand. “Take a good look round.”

I looked around the place, humouring her.

“Do it for real, Adrian,” she said, as though guessing I was only pretending to. “Look at it, remember its visual details, remember the smell and the sound of this place. Will you be able to envisage it accurately again?”

The light in the room was amber, like sunset, subdued. The bed was queen- or king-size, with black satin sheets. There was a black couch, one ornate chair of red and gold, a mirror on the ceiling, a TV set into the wall and in one corner a black cube with the one word MINIBAR on it in blue neon. There was one other door, presumably leading to a bathroom. The bed had those unnecessary bedposts that are handy for tying people to with furry handcuffs or whatever.

“I guess,” I said. Separated? What was she talking about? Still no actual alarm bells, but I was starting to think that I needed a second set to go off to tell me when the first lot had mysteriously stopped working.

Now Mrs M produced what looked like a tiny cigarette lighter.

“I shall apply this to myself first, then to you. It must happen in rapid succession,” she said, bringing the device up to her neck and putting her free hand behind my head, fingers spread over my sweaty hair like some giant spider. “Please try not to flinch when I apply it to you. Then I will hug you tightly. Do you understand?”

“Got you.” Must confess, my mouth was dry. The music stopped briefly, its thud-thudding gone, leaving only my heart.

“Then here we go.”

She stepped up to me, her body tight against mine. I could feel her small, firm breasts pressing into my chest and smell a scent somewhere between antiseptic and a musky perfume. She pushed the lighter up into her lower jaw and it clicked. A hiss. Her hand swooped from under her chin and came up to my neck. Pressure, another click and a hiss and a cold sensation in my neck and jaw like an infusion of ice. She wrapped her arms tight around my back, then wrapped her legs around mine too, rising a little on her feet and pressing her head side to side against mine. I put my arms around her. She felt good. There were stirrings down below. I was getting wood. I wondered if she could feel it. She would soon if she hadn’t already. Then, very suddenly, it felt like my head turned itself inside out.

I must have closed my eyes. I swayed and staggered as I opened them again. There was a grey light all around us and the air was suddenly chill and fresh. Mrs M was releasing me from her grip but holding one of my hands so I didn’t fall over and saying over and over, “It’s all right, Adrian, it’s all right, it’s all right…”

But it wasn’t all right, because not only was there was no dark, amber-lit room around us, there was no fucking building around us.

The Novy Pravda was gone and here we were in the grey light of a dawn that was hours too early on a low hill surrounded by marshes with a big river coiled across the landscape in the direction of the still-cloud-obscured rising sun. Great. Not just the room, not just the Novy Pravda. The whole of fucking Moscow had gone.

Scattered all about, stretching to the horizon, lay ruins.

I felt like I was going to keel over and we did a bizarre dance for a few seconds as Mrs M still held my hand and tried to stop me falling onto my bum and I sort of staggered and revolved around her, trying to get my balance back and gasping as my shoes slipped on the tussocky grass on the cold hilltop. Finally I got my legs spread far enough apart to stop gyrating and Mrs M pulled me to a stop, taking me by both shoulders while I bent, breathing hard and fast and not believing what I was seeing whenever I took a look out across this deserted landscape of grey marshes and black ruins.

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

I straightened up. She kept one hand on my elbow.

I took a few deep breaths, holding them a handful of seconds each. I looked around. Couldn’t see another soul. There was a dot on the distant river under the light patch of sky where the dawn was. It might have been a boat. The ruins spread in every direction. A few were on the horizon, darkly jagged. Towers and bits of domes; bitten, slumped-looking squared things that might once have been tower blocks or big office buildings.

There were some dressed stones sitting half-overgrown by longer grass a few steps away down the slope towards the nearest marsh.

“Let’s sit,” Mrs M said. She sat me down on the cold hard stones.

“Where the fuck is this?” I asked when I had my breathing back to something like normal.

“Another Earth, another Moscow,” she said. She sat beside me, half turned to me. The veil was down again, had been ever since we got here.

I rubbed my neck. “Was that the pill did this, or-?”

“This did this,” she said, showing me the little lighter gadget. “The pill was for if something went wrong. You had to visualise the room we left from, remember?” I nodded. “That was your way back. You shouldn’t need it now, though. We can go back together. The first transition is always the most problematic. We’re well attuned.” She smiled, patted my arm reassuringly.

“Fuck,” I said, shaking my head and standing up again and looking desperately around. I found a fist-sized lump of stone and threw it as hard as I could towards the still-rising spread of light where the dawn was. It disappeared into the grass downhill with a barely audible thud. I turned back to Mrs M. “No, just give me a minute, okay?”

“I’ll stay here,” she said, smiling behind the veil and clasping her hands over one raised knee.

I ran down the slope, skidding in places, jumping over a few more of the piles of dark brown stones lying in heaps within the grass. When the slope levelled out the marsh began and I squelched into muddy water. I put my hand down, brought up some grey-brown mud, stared at it then stared out over the grey landscape and let the mud dribble back through my fingers. A bird made a lonely mewling cry in the distance and another answered from even further away.

It all looked and felt and smelled real as fuck. The surface of dark water pooling between my shoes – black slip-ons! What happened to my Converse? – was going still. Looking at my face reflected in it, I didn’t even look like myself. My trousers felt coarser, and were more like very dark brown than black. No Nokia; nothing in the pockets at all. No Rolex on my wrist, either. I studied my hands. They looked a bit different too. They had freckles. I didn’t have freckles, did I? Suddenly I wasn’t sure any more. Fuck me, it turned out that I didn’t even know the back of my hand like the back of my hand. I turned and saw the small black figure of Mrs Mulverhill sitting where I’d left her. I trudged back up.