I twisted and screamed, called out for my mother, mother, please, as they led her away, but she didn’t look back, and I didn’t entirely blame her for in truth I didn’t know her name.

The next day, in the half-dawn light, they took me out to a courtyard framed with grey stone and locked shutters. They had a mansion which had once belonged to great men, but in this age of steel and smoke had fallen hard by, a cracked monument of imperial ambition.

A pyre had been built in the middle, and the red-robed masters of my demise stood round it, heads bowed, gloved hands folded across their chests, a single brazier smouldering at the foot of the stake. Ritual makes murder easier; it is something else to concentrate on. Seeing the pyre, I kicked and screamed some more, and they dragged me to the foot of the stake and pushed me to my knees. A priest stood before me, long black robes draping around his black-clad feet. He raised his hands to bless, if not exactly me, then the body he was about to commit to the flame, and it occurred to me that his robe, while extensive, could possibly obscure an excess of hairy leg. The question of what lay beneath a priest’s cassock was not one I had considered too deeply before, but now it seemed of absolute import and so I let myself collapse, falling against my own collar, dragging it down, even as it pulled into my trachea, cutting off breath. The guard who supported me was pulled forward by my weight and as I hit the ground, the priest started back, surprised at his own power to induce such an extreme reaction in the penitent. For the briefest moment I felt the pressure on my throat weaken and so I opened my eyes, pushed up off my belly and with teeth bared shoved my face up and under the priest’s robes and bit as hard as I could against what lay buried there.

I felt hair on my skin, cloth in my eyes, tasted blood on my mouth and even as the priest cried out in shock and distress, I

jumped, and staggered back, yelping, my black robes billowing around my legs. At my feet the shackled body was pulled back, a bludgeon to the head. I hopped away, hands shaking, and exclaimed in perfect Italian, “In the name of God, go in peace!” then scrambled away, gasping for breath.

Blood drifted down the inside of my calf from the fresh bite mark in my flesh, but no one noticed. Meanwhile, the bewildered body opened his eyes, and as they chained him to the stake he cried out, what is this, who are you, help me, help me, what’s happening?

I looked around at my silent companions. Thick gloves, long robes, no easy way in. A guard took a flame from the brazier, and as he laid it to the kindling the body on the stake saw me and screamed, “Heavenly father, help me, please!”

A gloved hand fell on my shoulder and a voice said quietly in French, “He did not touch you, did he, Father?”

I looked into a pair of eyes above a tight red mask and shook my head. “No,” I replied. “My robe protected me.”

The eyes narrowed, and it occurred to me that I had no reason to think the body I inhabited could speak French at all.

The Bible fell from my hands, and even as the robed man turned to his companions, I knocked the hat from his head and tugged the mask from his face, pulling one arm across his throat and pressing my other hand over his eyes and as he began to fight I

switched, spinning to drive my elbows straight into the belly of the black-robed priest. My body was tall, old but lean, and I had a dagger and a pistol on a black cord which now I pulled and fired at the first man who turned to fire at me. The flames were catching on the kindling beneath the pyre, black smoke rolling up as the body began to scream, but the red-robed men were moving, reaching for weapons, calling out in alarm, and I bent my head forward, put my elbows together and charged head first at the nearest man, slamming into his chest and knocking him to the ground. A gunshot rang out and something exploded inside me, tearing through lung and bone. I fell back, the echo of the shot ringing in my ears, not so much pain as shock opening inside my chest. The man who’d fired stood not fifteen feet away, reloading his pistol. I crawled on to my feet, felt blood swirl around me, and ran at him, pulling my glove free from my right hand, as he reloaded, raised his pistol again and fired.

The force of it spun me through a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pirouette, and as I fell I reached for the nearest object I could find, which happened to be him, and my fingers tore the robes from his chest. I felt the warm touch of a collarbone and

blessed relief, blessed merciful relief I jumped

a body with its bones still intact

a bloodied corpse that clung to my collarbone clung no more, fell at my feet, lungs broken, chest shattered, face covered in its own blood.

Now men were shouting, pistols drawn and daggers raised, but in the confusion no one quite knew who to shoot at, so I turned and looked for the exit, for the way I had come, and as the flames rose behind me, I hurled my gun to the ground and ran.

Behind me, on the pyre, a man whose flesh was popping and hair was catching flame screamed as his legs began to sizzle in the heat.

I ran.

Chapter 24

I, whose enemies call me Kepler and whose body, as it boarded the 7.03 bus towards Bratislava, answered to the name of Coyle, have in recent years tried my best.

Which is not to say that the standard of my best is especially high.

In a small room in a small flat in a small town a girl with scars in her arms sat awake, and afraid, in a room she herself could not remember tidying, ready to live a life no one else but she could possibly live.

A blink of the eye, and all things change.

Consequences are only for the ones who stay behind.

The bus rattled through tiny villages, picking up an old woman here, a pair of teenage lovers there, no more than six or seven passengers at any time, heading through Slovakia.

My stop was unmarked, but the driver knew the place, pulling up by a shrine to St Christopher and a mud path framed by a tunnel of beech trees. The ground was soggy with the mulch of fallen yellow leaves as I walked to a grey tomb of a building surrounded by gardens of sloping grass and still lily-spotted ponds. A small fountain was dried up and clogged with moss by the front door. Metal grilles had been nailed on the outside of the windows. A wooden board proclaimed, DOMINICO HOSPICE, PLEASE SIGN IN AT RECEPTION.

Under communism mental health was easy. Depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or, worst of all, the manifestation of any views contrary to those held by the state were simply the expression of a diseased mind best kept isolated from the body politic. To be ill was to be at fault. You, said the state, you who weep when you look upon the harsh truths of this world, see so clearly the lies that people tell–you have done this to yourselves. And so must be thankful for whatever little mercy the country throws your way.

We call it a disease, a doctor once whispered to me in the back-streets of Vienna, but a disease is not nearly as easy to blame as people.

Communism had fallen, but ideas fall more slowly than men.

This I’d known when, all those years ago, having drained his accounts and disowned his family, I marched the body of Horst Gubler to the gate and proclaimed, help me, I think I am possessed.

The receptionist asked for my name.

Nathan Coyle, I said, in my best Canadian accent. It sounded almost identical to my American accent, except for my pronunciation of the letter ‘z’, a refinement entirely wasted on the Slovakian matron behind the desk.