‘Private-Eye-ler’, see? Or ‘PRIVATYLER’ as just one word that sort of rolled off the tongue.

And I felt rather pleased with myself.

I had triumphed here.

I reached the phone box and found to my chagrin that it had been vandalised and was in a non-operative condition. And it was quite a long walk to the next one, which had been similarly disfigured.

After much walking in the cold, I found myself nearly back at Ealing Broadway, with, as it was late December, night now falling around me. But I did eventually find a working phone box and I did phone the number on Mr Ishmael’s card.

And it was engaged.

And I phoned again and I phoned again and eventually after many many such phonings, the phone rang at his end. But no one answered it. And-

Well, eventually I did get through. And I spoke to Mr Ishmael and I told him that I had located the stolen equipment and where I had located it and I named the mausoleum of Count Otto Black and everything.

And then there was a bit of a silence at his end of the line and I thought that perhaps I had been cut off.

But finally he spoke and he said to me, ‘Go home, Tyler. You have done very well and I am proud of you. But you must not, under any circumstance, return to that cemetery. There is great danger there and I do not want you to be put into such danger.’

‘Oh,’ I said. And then I said, ‘Oh dear.’

‘Just go home,’ said Mr Ishmael to me. And he replaced the receiver.

But of course I didn’t go home. I could hardly do that. If there was great danger in that cemetery, then I had left Andy in that great danger, and by doing so, any harm that came to him would be my fault. And my fault or no, I really did care about my brother and I certainly didn’t want any real harm to come to him. So I jumped onto the next 207 bus that was heading towards Hanwell and took to the chewing of my knuckles on the journey.

The bus stop was only a hundred yards or so away from the cemetery gates and I ran the rest of the way.

But it was dark now and once within the gates of the cemetery there was little or no light at all and I almost immediately lost my sense of direction and began to blunder about blindly, tripping over this and that, bumping into this and that and generally making a complete unholy twat of myself.

But even if I was lost, I was not dumb.

And so I shouted. Loudly. ‘Andy’ I shouted. As loudly as I could. ‘Andy, where are you? Mr Ishmael is bringing help. We ought to get out of this graveyard. There’s danger. Great danger. Andy, where are you?’

I shouted this and permutations of this. Numerous permutations of this, in fact. And I blundered on and I wished, really wished, that Andy and I were not in this god-forsaken boneyard, but back at home, sitting at the dining table, eating parsnips and chatting away with our mum and our dad. But not talking with our mouths full, obviously.

‘Andy,’ I shouted. ‘Where are you?’

And then things got a little complicated.

I had been blundering and shouting in the darkness for a while, when I suddenly saw the light. This wasn’t the Light that was seen by New Testament prophets. At least, I didn’t think it was. No, it definitely was not that Light. This was another light entirely. This was a sinister light, a crepuscular glow of a light, a Jack-o’-Lantern unearthly shimmer of a light, and it wafted up from the ground in all directions around me. It was a very queer light, for it rose a foot or two from the ground and then no further, as if it were contained, had its specific parameters illumination-wise, as it were. It fair put the willies up me, I can tell you. I didn’t like that light one bit.

But if the light had qualities about it that were outré and unquantifiable, then this light and its qualities were as nought (very nought) when put in comparison to what occurred next. For what occurred next was most horrid.

They rose, they did, from the ground. Before me and to either side, and, turning to run, behind me, too, I noticed. They rose from the ground as in climbed from it. Mouldy fingers clawed out from the frozen ground. Hands thrashed up from the snow, fought for release, and then up they came, the terrible ones, the ungodly ones, the walking dead, the hideous crew. The zombies.

And I tried to run. But where could I run, for they were all about me? And I cried out for help and I cried out for Andy and I all but poo-pooed myself.

And then the blighters came at me. From all directions, horrible monsters, decaying and rotten. And I could smell them, that stench of the grave, that evil foetor of death.

And my cries turned to screaming and I sought to peace-make with my maker.

And as the monstrous foetid fingers clawed all about me, I saw the light. Another light and a bright one, too. And I heard the noise that came with it.

I was aware of sweeping arcs of light, swishing down from the sky. And that noise, that deafening noise – not the wingbeats of angels, as I had reasonably supposed, but the thrashing of helicopter blades.

And then there were men – living men, I supposed – in black uniforms that had that Special Ops look about them, as if they must surely be the SAS, or the Firearms Response Team. And down they came upon lines from the helicopters, and they had guns and they fired these guns.

And there was the light and the copter sounds and the noises of gunfire and hideous things and I sank down and cowered on my knees.

And then someone thrust some kind of hood over my head and things went rather dark.

And then someone hit me hard on the head.

And things went utterly black.

Now, you know that feeling you get when you awaken in a bed that is not your own, with absolutely no recollection of how you came to be in it?

No?

Well, how about that one when you awaken to find yourself in a secret underground research establishment that the British Government denies all knowledge of?

No?

Well, I must confess that this one came as a shock to me. Not that my surroundings weren’t plush – comfortable, they were. Plush and comfortable and elegant too, and very ‘with it’ when it came to the furnishings, which were rendered in the style known as contemporary.

The bed I awoke upon was circular. Circular? I ask you. Where would you buy circular sheets? But this bed did have circular sheets and they appeared to be of silk. Not that I was a connoisseur of silk; I wasn’t. We had sheets at home, and our sheets were cotton, but these sheets were silk. And I knew this because I had beheld silk, for Toby had brought into school a pair of pink silk French knickers that his father had won in the war. And we’d all had a good feel of those!

Beyond the parameters of the circular bed was a similarly circular room, its walls painted orange, this orangyness relieved at intervals by wall lights of the semicircular persuasion, which cast a soft ambient light in an ever upwards direction.

There was a rug, which was circular, and a chair, which was a sphere with a cut-out section for you to plonk almost all of yourself into.

And there was a door that was not circular. And there were no windows at all to speak of. Or even to whisper about.

And it was the lack of windows that upset me. The room I was happy enough with – the room was, in itself, quite splendid. Because it was plush and comfortable and elegant.

But the lack of windows was worrying. That lack of windows signalled that there was a certain untowardness about this room. That this was an outré and anomalous room.

And one that I probably should not be in.

And so I sought to escape.

And as there were no windows to climb out of, I made a stab at leaving by the doorway, but sadly to no avail as the door, it transpired, was locked.