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"I'm going to count to three," said Ziegler, "and when I get to three you will awake as John Bruce. One . . . two . . . three."

There was a pause, then the man's eyes snapped open. He turned his head towards Louise and stared straight at her.

"Louise? Is that you? I knew you'd come." His eyes moved up and down her face. "You've changed your hair—it's shorter."

She froze in the shadows behind Ziegler's shoulder. She'd thought herself invisible and apart from the process. He didn't look anything like John; he was smaller—slighter—and facially completely different. And yet that voice . . .

It was John's. Or as close to John's as she could remember. Out came ribbons of memory, tugged by the sound, long walks in the countryside, winter evenings by a log fire, smiles and laughter.

"It's OK, Miss Callander," said Ziegler. "Come closer, he seems to recognise you."

"Hello." She shuffled forward, not knowing what to say or do.

"You've hardly changed," he said. "What is it—twelve, thirteen years?"

"I think so."

"Have they told you what's happened?"

"Not much."

"It's going to be hard to believe. I'm not sure what's happened myself but you're my last hope." He paused, his voice lowering. "You've heard about my parents?"

She nodded.

"I don't know what's going on. It's as though everyone who was ever close to me has been killed. Like someone's trying to erase all memory of me from the human race—as though I never existed. You'd better watch out too."

"I'll be fine."

"I'm serious, Lou. Be careful."

"I will."

He breathed out hard. His face relaxed.

"Do you remember what I gave you for your eighteenth birthday?" he asked.

Louise looked at Ziegler, unsure how she should answer.

"It's OK, Lou," said John. "I'll tell you what the present was. You tell the Doc if I'm right. A St. Christopher on a white gold chain. To keep you safe on your travels. You were about to go to University. To Exeter, to study Biology. I never knew how you did. We'd returned to the States by the end of your first year there. And now, here you are. How'd I do?"

The two men looked at Louise, awaiting an answer, but she was too shocked to speak. It couldn't be! He sounded so real, so convincing but it was impossible. She was flustered, struggling to marshal her thoughts. Other people had known of her present, could one of them have told him? What was there that only she and John could know, that neither of them would have told anyone else . . . And that she could talk about in front of Ziegler?

Funny. She was already beginning to think of him as John. It was Ziegler who she considered the stranger, the one she couldn't talk in front of.

"Who was Bunny?" she asked.

"Bunny?"

She could feel the concentration in his face. His eyes twitched, a slight but rapid movement, almost as though they were being bombarded with fast-forwarding images as memories cascaded into and out of view.

"The dog!" He remembered in a flood. "The dog from across the road. That's it, isn't it? You were the only one who called him Bunny. His real name was Jason but he'd tag along with us and you'd tease him, calling him Bunny because he liked to chase rabbits. We'd walk over the fields behind the village and he'd be running around like crazy chasing rabbits that were always too clever for him. That's right, isn't it? Isn't it?"

They returned along the corridors in silence. Ziegler could tell that Louise was shocked and was willing to give her time to come to terms with her feelings. God knows, she needed it. It's not everyday you meet an old boyfriend trapped inside the body of a crazed murderer.

Ziegler needed time to think as well. Things were moving rapidly into areas beyond his understanding. He expected Peter to be plausible, almost convincing at times, but not that convincing. Either the two of them were in collusion or . . . or what?

He took another look at Louise. Did she look like a groupie? One of those strange women attracted to notorious prisoners?

He didn't think so. She'd have to be a consummate actress if she were. And Pendennis wasn't allowed private correspondence.

Which meant . . .

His mind began to race. No. It couldn't be! A higher dimensional effect? John Bruce had been the first man to travel through the higher dimensions. Could that have affected his mind? Dimension Theory remained a mystery to Ziegler—he stood firm with the traditional wing that denied its pre-eminence in the field of psychology. But there were many that expounded it as the key to the understanding of the human brain. He felt out of his depth. He could see his book on Pendennis fade with every new thought.

"What happens now?" asked Louise as they neared the exit. It was the first words she'd spoken since he'd ended the session. She looked lost and subdued.

"Er . . . I don't know," he said. "I'll need to talk to my colleagues about this. Thank you very much for coming." He didn't mean it but the words came out as a dismissal. Perhaps, subconsciously, it was. He needed time alone to think things through.

"Is that it?" snapped Louise. "Thank you and good bye? You brought me here. You got me involved. What the hell happened back there?"

She was close to tears and starting to shout. Two guards at the reception desk had stopped talking and were looking their way. Ziegler shifted his weight onto his other foot.

It was then that he made his mistake. He gave her a name. Nick Stubbs, Professor of Applied Astropsychology, one of the gurus of the Higher Dimensional lobby.

"He might be able to help."

As he watched her climb into her battered pick-up, he cursed himself for thinking aloud, giving a name to a line of thought that was merely passing through. Bazley would hit the roof. There's nothing so intense as the rivalry between two factions of the same profession. They were incompatible. You could not believe in one without disbelieving totally in everything the other stood for. And he had just given the other side an entrée into the world of Peter Pendennis.

What did she think she was doing? Driving to Oxford, searching for some obscure professor, all because of what? Some madman and his delusions? And yet it had all seemed so real in the hospital. Outside, she wasn't so sure.

And even less sure after her visit to St. Olaves. She'd found the Astropsychology department, but no Professor Stubbs. He was spending the month at Framlingham Hall, out on the Banbury Road.

"You can leave a message if you want but it could be days before he checks his messages. Always out and about, that one," the receptionist had told her.

Was this fate giving Louise another chance to back out? What was it her mother used to say? That fate gave everyone three chances to change their minds. Three chances and then the page turned and the future set.

Was this her third chance?

She could easily back out. She hadn't committed herself to anything. She and John had drifted apart years ago. What help could she be?

Of course their parents had kept in touch, cards at Christmas—that sort of thing. Little notes saying this and that, how they were doing, what was Oxford like these days? With little pieces of news thrown in—how proud John's dad had been when he followed him into the Air Force, John's transfer to NASA, his selection for the SHIFT mission. After that who needed cards? John was headline news. The first man to travel the new space, the quiet-spoken hero. And then the political John Bruce, the master of the photo opportunity, the born again darling of right-wing Middle America.

But the hype had never registered with Louise. She'd known the boy, not the man. As far as she was concerned, it could have been a complete stranger on the holovision. But today . . . she'd met the boy again.

It must have been that which drove her down the Banbury Road, that and her love of abandoned animals. For, whoever it was that inhabited the recesses of Peter Pendennis's brain, whether John or not, they'd been abandoned there as much as any neglected dog or goat.

She pulled up outside Framlingham Hall; one of those early Victorian statements of wealth: gothic, grey and rambling. She climbed down from the pick-up and looked up at the crumbling facade; the dirty grey stone, the cracked windows and paint-peeling woodwork. It couldn't have been lived in for years.

The gardens showed the same level of neglect. Once-formal regularity replaced by haphazard colonisation. Lawns grown wild; long grass and nettles folded over by winter snows, yellowed by frost and criss-crossed by nocturnal paths. Leaves and broken branches left where they fell.

She crunched along the gravel drive and stopped by the entrance porch. Her last chance to turn back. An ugly brass knocker stared back at her, daring her to knock. She grasped it with her right hand and rapped twice.

A silence followed. Louise glanced back towards her pick-up and wondered how long she could wait before giving up. A few seconds, a minute? Shouldn't she just turn round now and let John become someone else's problem?

The door opened.

"Professor Stubbs?"

"Yes?"

He was younger than Louise expected, and scruffier. He looked like a student straight out of the '40s—tall and lean with long unkempt hair and a straggly beard. And a fashion sense to match.

Not that she could claim to be an expert on fashion. Her wardrobe came straight off the shelves of Two Counties Farmers. Discount clothing for the rural poor, hard-wearing and cheap.

She held out her hand. "My name's Louise Callander, I was referred to you by a Doctor Ziegler—from Upper Heywood?"

His eyes widened. "You've escaped? I always thought Upper Heywood looked after their patients better than that."

"No, it's . . ." She was flustered. "It's not for me. I was only visiting . . ."

"That's what they all say, Ms. Callander. Now tell me, are you very, very violent or just mildly homicidal?"

Nick Stubbs was enjoying himself. An amusing interlude in an otherwise boring day searching for phenomena that steadfastly refused to be found. And it had promised so much—a week ago. Come out and have a look at Framlingham Hall, they'd said. One of the most haunted houses in Britain. Guaranteed apparitions from dusk to dawn. They're knocking it down at the end of the month so it'll be your last chance. Can you afford to pass it up?

Nick Stubbs couldn't.

His was a simple philosophy—never pass up an opportunity for who knows where it may lead. A philosophy that had served him well. He'd had his fair share of falling into life's open sewers but generally came up smelling, if not of roses, then of something only marginally less fragrant.

And now, here he was, standing under a musty, cobwebbed door-frame talking to an attractive young woman. The day was looking up.

Louise looked less sure.

"Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. Perhaps I should . . ."

"Nonsense. Ms. Callander. Please come in. I insist."

He beckoned her inside with a theatrical bow and then wished he hadn't. The poor girl was on the verge of running away as it was. One day he'd learn to rein in his eccentricities.

But not any day soon.

He led her through the dark and musty entrance hall, over the bare, echoing floorboards, past the peeling wallpaper and into the light of a large front room. Library, morning room, study, billiard room—it could have been anything in a previous incarnation. But today, stripped of its former elegance it was just another empty room; four walls, imposing marble fireplace and a high, moulded ceiling.

And an array of tripods in the far corner. An oasis of modern technology in a desert of emptiness and decay.

"They're mine." He'd noticed her interest. "Higher Dimensional Imagers. Cameras, if you like." He walked over and patted one of them, feeling like a proud parent amongst strange misshapen children. "Now, how can I help?"

She looked nervously towards the door.

"Please," he said, trying to put her at ease. "If Anders Ziegler referred you to me, it's got to be important." Earth-shatteringly important. The two men barely spoke.

"I'm not sure where to begin," said Louise.

"Then just start talking and we'll work it out from there."

She started slowly, nervously stringing facts together and then becoming more animated. Nick listened, fighting the urge to interject. John Bruce, multiple personalities: he could see so many possibilities, so many unexpected avenues of research.

He waited until she'd finished and then jumped in.

"Interesting. The involvement with John Bruce in particular. Did you know most of my instrumentation came from the SHIFT project or offshoots from linked research? Well, no reason why you should. Higher Dimensional research owes a lot to SHIFT. And if John Bruce was subjected to a bombardment of higher dimensional stress—which is not that implausible, there was supposed to be adequate neural shielding but then again it was early days and more trial and error than proven fact. Given all that, could the extreme stress of the launch have had some adverse effect on the higher dimensional component of his mind?"

Louise raised her hands. "Whoa, you've lost me. That Higher Dimensional stuff passed me by. When I left school, it was still Newton and Einstein."

He was only half listening. Thinking of all the different ways a personality could split and still remain viable. Was it possible? Was any of it possible? All thoughts of the non-existent Framlingham ghosts had been firmly put aside. This was something new. Something with potential. And it was his for the solving.

He looked at Louise. Suddenly aware of her existence. Wanting to hug her for opening such an unexpected door. Rescuing him from boredom and frustrated inactivity. Feeling like Sherlock Holmes on one of his bad days, with Moriarty dead and not the hint of an interesting crime on any horizon.

But how could he explain it to her? This dark-haired woman waiting nervously for an answer while all he could do was witter and play the fool. And he was getting worse. He knew that. What had started out as playful affectation had all but taken him over. Sometimes he'd find himself saying things that even he couldn't believe, making impossible connections, playing the wayward genius like a ham actor in a bad amateur production.