At the end of the alley something stirred, something long dead.

And yet, judging by the roars of rage and the maelstrom of rubbish battering the surrounding buildings, that something was not prepared to concede the point. A little unsteadily, on account of all the whiskey I’d consumed at the World’s End pub (where I only drank because of the thrillingly cataclysmic name), I made my way towards the epicentre.

The sharp crack of a window smashing, the unmistakable tinkle of glass and the entity paused, as though surprised at its own strength; but only for a heart beat and the onslaught resumed with renewed frenzy. Walking through the flying shards of assorted crap, arm raised to ward off the worst of it, I was blinded, deafened, but unbowed.

Which was a shame really because if ever there was a moment when a kindly fate I don’t believe in should have intervened, turning me back to wend my weary, drunken way home instead of into the belly of the beast, it was that one.

But I was hooked now, because I could see it, motionless in the midst of its self-created mayhem.

I took off the dark glasses and studied it with more interest. There was a partial notion of a face: a snub nose so extreme it should have belonged on a shrunken head, and a sliding slant of facial feature that only just erred this side of human. This was what happened to those that had been long dead. They forgot the exact size and shape of the flesh over-coats they had worn in life. Eventually they lost all resemblance to their living, breathing, human selves, spiritually decomposing in ironic homage to the way of the flesh and finally becoming nothing more than a plume of dirty smoke; a patch of cold that you might feel as a shiver down your spine if you walked through it, but nothing more. The emotions were always last to go, stubbornly clinging on like dim witted hangers-on after the main attraction had upped sticks and gotten the hell out of Dodge. Which is exactly what I should have done.

And I could have too: right up until the moment it reached for me…

I was flying high above the city, lights like rusted stars beneath me. The big beasts were out tonight and I raced past vast serpentine shapes, coils arcing through the air, some with prey leaking their lives onto the night wind and others with joy-riders astride their sleek flanks, wild cries swallowed by the sky. On the ground a dark mass had devoured half of the Meadows and was making it’s way up through Morningside. But I wasn’t confined to the prison of my own skull anymore and such concerns were only part of a larger and more intricate whole, one that consumed me even as I tried to unravel it. No longer separate and discrete, I was part of the fabric of the world: the weft and weave of night joining the dance of the cosmos and beyond; the rhythm of prey and hunter, light as air, fast as light.

I swooped down past lit tenement windows, orange beacons to whatever wanted to spy, past lovers’ quarrels, furtive stirrings in dark alleyways, the blare of car horns, the desperate calls of dogs and other creatures one to another, the ebb and flow of life incessant, irresistible. Low now over pubs and clubs, pumping out a never ending sea of humanity in search of fast thrills and faster food, the debris nourishing the wild things that crept out from the shadows.

Soaring over the affluent houses of the Grange, a massed, silent citadel of privilege set apart from the tattered glamour of the rest of the city. Huge Victorian villas in enormous grounds, some containing only one elderly coot too stubborn to die, too infirm to make the most of it. This was where the bankers and the wealthy elite lived secure behind their stone fortresses, dreading the day the barbarian hordes stormed the gates.

And come it would.