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hand now. I had scarcely seen car keys at all. I knew how to drive, but had never owned a car. Driving in London is nerve-racking and, with the extensive tube system, unnecessary.
    All I had to do now was find the doctors’ car park and the right Jaguar. I went to the door, tried the handle. It was locked, and I felt a bright thread of panic.
They know I’m in here, the only one left alive, trapped.
But then I remembered that Drummond had told Waring to lock it from the inside.
    I turned the deadbolt lock, and the heavy door clicked open, the first door I had opened for myself in five years.
    The little room stank of formaldehyde, excrement, and terror, a musky sickish scent. I was glad to take my leave of it, this dank cubicle where an appalling man had thought to remove and pickle my innards, assisted by a boy scarcely old enough to be worth killing.
    The door had nearly closed when I remembered that Drummond had been talking into a cassette recorder. Presumably it had recorded everything that had happened since my resurrection. I dashed back in, retrieved the cassette, exited again, and locked the door behind me. The deserted corridor seemed to stretch away forever. I wondered where all the other, real corpses were. But I hadn’t time to think of that.
    Doors loomed in shadowy recesses on either side of me. The few rooms not closed off were dark and empty. One turned out to be a lift. I pressed the button and stood waiting for the car. There was still no one in the corridor, no one anywhere in sight, though I heard faint echoing voices.
    It seemed a rather sleepy country hospital Painswick had shipped me off to, perhaps trying to avoid publicity as long aspossible. I supposed they wanted to know what killed me before the vultures of the press swooped down to rip the flesh from my bones. How those same vultures would feast now! But not on the tainted meat of Andrew Compton!
    The lift door slid back like a thick metallic tongue, and the maw of the car disgorged two long pale figures, one vertical and one horizontal. I very nearly stumbled backward in surprise. But it was only a sullen spotty-faced theatre porter pushing a gurney covered with a white sheet. There was a twisted shape beneath the sheet, a shape that seemed not to have all its parts, to be caving in and crumbling even as I looked. But I did not let my eye linger on it, and if the porter was anxious to snub me, I was anxious to be snubbed.
    I pushed the button marked
G
. A burnt smell lingered in the air. The lift rose, and my stomach felt the tiniest bit queasy. Then the door slid open on a scene of chaos: people running and shouting, trolleys rocketing past, blood fountaining from a table surrounded by white and green backs, and from their midst a writhing hand that shot into the air, trembled at the end of its arm as if straining to touch God, then disappeared again. And everywhere, much stronger now, that same smell of burning. I had taken the lift to the emergency ward.
    I saw some white masks on a cart, took one and tied it over my nose and mouth. I took a pair of rubber gloves as well, thinking they were bound to help me sooner or later. Then I edged through the Danteësque milieu toward a set of double doors I could dimly make out on the other side of the room.
    The doors only led to another wing of the hospital, but beyond them was a nurse at a desk, fingers flying over the keyboard of a computer. Her face was calmer and kinder than any I had seen so far. “Sorry,” I said through the mask, “but I’m new and I’ve got a bit turned around. Which way is the doctors’ car park?”
    â€œIt’s just along this hallway and to your left, up two flights of stairs. Level Three. But can’t you stay, Doctor? We’ve just had this horrid crash come in and we need the help.”
    â€œI’ve been on for twenty hours,” I improvised. “My supervisor ordered me to go home and rest—said I was bound