Cal smiled; here was a man ready for a story.

'Well - ' he said, taking a deep breath. And he began.

He'd intended to keep the account short, but after ten minutes or so Gluck began to interrupt his story with discretionary questions. It consequently took several hours to tell the whole thing, during which Gluck smoked his way through an heroic cigar. At last, the narrative reached Gluck's doorstep, and it became shared memory. For two or three minutes Gluck said nothing, nor did he even look at Cal, but studied the debris of stubs and matches in the ashtray. It was Cal who broke the silence.

'Do you believe me?' he said.

Gluck blinked, and frowned, as though he'd been stirred from thoughts of something entirely different.

'Shall we make some more tea?' he said.

He tried to stand up, but Cal took fierce hold of his arm.

'Do you believe me?' he demanded.

'Of course,' said Gluck, with a trace of sadness in his voice. 'I think I'm obliged to. You're sane. You're articulate. You're damnably particular. Yes, I believe you. But you must understand, Cal, that in doing so I deliver a mortal blow to several of my fondest illusions. You are looking at a man in mourning for his theories.' He stood up. 'Ah well...' he picked up the pot from the table, then set it down again. 'Come next doorI he said.

There were no curtains at the window of the next room. Through it Cal saw that the snow had thickened to near-blizzard proportions while he'd been talking. The garden at the back of the house, and the houses beyond, had become a white nowhere.

But Gluck hadn't brought him in to show him the view; it was the walls he was directing Cal's attention to. Every available inch was covered with maps, most of which looked to have been up there since the world was young. They were stained with an accrual of cigar smoke, scrawled over in a dozen different pens, and infested with countless coloured pins, each presumably marking a place where some anomalous phenomenon had occured. And on the fringes of these maps, tacked up in mind-boggling profusion, were photographs of the events: grainy, thumb-nail pictures, foot-wide enlargements, strips of sequential images lifted from a home movie. There were many he could make no sense of, and others that looked patently fake. But for every blurred or phony photograph there were two that pictured something genuinely startling, like the frumpy woman standing in a domestic garden up to her ankles in what seemed to be a trawler's deep-sea catch; or the policeman standing guard outside a three-storey house which had fallen over on its face, though not a single brick was out of place; or the car bonnet which bore the imprint of two human faces, side by side. Some of the pictures were comical in their casual weirdness, others had a grim authenticity about them - the witnesses sometimes distressed, sometimes shielding their faces - that was anything but amusing. But all, whether ludicrous or alarming, went to support the same thesis: that the world was stranger than most of Humankind ever assumed.

This is just the tip of the iceberg - ' said Gluck. 'I've got thousands of these photographs. Tens of thousands of testimonies.'

Some of the pictures, Cal noted, were linked by threads of various colours to pins in the maps.

'You think there's a pattern here?' said Cal.

'I believe so. But now, after hearing what you've told me, I begin to think maybe I was looking in the wrong place for it. Some of my evidence, you see, overlaps with your account. For the last three weeks - while you were trying to contact me - Max and I were up in Scotland, looking at a site we just found in the Highlands. We picked up some very strange articles there. I'd assumed it was a landing place of some kind for our visitors. I think now I was wrong. It was probably the valley your unweaving took place in.'

'What did you find?'

'The usual debris. Coins, clothing, personal effects of one kind or another. We boxed them all up, and brought them back down with us to examine at leisure. We could have made them fit our pet theories, you know... but now I think much of that's in ruins.'

'I'd like to see that stuff,' Cal said.

'I'll unpack it for youI said Gluck. His expression, since Cal had told his story, had been that of a deeply perplexed man. Even now he surveyed the map room with something akin to despair. In the past few hours he'd seen his whole world-view thrown into disarray.

'I'm sorry,' said Cal.

'What for?' Gluck replied. 'Telling me about miracles? Please don't be. I'll just as happily believe in your mystery as in mine. It'll just take a little time to adjust. All I ask is that the mystery be there.'

'Oh it isI said Cal. 'Believe me, it is. I just don't know where.'

His attention strayed from Gluck's face to the window, and the blank scene beyond. More and more he feared for his beloved exiles. The night, the Scourge and the snow all seemed to be conspiring to erase them.

He crossed to the window; the temperature plummeted as he approached the icy glass.

'I have to find them,' he said. 'I have to be with them.'

He'd successfully kept his sense of desolation at bay until now; but sobs suddenly wracked him. He heard Gluck come to his side, but he didn't have sufficient mastery of himself to control his tears: they kept falling. Gluck put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

'It's good to see somebody so in need of the miraculousI he said. 'We'll find your Seerkind, Mooney. Trust me. If there's a clue to their whereabouts, it's here.'

'We have to be quick,' Cal said softly.

'I know. But we'll find them. Not just for you, but for me. I want to meet your lost people.'

'They're not mine.'

'In a way they are. And you're theirs. I could see that on your face. That's why I believe you.'

2.

'Where do we begin?' that was Cal's question.

The house was packed with reports from basement to attic. Perhaps, as Gluck had said, there was somewhere amongst them a clue - a line in a report, a photograph - that would point to the Kind's location. But where! How many testimonies would they have to dig through before they uncovered some hint of the hiding place? That assumed, of course, that in this time of jeopardy they'd band together. If not - if they were spread across the Isles - then it was a completely lost cause, as opposed to one almost lost.

Cal chided himself for that thought. It was no use being defeatist. He had to believe that there was a chance of discovery; had to believe the task before them wasn't just a way to occupy the time before the cataclysm. He would take Gluck as his model. Gluck, who'd spent his life in pursuit of something he'd never really seen, not doubting for an instant the validity of that pursuit; Gluck, who even now was brewing tea and digging out files, behaving as though he believed to his core that the solution to their problem was close at hand.

They'd made a base in the study. Gluck had cleared the largest desk, and laid on it a map of Britain, so vast it hung over the top like a tablecloth.

The Spectred Isle,' he said to Cal. 'Study it a while. See if any of the sites we've investigated down the years ring a bell.'

'All right.'

'I'll go sort through the reports; and break open the boxes we brought from Scotland.'

He got about his business, leaving Cal to peruse the map, which was even more heavily annotated than those in the next room, many of the symbols, crossed lines and dusters of dots, accompanied by cryptic acronyms. What the letters UFO signified needed no explanation, but what was a Suspected TMD7 or a Cirrus VS? He decided to ignore the notes, which were only distracting him, and simply examine the map systematically, quarter inch by quarter inch, beginning at Land's End and working his way back and forth across the country. He was grateful that he need only examine the land, because the seas around Britain - those regions whose names had always enchanted him on the weather reports: Fastnet, Viking, Forties, Tiree - those too had their share of miracles. It stood to reason. If there were squid falling on suburbia perhaps there were rains of tyres and chimney stacks on the North Sea. He had moved to and fro across the country half a dozen times when Gluck reappeared.

'Any luck?' he wanted to know.

'Not so far,' said Cal.

Gluck put a foot-high heap of reports on one of the chairs.

'Maybe we'll find something here,' he said. 'I've started with events in the neighbourhood of Spook City, and we'll spread out from there.'

'Seems logical.'

'You dig in. Anything that seems faintly familiar, set aside. As long as you keep reading, I'll keep supplying.'

Gluck pinned the map up on the wall beside the desk, and left Cal to wade through the first collection of reports.

The work required concentration, which Cal found hard to come by. It was ten-thirty, and he already wanted sleep. But as he leafed through this catalogue of neglected wonders his weary eyes and wearier brain forgot their fatigue, re-invigorated by the startling stuff before them.

Many of the incidents were variations on by now familiar themes: events in defiance of laws geographical, temporal and metrological. Misplaced menageries; excursions from distant stars; houses larger inside than out; radios that picked up the voices of the dead; ice in midsummer trees; and hives that hummed the Lord's Prayer. All these things had taken place not in the faraway, but in Preston and Healey Bridge, in Scunthorpe and Windermere; solid, stoical places, inhabited by pragmatists not prone to hysteria. This country, which Gluck had called the Spectred Isle, was alive from one end to the other with delirious visions. It too was Wonderland.