If you want the honest truth, I think it’s areas like this that are the real ghosts, aren’t they? Mouldy old things, dead things from hundreds of years ago that have no right to still be making an appearance in the present day, with all their creaking woodwork and their rattling chains. These terrible young men with their pale, undernourished faces and their hoodie tops, like apparitions, like the monk in Mr A. S. Palmer’s photograph. Shrieks in the night and phantom bloodstains on the paving slabs outside a takeaway that will have disappeared by the next afternoon, it is, it’s like a Gothic novel. And just like a ghost, a neighbourhood like this will hang around for centuries with all its flapping rags and its depressing atmosphere. It’s an accusing presence, making everyone feel guilty about things that happened before most of us were born. It’s not our fault if people were too lazy to make something of themselves and find a better place to live. Leave us alone.

  Oh, look at that. A great big lump of dog’s mess on the pavement. That’s disgusting. I’m lucky I spotted it, what with the fog. If Dennis Berridge had to live round here, all I can say is that he can’t have been much of a physics teacher. Or perhaps he was, but never got on in the education system as it is now. Either way, it must have made him bitter that somewhere like this was all he could afford. Reading his blog, I sensed he was a very angry man. You’ll often find that people who say nasty things about spiritual healers – which is how I see myself – you’ll often find that it’s their own frustrations and their failures that they’re really cross about, deep down inside. His brother David here, though, seems much more contented in himself, more open-minded and more likeable. Walking a pace or two ahead, he turns and glances back across his shoulder at me with his funny smile that, frankly, in the useless lamplight that they have down here, is looking a bit ghastly. Doesn’t look like a vessel of light, let’s put it that way. But you must remember that he’s had a blow, the poor soul.

  ‘Not far now. Dennis’s house is just along the end here.’

  Well, thank God for that. If we’d have had to go much further, I think I’d have wanted rabies shots. I’m sorry, but I would. This street we’re on, it’s like a terraced row with little badly kept front gardens, most of them with the gates hanging off or missing altogether. David takes a right turn up the pathway of a pebble-dashed affair and I follow behind him. The house looks to be in a better condition than the other properties along here, although not by much. It’s shabby, and the paint’s all peeling off round the front doorway, but at least its windows aren’t smashed in and patched with plasterboard like that house that we just passed two doors down. Someone had drawn a willy on its wood fence with black spray paint and it had, you know, the stuff, the droplets coming out the end. Who wants to see that? They’ve got ugly minds, some people. Ugly minds.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll just check round the side to see that all the windows and back door are still all right since Dennis died. He kept a key under that flowerpot, next to the front doorstep there. Let yourself in, and if they’ve cut off the electric, there’s a big torch in the passage, just inside the door.’

  This is a bit irregular but, still, a hundred pounds. I have a job finding the plant pot in the dark and then my fingertips are that cold that they’re numb, so that I’ve only just unlocked the door and found the torch that Mr Berridge mentioned when he’s back from his inspection, standing there behind me. I can’t see his face in this light, but I know he’ll have that weary, gormless smile showing his rabbit teeth, that little overbite he’s got. I switch the torch on and it throws a puddle of tea-coloured light along the passageway, so I can see the bottom of the stairs. I think that’s … no. Is it? I think that’s the old-fashioned stair rods showing, brass ones like they used to have. That’s shameful. You’re not telling me a science teacher couldn’t have afforded to splash out on fitted carpets?

  Mr Berridge slips in past me, and I notice he leaves me to shut the door behind us, thank you very much. Born in a field, as my mum used to say. Not that shutting the door has made a scrap of difference to the cold. If anything, it’s colder indoors than it was outside and there’s that smell, the smell of other people’s houses. With the better sort of residences you don’t notice it, they all just smell of Glade or something – mine does – but in poorer people’s houses, you can smell all the fish fingers and the dirty socks going back years, like it’s accumulated in the furniture. I try the light switch in the hall, but nothing happens. I doubt that the council would cut somebody’s electric off so soon after they’d died, so probably what happened was he hadn’t paid his bill. I think it’s better if I hurry things along a bit, get to the business, so to speak. I don’t want to spend too long here.

  ‘Well, now, this is very atmospheric, Mr Berridge. Very atmospheric. I can almost feel Dennis’s presence, as if he were right here next to me. I sense that he’s concerned about you, worried that you’re suffering needlessly over his death. He’s saying that he doesn’t want you to be hurt.’

  I angle up the torch beam from where it’s been playing over the unappetising wallpaper and the chipped skirting board and there they are, the goofy teeth and mournful smile as he considers.

  ‘Yes, that sounds like Dennis. We were always ever so protective of each other, being twins. If either of us were in any trouble or had someone picking on them, then the other would be on it like a ton of bricks. Dennis particularly. Out of us two, Dennis was always the bloody-minded one.’

  Why am I not surprised? Anyone who can fume for pages about chiropractors and the like is hardly likely to be someone normal who just lets things go. I’m frankly glad I never met him. He sounds like a nightmare.

  ‘He sounds like a lovely, very caring man. Just let me ask you, was there a possession or an object Dennis was especially attached to, something I could touch? I find it often makes the contact stronger, that’s all. It could be a favourite pair of slippers or a record he was fond of. Literally, it could be anything. Just something so I can make a connection with him.’

  There’s the smile again. It’s probably the torchlight bouncing round this narrow passageway, but it looks almost pitying, or even condescending. Oh, it’s very cold in here. It’s icy.

  ‘Well, if you want something so you can connect with Dennis, I think if I popped upstairs a minute I might come back with the very thing. Go in the living room and make yourself at home.’

  He turns and walks towards the stairs, then he looks back at me, and … no. No, his voice is very faint and I can hardly make it out. He’s asking if I’d like … don’t know. A cuppa? Is he offering to make a cup of tea? I shake my head, smiling politely.

  ‘No, no, I’ll be fine. You go ahead and I’ll wait in the living room.’

  He turns and walks up the stairs very casually for saying there’s no lights on, although obviously he’s more familiar with the place than I am. I’m guessing he’s spent a lot of time here.

  I push the door open and I sweep my torch around the living room. God, this is a depressing little hole for somebody to spend their final years in. There’s three bookshelves, mostly science and science fiction from the look of it, and there’s no television. Two sagging armchairs with one each side of an old three-bar fire. I’ve not seen one of them in years. Upstairs I can hear Mr Berridge walking back and forth as he looks for whatever piece of sentimental tat he’s going to bring back down for me to go into my Vulcan mind-meld with. It’ll be Richard Dawkins’ autograph, I shouldn’t wonder. If he’s going to be a while, then I suppose I could risk sitting on one of the chairs and rest my feet after that walking. I hope he’s not long. It’s twenty-five to nine already and I’m going to miss the start of QI unless Mr Berridge gets a move on. Sitting in the dark like this, well, it’s not how I like to spend my Friday evenings, put it that way.

  Oh, hang on, there was that call I had when I was just locking the front door, wasn’t there? While Charlie Boy’s upstairs having a weep over his brother’s keepsakes, I can at least check on that and see if there’s another client in the pipeline. Honestly, my fingers, fishing out the bootie with the iPhone in from my coat pocket, they’re half frozen. If it gets much colder they’ll be falling off.

  Dialling the number and the suffix that connects me to the answerphone takes ages. Clump-clump-clump upstairs, the footsteps through the ceiling. Thinking back, it didn’t sound like ‘cuppa’, what he offered me when he was just about to go up. It was more like ‘phantom’ or a word like that, except that doesn’t make … ah! Here we are. The girl’s voice tells me I was called at eight o’clock and then there’s the long pause before it plays the message.

  Fanta. That’s what he said. ‘Ricky? Would you like a Fanta?’ But why should he …?

  ‘Mr Sullivan? I’m sorry, this is David Berridge. Listen, I’ve been talking to my wife and, well, I’m sorry, I’ve had second thoughts about coming to see you. I don’t think it’s anything that the departed would have wanted. I’m sorry to cancel the appointment and I hope I haven’t, like, put you about or anything. Anyway, thanks again, and sorry. Um, you take care. Bye. Bye …’

  What? Is this … is he playing a trick or something, calling from upstairs, just some mean joke to make me … no, he didn’t call. It’s me who called, what am I thinking? It’s the landline, isn’t it? The landline at my house. I called and it said eight o’clock and he was with me then, outside my gate. There must be, I don’t know, there must be something that explains this – calm down, Ricky – something I’ve not thought of, and in just a minute I’ll be laughing at how daft I am. Because if David Berridge, if he rang at eight to call it off, if he’s still sat at home, then …

  Up above me on the landing there’s a creak. Somebody’s coming down the stairs. I’m sorry.

  I’m so sorry.

  THE IMPROBABLY COMPLEX HIGH-ENERGY STATE

  It was the best of times; it was the first of times. In that initial femtosecond of it all – and if a femtosecond lasted for a second then a second would last thirty million years or so – in that bolt-upright quantum startle, with the whole idea of past still in the future, everything was perfect.

  Clattering out of blank nothing, there eventuated an exquisitely contrived arrangement of what might have been translucent lacquer tiles. Lacking a medium to carry sound, the clattering was purely visual. Without scale, the toppling tiles were unimaginably massive or infinitesimal. Impossible, of course, to speak of shape or colour in the blank and empty run-up to those qualities, but the emergent form had something like the perfume of geometry, within its spin a premonition – more a taste – of clear, cold pink in mixed-state oscillation with the rich blue of a peacock’s shoulder. By its very nature, it was beautiful beyond compare. This incomparability was also true for the duration of the subatomic instant in which these preliminary phenomena occurred: still yet to reach the smallest measure of chronology, it felt like it went on forever.

  The event, arresting and unprecedented, not yet even on the brink of substance, had instead for its material what could be called an eidolon of light, an optimistic diagram for energy and matter. Having thus spontaneously generated a precursor to solidity and with it a primordial object, the insensate mathematic force that had unwittingly precipitated ontological eruption seemed compelled to run through every plausible contingency of structure, as the cascade of increasingly elaborate surfaces crashed silent into being. In a fabulous kaleidoscope dilation, there were steam pavilions, tessellated runways, grand Alhambras, spectral lidos, avenues, concourses, corridors of an incalculable stature, opening and closing and unfolding like a schoolchild’s paper oracle. Spontaneously germinating kiosks blossomed into Futurist cathedrals, ripened into unimaginable cities that were iterated to the limits of the gradually swelling moment. Abstract architectural logic shimmered, radiant with manifest contingency. Although an arithmetical inferno beyond definition or description, this quickly evolving situation was as close to heavenly as anything would ever get.

  Characteristically, the aforesaid initial object, exponentially accumulated and incessantly self-complicating, implied – and indeed, necessitated – an initial subject. From the fizzing symmetry, as multiplying stadia unpacked themselves from empty vacuum everywhere about, a rumour of submicroscopic particles converged with highly ordered randomness upon a striking new configuration, a fortuitous stylistic breakthrough with a shocking absence of straight lines. Back then, of course, in the euphoric algebra of that first femto-blink, improbability was not yet even possible. As choreographed accident, untrammelled by unlikelihood, the scrum of proto-atoms and incipient molecules collided into a foreshadowing of organism. Now – and there was only now – suspended at the centre of a stately void whose inner eggshell surface was embroidered with basilicas, there coalesced a self-possessed ellipsoid of uncertain size. Lit by the same inflection of pink/blue as its progressively elaborate surroundings, glistening and crenellated with a fractal tracery of creases, this primary entity was what would be eventually referred to as a Boltzmann brain.

  The Boltzmann brain, sentient life extemporaneously formed from subatomic happenstance, inevitable consequence of a non-finite universe, as per the thought experiment of nineteenth-century physicist and theoretician Ludwig Boltzmann was, in that fast-breeding and surprisingly well-regimented paradise before statistics, no less probable than any other outcome. Nonetheless, from the brain’s own barely congealed perspective, its existence was an unbelievable surprise.

  Born into a condition of black silence that, lacking the notions of both sound and whiteness, was not even understood as such, the disconcerted prototype of consciousness became at first uneasily aware that it existed, then aware of that awareness – and with these initial principles in place, thus was philosophy invented, as was solipsism. Relatively quickly – if it’s possible to speak of quickness in that femto-splinter of beginning – the emergent locus of cognition, slippery and blind, developed a hypothesis as to what might be going on, an opening stab at what in later eras would be called reality.

  Blithely originating reason, the brain reasoned that if it existed, as appeared to be the case, it seemed conceivable that there might be some broader pasture of existence somewhere for it to do its existing in. Furthermore, while incidentally creating the activity of noticing things, the brain noticed that its speculations with regard to a potentially wider field of being must have necessarily arrived at some point following its earlier feat of noticing; the moment it had noticed it existed. Through this inference of a sequential nature to events and its conjectures on the possibility of a location, the detached cerebrum, still in the traumatic processes of being born, construed both time and space. It was, clearly, on something of a roll.

  Giddy with genesis, the Boltzmann curiosity next posited that its just recently deduced continuum might not be the black, solitary emptiness it seemed. In the brain’s own hastily crystallised opinion, an alternative hypothesis pointed to an existence in which there existed various other points of information signalling their nature, but with no means of registering these imagined signals, the blue/pink electrified blancmange remained oblivious to everything. If only the almost material form it sensed that it possessed could be augmented by some kind of apparatus sensitive enough to note the least perturbance, the most subtle fluctuation in whatever medium this preliminary business was all taking place.

  Although without scale in its own terms, by the standards of the present day, the entire rapidly developing continuum inhabited by the cerebral fluke of probability was smaller than the most elusive quanta, and was thus susceptible to quantum principles. For instance, the observer effect – that with time would be employed by Werner Heisenberg – was, in an infinitely tiny nascent universe with only one observer, more dramatic and immediate by several factors, and no sooner had the singular observer made its observation than the blurry fog of almost-particles surrounding it began to congeal into visibility and form by way of a protuberant new structure on the brain’s anterior upper bulges. This new shape, ghostly at first but rapidly accruing definition, was essentially a conical construction not dissimilar to a witch’s bonnet of soft felt, the point pushed down inside the pointed crown to form a deep concavity. The novel ornament was thus at once both penile and vaginal in its contours, slumping forward to depend from the brain’s ‘brow’ much like the luminous appendages that would one day be worn by lanternfish.

  From the sensory-deprivation-tank perspective of the Boltzmann thought experiment, this vaporous growth process was experienced initially as a vague, non-specific tingling sensation. This was still, however, a sensation; something which had not existed previously and was, therefore, to be marvelled at. The brain was thus already lost in wonderment before the organ sprouting from its frontal lobe developed a lush carpeting of hairs, or filaments, on its exterior and interior surfaces, millions of individual cilia suddenly quivering with information as the freshly minted nightmare of perception thundered unannounced into the black and solitary silence of creation’s first inhabitant. Which, we may freely speculate, was quite a thing.

  A militant chrysanthemum of mosques and locomotives swelled out from a centrally located nowhere, filling almost instantly the floating brain’s new-found field of awareness, even as more recent, contradictory wonderlands expanded up from the arrangement’s previously hidden interstices to replace it: sword lagoons, wedding-cake icebergs, stilt panopticons, and so endlessly forth.