Then he remembered what it was that the mention of Keats had jogged in his memory.

The slimy things with legs from his dream.

A cold calm came over him as he felt himself coming very close to something.

Coleridge. That man.

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

«The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.»

Dazed, Michael walked over to the bookshelf and pulled down his Coleridge anthology. He took it back to his seat and with a certain apprehension he riffled through the pages until he found the opening lines.

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

The words were very familiar to him, and yet as he read on through them they awoke in him strange sensations and fearful memories that he knew were not his. There reared up inside him a sense of loss and desolation of terrifying intensity which, while he knew it was not his own, resonated so perfectly now with his own aggrievements that he could not but surrender to it absolutely.

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I.

CHAPTER 20

The blind rolled up with a sharp rattle and Richard blinked.

«A fascinating evening you appear to have spent,» said Dirk Gently, «even though the most interesting aspects of it seem to have escaped your curiosity entirely.»

He returned to his seat and lounged back in it pressing his fingertips together.

«Please,» he said, «do not disappoint me by saying „where am I?“ A glance will suffice.»

Richard looked around him in slow puzzlement and felt as if he were returning unexpectedly from a long sojourn on another planet where all was peace and light and music that went on for ever and ever. He felt so relaxed he could hardly be bothered to breathe.

The wooden toggle on the end of the blind cord knocked a few times against the window, but otherwise all was now silent. The metronome was still. He glanced at his watch. It was just after one o'clock.

«You have been under hypnosis for a little less than an hour,» said Dirk, «during which I have learned many interesting things and been puzzled by some others which I would now like to discuss with you. A little fresh air will probably help revive you and I suggest a bracing stroll along the canal. No one will be looking for you there. Janice!»

Silence.

A lot of things were still not clear to Richard, and he frowned to himself. When his immediate memory returned a moment later, it was like an elephant suddenly barging through the door and he sat up with a startled jolt.

«Janice!» shouted Dirk again. «Miss Pearce! Damn the girl.»

He yanked the telephone receivers out of the wastepaper basket and replaced them. An old and battered leather briefcase stood by the desk, and he picked this up, retrieved his hat from the floor and stood up, screwing his hat absurdly on his head.

«Come,» he said, sweeping through the door to where Miss Janice Pearce sat glaring at a pencil, «let us go. Let us leave this festering hellhole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. Now, Janice» —

«Shut up.»

Dirk shrugged, and then picked off her desk the book which earlier she had mutilated when trying to slam her drawer. He leafed through it, frowning, and then replaced it with a sigh. Janice returned to what she had clearly been doing a moment or two earlier, which was writing a long note with the pencil.

Richard regarded all this in silence, still feeling only semipresent. He shook his head.

Dirk said to him, «Events may seem to you to be a tangled mass of confusion at the moment. And yet we have some interesting threads to pull on. For of all the things you have told me that have happened, only two are actually physically impossible.»

Richard spoke at last. «Impossible?» he said with a frown.

«Yes,» said Dirk, «completely and utterly impossible.»

He smiled.

«Luckily,» he went on, «you have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as „impossible“ in my dictionary. In fact,» he added, brandishing the abused book, «everything between „herring“ and „marmalade“ appears to be missing. Thank you, Miss Pearce, you have once again rendered me sterling service, for which I thank you and will, in the event of a successful outcome to this endeavour, even attempt to pay you. In the meantime we have much to think on, and I leave the office in your very capable hands.»

The phone rang and Janice answered it.

«Good afternoon,» she said, «Wainwright's Fruit Emporium. Mr Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right in the head and thinks he is a cucumber. Thank you for calling.»

She slammed the phone down. She looked up again to see the door closing softly behind her ex-employer and his befuddled client.

«Impossible?» said Richard again, in surprise.

«Everything about it,» insisted Dirk, «completely and utterly — well, let us say inexplicable. There is no point in using the word „impossible“ to describe something that has clearly happened. But it cannot be explained by anything we know.»

The briskness of the air along the Grand Union Canal got in among Richard's senses and sharpened them up again. He was restored to his normal faculties, and though the fact of Gordon's death kept jumping at him all over again every few seconds, he was at least now able to think more clearly about it. Oddly enough, though, that seemed for the moment to be the last thing on Dirk's mind. Dirk was instead picking on the most trivial of the night's sequence of bizarre incidents on which to cross-examine him.

A jogger going one way and a cyclist going the other both shouted at each other to get out of the way, and narrowly avoided hurling each other into the murky, slow-moving waters of the canal. They were watched carefully by a very slow-moving old lady who was dragging an even slower-moving old dog.

On the other bank large empty warehouses stood startled, every window shattered and glinting. A burned-out barge lolled brokenly in the water. Within it a couple of detergent bottles floated on the brackish water. Over the nearest bridge heavy-goods lorries thundered, shaking the foundations of the houses, belching petrol fumes into the air and frightening a mother trying to cross the road with her pram.

Dirk and Richard were walking along from the fringes of South Hackney, a mile from Dirk's office, back towards the heart of Islington, where Dirk knew the nearest lifebelts were positioned.

«But it was only a conjuring trick, for heaven's sake,» said Richard. «He does them all the time. It's just sleight of hand. Looks impossible but I'm sure if you asked any conjurer he'd say it's easy once you know how these things are done. I once saw a man on the street in New York doing» —

«I know how these things are done,» said Dirk, pulling two lighted cigarettes and a large glazed fig out of his nose. He tossed the fig up in to the air, but it somehow failed to land anywhere. «Dexterity, misdirection, suggestion. All things you can learn if you have a little time to waste. Excuse me, dear lady,» he said to the elderly, slowmoving dog-owner as they passed her. He bent down to the dog and pulled a long string of brightly coloured flags from its bottom. «I think he will move more comfortably now,» he said, tipped his hat courteously to her and moved on.

«These things, you see,» he said to a flummoxed Richard, «are easy.

Sawing a lady in half is easy. Sawing a lady in half and then joining her up together again is less easy, but can be done with practice. The trick you described to me with the two-hundred-year-old vase and the college salt cellar is» — he paused for emphasis — «completely and utterly inexplicable.»