CHAPTER Thirty-Seven

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Jimmy was no longer in the cinema, or anywhere in London.

He was in a giant underground space that seemed to stretch for miles in every direction. In places it looked like a cellar or a basement, in others a catacomb or a vault. In every area of the space there were people tied to operating tables, stone slabs and sacrificial altars with blurry Anunnaki buzzing round them, destroying and tormenting their flesh.

Jimmy was looking at the whole landscape of a murderous story that had no end. It was a limitless cartography of pain, showing every victim the story had ever taken, all suffering side by side. The atmosphere was like that of a charnel house, on a scale that Jimmy’s mind just couldn’t process. The air was so thick with human agony you could choke on it. Jimmy pulled the robe up around himself like a small child who pulls the blankets over his face, in the dead of night.

The hem of the robe had joined itself to the fabric of the story. There was no differ