Sometime after, I don't know how long or how far, I stopped and vomited again. As my breakfast that morning had been the usual two slices of toast, undercooked eggs and tepid coffee (they know how to look after you in that mental home), my previous efforts at throwing up had relieved me of the contents of my stomach. Dry retching was about all I could manage, but my body had a good attempt at more.

I'd left the beach behind a while ago, not noticing as the sand gave way to rough brush, which in turn transformed into grass. At some point the grass had met up with a road, maybe for a few drinks and a pizza, and I'd automatically turned along it, my feet taking me along their own path without actually letting the rest of me know. Perhaps they fancied pizza as well. Pepperoni, probably. Or maybe a meat feast. Just no tomato on the base please. I hate tomato.

I walked in a daze, feeling amazed, phased and, sadly, not erased. For a long time, I didn't actually think anything. I didn't notice flies on my face, though I perhaps brushed the odd one away. I didn't hear squirrels scooting along branches of trees or rabbits scurrying through the long grass. I never noticed any cars driving past, except for the one with the music blasting out. Music, nowadays, is a phrase that gets thrown on any pile of notes chucked together, however loosely. This particular harmonic car crash consisted of a bass beat I could feel in my bones, and someone swearing in rhyme, shouting to be heard above the relentless drums. The car was a pale metallic blue, small but with a rear spoiler so disproportionately large that, if the car hadn't have been doing 80 miles an hour, it would surely have tipped backwards. As it was, I expected it to achieve lift off at any moment, its escape velocity taking the vehicle into near orbit.

I didn't see the driver, but I assumed he wore a baseball cap, the peak curved down, frowning at the fact it covered the head of an idiot. He'd be on his mobile phone, shouting to be heard above the guy on the CD who was swearing at the top of his voice above the beat. He'd drive like this whether he was on the open road, or whether he was driving past a primary school. It was cool. He was invincible.

I vomited again at that point. Or tried to.

I hadn't seen the small dent on his bonnet. But I knew it was there.

I hadn't seen the single strand of strawberry blonde hair that was still, no matter how well he'd tried to clean the evidence away, trapped in the arm of his wiper blade. But I knew it was there.

He hadn't seen the girl. He was reading a text message on his phone from one of his drinking-smoking-drugging buddies. He hadn't felt his car hit her. The only thing he could feel was the beat driving its way into his soul. It wasn't until he'd pulled into his mother's drive and was walking away from the car that he saw the dent and he saw the hair and he saw the blood. I think he probably vomited then, but it was a club I didn't care to share membership of.

Up ahead the road curved to the right around a small copse. I saw the blue car with the enormous, phallic spoiler take the curve way too fast. The driver drove this way normally, so he could, most likely, have handled the skid. He would have laughed as he turned into it and accelerated away. Adrenalin, food of the yobs. Except he wasn't laughing. He didn't get chance. I'm quite sure the tree didn't leap into the middle of the road. I'm equally certain its branches didn't reach down, snatching the car off the road.

I didn't see the crash, but I heard it. I couldn't smell the smoke but I knew it was there. I couldn't see the strange angle his bloody head was hanging at, or the way his right arm didn't seem to be fully attached at the elbow anymore. But I knew. I knew.

I didn't run to the accident. I didn't believe it was entirely an accident. And when I rounded the curve in the road, I looked at the wreckage just as I would have roadkill, although for the squashed remains of a hedgehog or pheasant I would have felt something. Here, I felt nothing. No sympathy and no sorrow. I didn't feel numb, as I thought I might, I just felt nothing for the man, little more than a boy, who had driven too fast for too long and had mowed down a young girl on her way home from school without even noticing. I felt nothing for the person who could clean his car, polishing till his arms ached, to try and hide the fact. I felt nothing for the mangled corpse of someone who, the next day, could climb back into his car, turn up his music, talk on his phone, and forget it had even happened. The expanding pools of blood and oil, merging together like a ying-yang pictogram were just something to step over.

It would seem that, apart from our mutual queasiness, we also shared a lack of guilt.

I looked at the wreckage and continued to walk. I didn't stop to see if I could help - it was obvious I couldn't. I'd be hard pushed to say which was in a worse state - the car or the body.

It had been, apart from that spoiler, a nice car though.

Leaving the shattered remains of man and machine, car and corpse, fillet o' fish, behind me, I continued to let my feet take me where they wanted. I felt detached as if the only thing keeping me in contact with this world was the touch of my feet on the road. If I'd jumped, separating me from the tarmac, perhaps I would have winked out of existence faster than His Royal Deceasedness back there could take a corner. I didn't jump, to test my theory, just as I didn't feel bad that I could make light of what had just happened. I maybe felt bad about not feeling bad, but that was a bizarre spiral I didn't want to get tangled up in.

It dawned on me, like the sun rising refreshed after a good night's kip, that, as well as being still in the land of the living, I didn't actually know where I was. I hadn't recognised the beach I'd arrived on, washed up survivor of the shipwreck called my life, but that meant nothing. Apart from the glorious golden stretches of Majorca's Alcudia or mainland Spain's Costa Dorada, as the brochures insisted they were, I'd only really been to Cleethorpes. Golden, it wasn't, but it was all we'd had as I grew up. There were infrequent visits to the seasides of Skegness and Mablethorpe, and even less so to Scarborough or Bridlington, but none of the sandy stretches had any distinguishing marks to stick in my head. They all looked, like the grains of sand on their very own beaches, pretty much the same. They had pubs, they had souvenir shops and they had tourists. If it wasn't for the much hotter weather and the fact that the Mediterranean Sea is a tad cleaner than the River Humber, you could have been sunning yourself anywhere.

I'd been walking with no sense of direction and no sense of destination. Even if I'd had a destination, somewhere to rest my weary bones and, under the circumstances down a few neat vodkas, I wouldn't have known what to do once I got there. Except down a few neat vodkas, of course. That in itself raised a problem or two. I didn't have any money. The slacks they dressed us in were the poor relation of hospital scrubs, and were pocketless, not to mention styleless. With the asylum to bleed us dry of any finances we might have, residents, patients and grunts together were provided with their every need so personal money wasn't an issue, nor was it a temptation to anyone else. Providing us with our every need meant feeding us slop and doping us up, but that was just incidental. No need to be picky is there?

One thing Joy had done for me was make me comfortable. I don't know how she'd managed it, but she must have been a far keener financial wizard than I'd ever hoped to be. Because she'd taken her own life, her life assurance, to the sweet tune of £100,000, had not paid out, but her shares and various other monetary wotsits certainly had. I knew nothing about tax and accounts and bonds and such myself. I'd never had the money to warrant me finding the knowledge. As far as I was concerned, a bank account was somewhere to pay your wages into before everyone else leeched them out. My future-thinking financial security extended to a limited stakeholder pension, but that was about it. Everything else seemed as complicated as Sudoku, so I kept well away. Joy, it appeared, didn't have that problem. She'd invested extremely wisely, in such a way as to ensure her standard of living well into her twilight years. It was a pity her twilight had come so fast, like a candle snuffed out by an errant breeze.

More surprisingly, though, was the fact that I was named beneficiary of the whole shebang. Not because I wouldn't be, don't get me wrong. Joy and I were as close as any brother and sister might be. Granted she never, ever wrote me a letter, except one in particular, but we always shared a bond. I always thought that bond was one of simple sibling love. Naturally it wasn't. Joy was joy and I, Sin, was sin. I found out too late how closely we were connected. Too late to save her and, perhaps, myself. But whip-de-do. At least she made sure I could afford Dr. Connors' rates.

I think, sometimes, I sound callous and uncaring. I make light of the deepest, darkest subjects, as if I couldn't give a rat's banana. That's not the case, though. I might joke about my sister jumping off the Humber Bridge to take a little dip in Pollution Central, but it doesn't mean I think it's funny. It doesn't mean it didn't tear me apart. It doesn't mean it doesn't still.

Perhaps it's because that's exactly what happened. It tore me apart, just as everything else I've caused has done. The bus smashing into the post office. The seagull ending up as if it had been supper for a pack of hunting dogs that had somehow mistaken it for a fox. The boy, a young boy, driving his car into a tree. Each time something happened, I was fed through the shredder, then stuck back together with a great, hefty staple gun and a few rusty nails. With some blu-tac and spit to make sure I didn't come apart at the seams. After so much of that you either deal with it or you end up insane.

No comments about my previous residence, please.

So that was my way of dealing with it all. That was how I bit the big cookie. I took the piss, just a little. It was either that or gouge my eyes out with a rusty fork. They didn't give us metal forks, rusty or otherwise, in the mental home, so I didn't really have that option. Humour, however inappropriate, was my only course of action, my only weapon and my only form of defence.

So, I wasn't rich, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I was comfortable. I couldn't buy a twenty seven bedroomed, eighteen bathroomed, ten kitchened, six garaged, one partridge in a pear treed mansion, not could I fork out for a Ferrari or two to run about town. I couldn't afford eight cruises a year. I couldn't afford one really. Well, maybe I could, but Dr. Connors' vampiric fees made sure I didn't take it. But that was OK. It was all well and fine and dandy. I'd voluntarily incarcerated myself into Hell's Kebab House and accepted the fact that they'd bleed me like a leech, all nicely bloated and disgustingly fat.

It was a good job their standards of care were right up there with the monkeys. I imagined Dr. Connors performing lobotomies with a steak knife and a knitting needle, giving the knife a quick wipe before he sat down for a nice bit of sirloin, chips and peas, hold the mushrooms. Was I being unkind? Perhaps. The good doctor might well use a clean knife for his dinner. Was it deserved? Yes. It was. Dr. Connors was like Stephen King's It. All smiles and happiness while he eviscerated you.

Apparently he liked Chianti too.

My problem was, although I had money in the bank - assuming that it hadn't been totally siphoned yet (and we know that assuming anything turns me and you into a right donkey's arse) - I didn't have access to a bank. I didn't even know if there were any banks around here, not knowing precisely where 'here' was. I could have been in my home town, or I could have been in Outer Mongolia. Both options were pretty much the arse end of Nowhere to me, but at least Grimsby had its fair share of banks, building societies and those cash-point machines that rip you off a couple of quid every time you make a withdrawal. I knew that Outer Mongolia had come a long, long way since the days of Genghis Khan, but I was sure trying to get hold of any cash, if indeed that's where I'd landed, would have presented me with one or two wee problems. All I could do, in my current situation, was keep walking and see where I ended up.

I just hoped I'd end up somewhere fairly soon. Dark clouds were looming ominously not too far away. I could see them planning their attack on me, making bets on which would manage to drench me the quickest. I wished I'd brought me brolly.

My thoughts, drifting like a strait jacket on the water, returned unbidden to the crash scene I'd left behind me. I'd trained myself to not dwell on the things that happened, that I caused. 'Trained' might be too structured a word. It wasn't really that conscious, or that regimented. It was more a case of I'd learned, through instinct or pain or sweet self-preservation, to not think too much about the deaths and the screams and the things I knew. The fact that I had wanted to turn myself into a strawberry Pop Tart might decry that admission, but, while I could want to rid the world of Me because of everything I'd done, I didn't concentrate on individual atrocities. The situation as a whole made me want to, let's be blunt, kill myself, not because of anything specific, but because I was a monster ass-ay-hole.

I think that makes sense. I could turn a blind eye to causing the death of a family, but not to the fact that I'd caused death.

I looked back, briefly. I couldn't see the remains of the car. The scene back there seemed as peaceful as if it was an autumn's day, just before the rain. The trees and hedgerows stood out in stark relief against the blackening clouds. The air felt charged as if the sky was winding up a dynamo ready for a lightning display. I certainly didn't want to be caught in any downpour but didn't see the point in quickening my pace. I could be 100 metres from sanctuary, just around the next gang of elms, or it could be 100 miles, over the hills and far away. Who knew? I, for one, didn't, so why bother breaking into a sweat when it might be pointless? If the heavens opened, as they surely were planning to, I'd take shelter under the branches of a tree and wait it out.

The car. The boy. The blood and the broken glass and the crushed metal.

I flashed back to him flying past me. He'd been a blur, but I saw more in retrospect than I had at the time. He was driving on the left hand side of the road. He was sitting on the right. The number plate was a UK one. FX56 something or other. A new car. Nice one. I wasn't in Outer Mongolia, nor was I in deepest, darkest Africa. Darkest England was a fairly safe bet.

I smiled. It had been a long time.

There was a body. There was a wreck. There was death. But hey, there was also the chance that I might be able to find a pub and have a few neat vodkas. "Yippee-ki-yay, you mothers," as Bruce Willis might say.

I blotted the crash out. What could I do, that I hadn't already done? Come on. I'd rid the world of an idiot driver, one that had gotten away with running down a young girl? Was the world a better place? Was it sweeter smelling and fresher? No. Not to my nose anyway. Not to my senses. Not to my heart. He was an idiot. His idiocy had resulted in the death of a girl. Who was I, though, to dictate that he should die? I didn't wear a great black hooded cloak and swing a scythe like Tiger Woods does a nine iron, or my old mate Tony tries to. I don't live on a cloud, have a long white beard and lightning shooting from my fingertips, having to be careful if I wanted to pick my nose. I was just me, Sin, a mortal more mere than most.

But anywho-be-doo. Hi-ho, it's off to wherever I go.

The light was fading and the distinct lack of any street lighting meant it was becoming much darker than I was used to. I hadn't thought enough time could have passed since I left the hospital for the day to be leaning towards night. I knew I'd been walking for a while, but I had nothing to track the hours by. Watches weren't allowed - yes, you could possibly hang yourself with the strap if your shoelace happened to snap, and I didn't have Tonto's skills in telling the time by the position of the sun or the song of a cricket. If I didn't have my Pulsar or my mobile phone, an hour could last five minutes or be about five days long. It meant the few years I'd spent in Dr. Connors care had lasted about six millennia. Even so, I would have guessed that only a couple or three hours had loped by since I'd blown apart that gull. Even in September it doesn't begin to get dark until around seven-ish. The clouds, my Reaper's cloak made real, were dragging across the sky, as if they were readying themselves to wipe us all out, although that was perhaps wishful thinking. The sun had disappeared, either behind the cloak or beneath the horizon I didn't know. Still, it didn't feel that late. It didn't feel like I'd been walking seven hours instead of two.

I wasn't hungry, nor was I tired. My legs weren't heavier than a mobster's hit, concrete shoes and all, and there were no stitches in time to save nine digging their wee ways into my side. So why was it getting darker than Dr. Connors' mood the time Bender Benny told him he (Dr. Connors) was the crazy one and everyone else was saner than a rattlesnake on ecstasy? I didn't quite get the rattlesnake analogy, but sometimes Bender Benny talked a lot of sense. Mr. Shrink-o-matic 2010 didn't appear to think so though, and had made sure Benny had realised the error of his ways.

We didn't see the Bender for a few days after that. It might have been about a week. He was quieter.

I figured that, if I could have been plonked on a beach somewhere when I'd intended on ending up in the belly of the dragon, I could, I supposed, equally have been plonked a few hours later. Maybe teleportation included a slight risk of time travel. Perhaps it was the equivalent of turbulence on an aeroplane flight. No oxygen masks were there to drop in the case of an emergency, and no air stewardesses were on hand to show you the wheres and whyfors of a life jacket. If you hit a cosmic air pocket on your teleporting way from one place to another, maybe you hiccupped a few hours into the future. Hey, if we're walking in the realm of Star Trek, why not add in a dash of Doctor Who for good measure?

I was new to this. Even I didn't entirely believe, deep inside, that I could teleport. Even I still thought I hadn't done exactly what I had done. It was all madness. Maybe I was in my padded cell, strapped up tighter than Scrooge and doped up to Alpha Centauri. Maybe none of this was real and I was a pigment of Bender Benny's emancipation.

But the death told me it was real enough. All the souls, torn from their bodies like giblets from a chicken, en-masse screamed at me that it was real enough.

Still. Time travel, on top of everything else, was just a step too far over the border into Crazytown, population 1. I'd just been wandering for longer than I'd thought. Time flies by when you're having fun, or causing youngsters to plough their cars into the trunk of a tree. Apparently time is relative. Whose relative, I don't know. Does time, his cousins, his mum and dad and the dog gather around the table for Christmas dinner, ready to tuck into too much turkey and pigs-in-blankets? Which one refuses to wear the paper crown from the cracker, that's what I wanted to know.

I did begin to feel tired then. The energy drained from my body like a light bulb being switched off. I was suddenly knackered and the thought of taking any more steps was so daunting, I'd have rather kissed a pissed off Rottweiler. I stopped and stood there, looking at nothing in particular, feeling... feeling floppy. I just couldn't be bothered. I didn't know how far I had to go, mainly because I had no idea where I was going. A house could chance across my path, but would I stop there? What if I did? What then? Would someone open the door, a big old farmer or a young, vulnerable farmer's wife?

"Hey there," I'd say. "I wonder if you could help me. You see, I've just escaped from a lunatic asylum..."

Would the resident reach for a gun to shoot me? Would it be a phone to call the police? Perhaps it would help if I mentioned how, precisely, I'd managed my escape.

"I teleported out," I'd tell them. "It's a simple trick of matter transference. You should try it; it'd save you a fortune in taxi fares."

Perhaps not.

It did occur to me, as it would have had to, that I could use my new found talents of space shifting (as opposed to shape shifting which, to my knowledge, was beyond my abilities) to get myself somewhere else. The problem was, of course, that I might well end up back in the mental home. Or on a beach in Outer Mongolia, if they have any beaches. Or even sitting in a furnace with a great walloping flame up my backside. Right now even my original plan of action had become a plan of inaction. Suddenly death, my own anyway, was something I didn't fancy trying out. Death was a bright spangly pair of purple trousers that I wouldn't be seen... dead... in. I didn't want anyone else to die because of me, but I wasn't keen anymore on biting the big apple myself.

Call me selfish if you like, I don't mind, but not shellfish. Well, maybe a bit crabby.

As such, with my possible destination being either the inside of a white dwarf star or sitting on Dr. Connors knee while he ate his supper, I decided to keep on walking, exhausted or not. Thunder rumbled, fairly closely. The clouds were chanting their song of attack and I was right in the firing line. Maybe walking would do in preference to getting wet.

Off to my left, to the side of a freshly ploughed field, was a small copse of trees. They were obviously an artificial planting, the trunks marching in even ranks across neatly trimmed grass. All were of the same make, model and serial number, but not being a botanist I wasn't sure which. Maybe willows or something. They weren't oaks or elms, I knew that much. They could have been baby redwoods, waiting to become fully grown so a car could drive through their bases, but I doubted it. It didn't matter anyway, though I did briefly think I should take better notice of the world I seemed hell bent on destroying. Whether willow, redwood or bonsai, they were enough to offer me shelter from the coming storm, and if they didn't want to offer, I'd certainly take. The sky had turned angry and I didn't want its temper taken out on little old me, thank you very much.

The first spatterings of rain were throwing themselves at me as I left the road and, by the time I had reached the cover of the first branches, the spatterings had become an onslaught as each drop did its very best to hit me. They weren't bothered which part of me they made a target, any would do, but I felt like John Cleese accidentally saying Jehovah in the Life of Brian. A good stoning had taken place, albeit with water instead of rock, and I was battered and served up with chips and mushy peas.

So much for not getting wet.

Wiping the rain from my face with my sleeve I looked around for a nice comfy tree to sit against. It looked like I was going to be here for a while, so I figured I may as well get myself settled. The branches and leaves above me served their purpose in protecting me from the rain well enough for me to remain soaked and not to progress to drenched, not passing go and not collecting £200 - which was a bit of a pain because I could have done with the money. Vodkas don't buy themselves. One tree looked to be not quite as knotty and knobbly as its neighbours so that's where I parked my behind. It wasn't exactly the most comfortable place I'd ever rested, but it would have to do. I contemplated removing my wet clothing, but without a radiator handy to dry them on I decided my own body heat was the nearest I'd get. Besides, I wasn't sure whether I'd be colder with them on or off, so I chose wet and clothed rather than cold and nude.

I looked at the forest around me. It was nice. Now nice is a word I don't like to use too much - thanks, pretty much, to my old English teacher. I remember he banned us from using it in essays once because it was so insipid and overused. This is nice, that's nice, they're nice, I'm nice, you're nice, mice are twice as nice. Using it in conjunction with other words was fine and double dandy, but on its own, it wasn't nice at all. The forest, however, was nice. It was pleasant. Not insipid by any means, but restful. Even with the raindrops drumming along to their rock-steady-beat, peace seemed to reign beneath the blanket of leaves.

It was nice. Sorry Mr. Staniforth, but it was.

There weren't any birds whistling or whooping, but I did hear the odd scurry of a squirrel or rabbit hidden nearby. I didn't really know where they'd be hiding, as the ground between the trees was covered in a thick but neat carpet of grass, as if it had been a football pitch a couple of days ago and someone had accidentally dropped the trees here and hadn't got round to picking them up. But they scampered thither and to, keeping their distance from me and from the downpour beyond. I didn't mind them staying away from me. I wasn't in the mood for company, and trying to hold a conversation with a squirrel was something I was too tired to bother trying. They can be skittish creatures and tend to have a short attention span, so any chat is liable to dip and dive from subject to subject faster than I could make a banoffee pie disappear. Rabbits are different but just as hard to please. They simply look at you with blank faces, making it obvious that, no matter how riveting your conversation might be, they just wanted to know where you kept the carrots. I couldn't blame them. My stomach was starting to growl so a carrot or two, while not banoffee pie, would have been quite welcome.

I wondered if anything was happening anywhere else. By that I meant did the Grim Reaper owe me any thanks for chucking a few more shredded souls his way. I thought not. I'd know. I wondered if the boy in the car had been missed yet. Or had he been found. I wondered if I'd get some sleep. Then I slept.

Do you remember your dreams? I didn't. Not very often anyway. Sometimes, if I woke in the early hours then drifted back off to sleep again, I'd have snatches of a dream still clinging to me when I awoke properly. Occasionally those snatches would be full episodes and I'd recall them for a few hours or so before they would fade. Usually, though, I didn't. Sleep is a coma that only the insistent blaring of an alarm or the not too gentle shaking of a burly hospital orderly can rouse me from. And if I still retained glimpses from a dream, I rarely believed it to be my subconscious trying to communicate some hidden message to me. I'd like to, really. It would be good to have your brain ticking over problems while you're out for the count, supplying you with the answers in the form of little soap operas ready for when you wake up. I'd like the human brain to be capable of stuff like that. Perhaps it is, Who knows? In my case, though, it didn't happen, or if it did, my subconscious kept the solutions to itself. Maybe my dilemmas were too much for me to handle and I didn't realise it? Or maybe there aren't any actual solutions. My inner demons wouldn't stay inner enough for me to resolve them. They had a habit of escaping every so often and people died. I always wished I could dream more - or at least remember them. That would mean that things were getting better. That would mean the Reaper was doing his own dirty work.

"Hey, Sin," said Joy.

* * * *