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The phone rings after midnight, and because the City is quieter than usual, I answer. A man introduces himself as Dr. Lackerey, palaeontologist, retired, provisional. He says provisional the way some people say forgiven or condemned. He has heard from a mutual acquaintance that I’m good with catalogues. He wants me to help arrange a collection. Fossils, he says. Of a kind.

We agree to meet in a café on Stuart Street where nobody watches the door. He arrives late, carrying a museum box wrapped in brown paper, then orders tea and doesn’t drink it. He asks to see my hands. I hold them out. He nods, satisfied that they are not the hands of a thief or a surgeon.

Inside the box are papers and a bone the size of a large wedding ring. It is jet, or something like jet, but when I lift it, the surface briefly holds the outline of my fingertip as a bruise of cold. You’re looking, he says, at the eighth dorsal vertebra of a nocturn. I say nothing, the only honest reply. He smiles and says: a creature adapted to the absence of light. When the sun rose to its highest point, it retreated into the deeper layers of unrecorded time. We know about it from one vertebra, a few foot-bones, a trace of cartilage, and what amounts to rumour. The rumour, he says, is older than the City.

…

Continues in a forthcoming collection (late 2025)