My first crossing of The hinge was, disappointingly, a non-event - no thunder, no lightning, no sign from the universe that I had broken any rule at all, just a bone-deep exhaustion and the dawning question of whether I had crossed over or merely fainted in my own front room. Then I did faint, and as my awareness ebbed I understood physiologically, if not yet cognitively, that I was being poisoned: the murk had curled up my legs and smothered my face within seconds of my arrival. I came round breathing through a psycmask I did not yet have a name for, my air purified, my skull flooded with rivers and hills and whispered words - mutable, fluid, transforming. When I finally sat up in the oldest, most lived-in room I have ever seen, a grizzled figure in a mask patted the chair beyond my shoeless feet and told me, in the broadest Dark Peak idiom, that the murk had had me good and I'd have been crozzled if he hadn't been surfing scerm when he found me. That figure was Van Hallam, and he saved my life largely by accident - I have never forgotten it.