"Yeah, yeah," agrees Deema, another barista. "And even if I had the brainspace to worry, I haven't got the roomspace in my apartment for a shrine. I make my obeisance when I visit my parents at the weekend, but my apartment's so cramped the shower's in the kitchen. Where am I meant to find the space for the Eighteen Forms of Frozen Madness?"

The crack in the window let in the ghosts. They came with the night breeze, whistling their mourning songs and carrying with them the stink of rotten water that lay across the paddocks, down past the crooked fence that bent and bowed where the earth had sunk away to let the sea creep closer. Where the salt ate the grass brown, then grey, before the water swallowed it up.