He’s sure I bought my pink notebook just to annoy him, W. says. A pink notebook, with a pink ribbon as a bookmark, in which I write with a violet pen in violet ink, like a Japanese schoolgirl.

What have I been writing? ‘Cynothoglys’, W. reads. ‘Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Zvilpogghua – tentacles instead of a face’. What is this?, W. wonders. A made up language? And then, ‘Shathak – Death Reborn. Volga-Gath – Keeper of Secrets’. What are these?, W. asks. Norwegian death metal bands?

‘My name is legion’, W. reads. The ‘nihil negativum’, W. reads.

Then a drawing. A kind of goat with wings and a star on its forehead. A goat with breasts, W. says. And what’s this: a head with three faces?

Then pages of minute writing, almost too small for the eye to see. It’s a bit like Walser’s Microscripts, W. says. It’s a bit like the work of one of those outsider writers, which is discovered in mouldering piles in a flat. Ten thousand manuscript pages full of ravings, full of wild new mythologies ...