 Beyond Black, by Hilary Montell. Narrated by Anna Bentink. There are powers at work in this country, about which we have no knowledge. Her Majesty the Queen. Attributed. Chapter 1. Travelling. The dank oily days after Christmas. The motorway. Its wastes looping London. The margins scrub grass, flaring orange in the lights. And the leaves of the poisoned shrubs, striped yellow-green, like a cantaloupe melon. Four o'clock. Light sinking over the orbital road. Tea time in Enfield. Night falling on Potter's Bar. There are nights when you don't want to do it. But you have to do it anyway. Nights when you look down from the stage and see closed, stupid faces. Messages from the dead arrive at random. You don't want them, and you can't send them back. The dead won't be coaxed, and they won't be coerced. But the public has paid its money, and it wants results. A sea-green sky. Lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land. Fields of strung wire. Of treadless tires in ditches. Fridges dead on their backs. And starving ponies cropping the mud. It's a landscape running with outcasts and escapees. With Afghans, Turks, and Kurds. With scapegoats. Scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life-forms here are rejects, or anomalies. The cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece, clotted with the stench of aviation fuel. Beside her, in profile against the fogged window, the driver's face is set. In the backseat, something dead stirs and begins to grunt and breathe. The car flees across the junctions, and the space the road encloses is the space inside her. The arena of combat. The wasteland. The place of civil strife behind her ribs. Heartbeats. The taillights wink. Dim lights shine from tower blocks, from passing helicopters, from fixed stars. Night closes in on the purged ministers and burnt-out pedophiles. On the unloved viaducts and graffiti. Sample complete. Ready to continue?