Shad is a barghest — Van Hallam's enormous black companion, audible but rarely visible, who appears when called by a whisper. He returns to the Wisewood and the grimy streets of Hellsborough between assignments for what Van describes as his own ghostly and demonic entertainment; what this involves has never been fully explained, and I have found it prudent not to ask.

On his morning walk along the Middlewood Road, Nigel spoke briefly with a murk wraith — it asked him why dark matter was leaving this place, and he kept walking because he had to get to work. By lunchtime his colleagues were shaking his hand and saying their farewells, which is the kind of thing that happens in Hellsborough after certain encounters you decide to ignore. Nanna Farantee sent him home early. He didn't go back to Outibridge.

Dark Peak time runs in its own vocabulary: murkrise for dawn, murkneet for the full dark, Bleak for winter. The seven days are Mard'y, Toid'y, Midd'y, Neard'y, Besd'y, Spand'y, and Splend'y — the week ending on Sunday, which is named for being splendid. Optimism of that kind, in a world that calls its winter Bleak, is either admirable or delusional, and the distinction has not been resolved.

My first crossing through The Hinge was not dramatic. I used a Milting semagram, moved between worlds without moving, and immediately fainted from the murk. Van Hallam found me because he was surfing the scerm at the right moment and his house sits directly on the junction; he describes this as luck, which is his standard way of describing things he clearly arranged.