Hellsborough Exposed

Semagrams turned up in my research the way fossils do — hidden, buried, closeted by the eons past. I had a set spectrographically analysed and was told, in this order, that they should not exist, that they were impossible, and that I had fabricated them myself; the same people then asked very politely whether they might keep hold of them. My troubles with the university began at roughly that point.

A scratcher does not watch you; it watches whatever you cannot see yet — cat-sized and tabby-marked, sat on a wall holding one angle for the better part of an hour on a hedge that appears to contain nothing at all. Corner one and it will scratch you precisely once and go straight back to watching, which is the whole of its violence; the danger was never the scratcher. Use them as a compass, and if a scratcher's gaze swings onto you mid-watch, follow its new line before you do anything else — something changed, and it noticed before you did.