I was, however, given the liberty of flat, and on the handful occasions that the Nemesis left me to my own devices, was afforded the small pleasure of roaming her darkened rooms alone. Therein finding great delight in the curios and trinkets that had been crammed into the drawers and shelves that lined the old woman's quarters: an entire wardrobe of shells was located in the third bedroom, walls of jarred sea creatures fading in the weak light of the most northern antechamber, whilst everywhere there were antique books with dried flowers cemented within their pages. Perhaps the most fascinating of all the spectacles lay in the study, wherein I found a shelf of animal skulls classified in order of size: mice crania, weasels and ferrets, monkeys and finally a skull that was tinged orange with a prehistoric lustre.

The Nemesis, as I now officially called her, was a keen photographer too, and everywhere bubbled with black and white prints: of lichen and sea kelp, of detail shots of flowers (chrysanthemum heads and such) - all arranged in the same shallow focus splash. All colour drained in a lifeless show of nature. And where I found solace in wrestling, the Nemesis took refuge in what she called, 'the ancient art of boxing'. Famous fight posters glossing the hallway: Mohamed Ali, Joe Frasier - the usual suspects. She too sporting a pugilistic stiffness while she watched pre recorded ringside specials on VHS. Forcing me to participate, as if my viewing would negate her own culpability in such things. They were graceless batterings of course, shows of bloody vulgarity. Their beauty, the Nemesis pronounced, lying within their unpredictability.

I tried to escape, one time forcing the front door to find myself enclosed within a tiny courtyard that flushed with moss and the sound of water trickling beyond. The Nemesis of course returned before I could make good my plans, and she chained me naked to a gurney in an empty bedroom as reward for the misadventure. I was abandoned thereafter for whole days at a stretch with nothing more than a full length mirror for company. I howled until dusk, not for the torment of solitude, but for the tricks that my body was unveiling. Starved of its muliebrous hormones my figure slumped into old habits. l was a startled newborn that longed for the confines of the womb; a grizzled version of the man I once was reappearing. Hair clotting my effete form, muscles aching with the weight of testosterone, silicone breasts sagging over a masculine paunch. I wondered that the Nemesis wasn't blanching me in preparation for some final showdown.

It wasn't until the fourth week that my captor's true intentions were revealed, when, upon waking, I found a tray laid out some four feet to the left of the gurney to which I was fastened. The Nemesis appearing a little later, looking older and a little more exasperated than usual. The uncertainty of her entrance prophesying, perhaps, a cannibalistic intention to devour the polarised energies that I exuded.

"We need to move forward," she stated in a matter of fact tone.

"We?" I asked, and the Nemesis exhaled wearily.

"If you could keep just one memory," she said, "which one would you save?"

"I don't follow," I replied.

"Something from your childhood? A lover perhaps?" The Nemesis turning away before I could answer, busying herself with the tray of instruments at the foot of the bed. She returned into view with a small syringe filled with pink liquid and, despite my protests, the Nemesis pushed the needle into my arm, darkness flooding where she pressed.

"What is this?" I demanded, but she didn't answer, the Nemesis immersed in the tray of tools that lay at the foot of the bed while the pink liquid took hold. Muscles filling with lead, a wave of nausea issuing that forced me to close my eyes.

It was only when I felt a wet slap on my head that I opened my eyes again and saw that the Nemesis was applying a lather of shaving foam to my left temple. Perhaps it was the tightness of the straps, maybe even the heaviness of the drug that had been administered, but it became increasingly difficult to take in her actions. The Nemesis now working, as far as I could tell, with a close precision to the rear of my gurney, applying the foam with a delicacy that was almost reassuring. It was when I felt the deft stroke of a razor scraping my scalp that I realised I was being prepared for some form of surgery. I figured that an unexplained butchery of sorts was intended.

"Here," the Nemesis said, tapping my left temple, "the frontal cortex, where memory is stored." She skipped to the tray to retrieve another tool, a small cranial drill that I knew from my own medical experience was used for precision neurosurgery.

"You still haven't answered my question Dr. Haunt, which memory would you keep?"

I searched, but the weight of the pink syringe stopped up my thoughts.

"You look a little flushed," the Nemesis said tilting her head, and I wondered what she saw when she looked upon my naked form. She smiled uncertainly. "Not to worry, I'm sure that you will pass out before I hit the cortex itself."

The Nemesis paused for effect. "If you are unlucky," she continued, "you might regain consciousness at some further point, but that experience, whatever it is, will be fleeting. I am quite sure."

"Please," I stammered,"whatever I have done, I can make better."

The Nemesis squeezed the trigger of the micro drill and it whirred with a high pitched squeal.

"Done Dr. haunt? You haven't done anything."

"But -"

"But nothing, we are diametrically opposed, that is all, and so I must destroy that which makes you you." Her head tilted to one side still, "I could give you something to send you to sleep while I scramble your brains. Would you like that Doctor Haunt? Would you like to wake up as someone new, as something else?"

I tried to say something, but was paralysed, the Nemesis scowling while I pleaded with my body to respond.

"I guess not," she said closing in, the drill held high so that I could get a clear view of it. I tried to close my eyes, the drill drawing closer and closer until it finally made contact. The white heat of pain, the smell of skull powdering. The deafening screech as the drill bit through skin and bone.

***

I am spinning, spinning on the mirrored surface of an Italian lake. It was, I was sure, Lake Como, and beneath my feet I felt the cool rush of liquid and realised that it wasn't me who was spinning, but the lake itself.

If I reached out, I could just about touch the water as it circled beneath me, and, in so doing, sent v shaped ripples skittering across the screen of water. Each contact releasing a strain of David Bowie's seminal album, Heroes, a power chord from his protean Moss Garden vibrating so intensely that I feared my heart would surely explode. Again and again, I plunged my toe into the water to release layers of Eno, to send Bowie's musical glass twinkling into the black quiet of the universe: the sky vignetting with a bird flock of notes, the horizon spotted black with the meanderings of a 1980's Korg.

It was only then, when the last dog barked, that the self same creature who had so appeared at the edge of my LSD infused vision all those years ago returned. That same shadowy something, beckoning me towards the centre of the lake and the island that it called home.

Who are you? I screamed.

I am freedom, it said.

It was the cold that woke me, and upon waking I instinctively fingered the left side of my temple, crowning the rough edge of a wound with my index finger.

There was the sound of the sea of course, the waves falling and rising in layers of shale and wet.
I shivered. The sky was grey: a curtain pulled over the horizon. The sounds of the world deleted save those of the water.

My blanket pulled close; I should go indoors, I thought. I should seek refuge from the November winds and these Northern skies, but there was something comforting about this particular cliff edge. Something that was written in the fall of the waves below.

If only I could follow them, follow their rise and fall to the source. If only I could count backwards till I reached the first wave that ever issued. Surely then I could make sense of it all.