He worked for the Mental Health Assessment Unit and a lot of people didn’t like his methods. Some said he was in the pay of corrupt government factions and that he was a secret devotee of the dark old gods, who ruled the earth before the dinosaurs, way back in the Age of Amphibians when the dominant life form on this planet was the giant newt. He was a rogue operator – some would say a renegade – and yet not entirely without a certain sort of charm, as you might say. Charm he had certainly had, albeit charm of a very particular nature, a very particular and very peculiar nature, in fact. Some say he had all the charm of a black mamba with his elegant, lithe deportment and that slender, elongated coffin-shaped head of his. He was in any event very much a rogue operator and he made up the rules as he went along. He had his own way of doing things, you might say, and if these ways didn’t always work then that was just the way it went. A strange man, an unusual man, and not necessarily a man you’d want to have too many dealings with. A strange man, some would say, and not altogether a very pleasant man, although not without a certain sort of charm – it was something about his eyes, the way they kept watching you, and that weirdly narrow skull of his. A fastidious man, but also a cruel man, his eyes following you wherever you went, hypnotic in their intensity. A cruel man but also a deeply unusual one, definitely a very unusual one. Some said that he worked for the government, others that he served the ancient evil gods whose names had long since been forgotten. They said he was a throwback to the ancient evil times. There was something about his eyes, something very odd. Perhaps it was the way they followed you about wherever you went. A cruel man but not an unjust one, he was known to work for the Mental Health Assessment Unit. He was a roving inspector for the Department of Mental Health and his methods were unorthodox, to say the least. We are on safe ground when we say that and safe ground is hard to find these days. Time itself has become doddery, infirm and unsure of itself, taking a step first in this direction and then in that, and then returning to where it started from, as if unable to remember where it was going or why. Time goes back on itself, full of doubts, full of uncertainties, unsure of where the next step should be. Things were simpler and more to the point back in the Age of the Amphibians, many would say. Life was life and death was death back then – it was either the one way or the other. There was no such thing as the sort of things that we see happening these days. There was no such thing as the dead coming back to life and then persecuting the living. People yearn for the old days, some even mutter about the dark old gods and how much better things were way back then. People always yearn for the old days of course – there is nothing new about that. We always yearn for a return to the ancient evil ways. Foolish of us really – there is evil aplenty here to be had, after all…