Ingrid was late. She called round to pay her respects every Saturday morning. My elder sister was fastidious. Punctilious. Had something happened?

I ran upstairs and peered round the bedroom curtains. I saw her immediately. Stepping along the esplanade. But she looked...different. She had always been so much more self-possessed than I. She took life's challenges in her stride. Now, she looked uneasy, stressed. Flustered.

But everything looked...different.

I had lived all of my nineteen years in Bergen. I knew it like the back of my hand. The harbour scene greeting my gaze was reassuringly familiar. Or, should have been. Today there was a glare which made me shield my eyes. A vivid, piercing quality to the kaleidoscopic light suffusing the dock area.

The sky was swirling, eddying blue. Celestial bath water draining into an invisible sump.

But at the centre of the maelstrom, an eye. Watching. Planning? Plotting?

I shivered, disconcerted.

Those fishing boats, moored just offshore. Reduced to skeletal images, burnt wooden arms supplicating, reaching heavenwards. Victims of a lightning strike? I had heard nothing.

Ingrid's mouth issued a silent shriek. A scream? A howl of terror and dismay. Her ivory hands hermetically sealed her conch-like ears.

I trembled. My head was spinning. My senses amplified, distorted, sucked me into a perceptual vortex.

The wooden boardwalk was alive. Reds, yellows, orange. Sparking, firing, flashing. Electrified?

Is that why Ingrid seemed transfixed? Was she being tortured by the light demons?

But then I saw them. The shadow men. The stalkers.

Two bulky figures, side by side, prowling menacingly behind my sister.

They were dressed like cowboys. Stetson hats. Or malign male models with shoulder pads.

They were threatening her, remotely. She must feel doomed by their remorseless progress.

And what was that green excrescence, expanding its shimmering tendrils behind the guard rail?

It glowed and flowed and reached beyond its boundary clutching at my sister's earnest innocence.

Bergen had been transformed into a vision of Hell worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. Why? How?

Then I remembered. Uncle Hans had brought me a gift, yesterday. He loved foraging in the forests.

He had opened his satchel, cascading an abundance of wood mushrooms onto the kitchen table.

He had said, with a mischievous wink:

"These are very special, Edvard. I stole them from a bad-tempered troll. Only eat them if you wish to taste life beyond the boundaries of reality."

I had fried them for breakfast in copious butter, with cloudberries, served on toasted pumpernickel.

Their musty, musky, earthy taste had jolted my senses as I swallowed them down.

So, this must be life beyond the boundaries of reality. SCREAM!