The bath room was a shock. Bigger than Akiko’s living room, half of it was taken up by the bath itself, and the whole room was paved with stone. Akiko half wondered whether she had wandered into another world again, but then she heard Shiraishi call from the changing area.

“I’ve left a yukata here; I imagine you’ll want to get out of the bath before your clothes are dry.â€

“Thank you,â€ Akiko called back, and walked over to step into the bath. The water was pleasantly warm, and came up past her knees even while she was standing. She sat down, the water coming up to her neck, and leaned back against the side of the bath. The wall on the far side was a window looking out onto a traditional Japanese garden, albeit one that looked like it could do with some attention, and Akiko let herself relax as she felt the chill leaving her body.

For a moment she just enjoyed the warmth, but the questions soon demanded her attention.

What had happened? The obvious answer was that she had slipped and fallen, hallucinating the whole thing. Akiko was almost ready to believe that, but one detail stopped her feeling confident.

She remembered the shrine changing as soon as she entered the precincts through the torii, but Shiraishi had found her at the foot of the steps leading into the shrine building, quite some distance from the entrance. And also, she couldn’t help remembering, where she been running in the other shrine when she slipped and fell.

Akiko only considered the possibility that she had slipped to another world for a moment, dismissing it as ridiculous. Some sort of hallucination was still the obvious explanation. But if she had fallen and hit her head, she could hardly have moved from the entrance to the centre of the precincts. Two possibilities occurred to her. One was that she had fallen on the steps after running up to them in the normal way, and lost a little bit of memory. The other was that she had hallucinated, but actually walked around the shrine while hallucinating.

She quickly decided that the first option was more likely. She had been planning to run straight to the shrine building to get under cover, and she could easily have slipped on the wet steps. She had heard that brief memory loss was not rare as a response to a blow to the head. It occurred to her that she should go to a hospital to make sure that there was no serious damage, but she felt fine, without even a headache.

She even thought that dreaming about the shrine made sense. After all, that would have been the last thing she saw. But where did the snake come from?

The memory came back, intense and vivid, and for a moment she almost thought she could see the snake reflected in the window. Its shining eyes were fixed on her, and the brilliant colours of its scales flashed in the darkness.

Akiko shook her head to clear it, and stood to get out of the bath. Just a dream.