Again and again, the thought reeled through professor Wilhelm Heinrich Reinhardte's numbed mind in time to the desperate pounding of his footfalls, and the painful, savage hammering of his heart. He should not be doing this; could not understand how it was that he had come to be running for his life, while the mob howled and shouted behind him, and his panic grew with every frantic moment.

It had been so impossibly quick: a wrong turn into a little side street of small shops, after taking a different route home from the university to avoid the exploding panic in the wake of the sudden, impossible darkness, and the more immediate chaos of a crashed, burning car and the two-score or more shouting people gathered around it. Then the sudden cries as they had seen him, and the bottle that had come as though from nowhere, crashing through his windscreen, even as someone had leapt into the road almost at his side.

He had swerved wildly in a desperate attempt to avoid an accident, but a second missile – a brick this time – had smashed the driver's window, grazing his ear as it spun passed his head to crack the back parcel-shelf, before bouncing to the floor, and he had lost what little control he had managed to maintain. He had spun wildly across the street, crashing through the front of a little coffee-shop, to come to rest at last amidst the glass and a ruin of shattered tables and chairs.

For how long he had sat half stunned, while his breath came in gasps, and the world spun wildly around him, he could not say. Yet at last he had clambered dazed to the further door – his own was wedged hopelessly closed – and from the wreck, miraculously unhurt, save for a twisted left ankle, and a small stream of blood from the cut in his ear, and another, but no more serious, from a glass sliver in his left hand.

He had half-turned in time to catch the first shouts and cries he had thought for a moment in his stupor were of people come to help him. Then the first of them had rushed into the darkened interior, their cries turning to ugly shouts and jeering as they caught sight of him.

“There's the bastard!” one had shouted, his voice seeming horribly loud in the suddenly cloying darkness. “Stinking, filthy f***ing Jew!”

Then they had come surging towards him, and he had turned to run.

They were still gaining.

Turning his head for a moment to glance again desperately behind, Wilhelm staggered drunkenly around yet another corner and into yet another narrow street, reeling wildly for a moment as his ankle stabbed another warning that it would not take much more, before he regained his momentum, and fought desperately to increase his already frantic speed. They were not far behind, the shouts and cursing growing more savage with every second, abuse, mixed with snarling and half-incoherent screams of hatred and promises of what they would do when they caught him, driving him to still greater speed as they continued to close the distance.

He could not keep this up, he knew. Already, his heart was labouring with a frightening, arrhythmic lurching, while hot knives of pain lanced savagely through his leg with every footfall, and his breath came in desperate, ragged gasps against the searing burning in his lungs and throat. At any moment, he knew, he would fall, and they would have him.

Yet again, his eyes turned desperately from left to right, seeking any shelter or escape. But the shouts of his pursuers drew ever nearer, and he could see nothing in the near-darkness, save the unbroken line of shops to either side, and the dimmer outline of the little street's further end.

“Come on! Get the bastard!” someone screamed again, seemingly almost on his heels, followed by something that flashed viciously passed his head to explode against a shop-front with a crash of splintering.

Twisting from the glass, Wilhelm staggered, almost falling, before a sudden narrow gap in the shops to his right caught his attention. Staggering, barely able to keep his feet, he lurched desperately across the street, his ankle screaming in protest, and his breath a tearing agony as he surged forwards in a last race. Then his foot caught the curb, and in the same instant his vision exploded in sudden, white-hot agony.

Dazedly, as the ground left his feet and he somersaulted, he understood that something had struck the back of his head. Then he crashed across something that collapsed beneath him, the sudden stink of filth filling his nostrils as he rolled with the overturned dust-bin and its spilt refuse, to come at last to rest face-down in the muck, the shouts turning to jeers and laughter as the mob pulled to a halt and gathered around him.

“Look at him,” one grinned. “Right where the f***ing swine belongs. Like your nice new bed do you?” He continued, stepping to stand almost by Wilhelm's head. “Like us to tuck you in, you stinking, filthy, Zionist bastard?”

Fighting the pain, Wilhelm shifted feebly in an attempt at least to turn on to his back so that he could see his tormenters. But a sudden new agony knifed through his left arm, and he choked back a scream, gritting his teeth against a sudden wave of nausea and giddiness.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “The bastard won't lie down and die.”

“That's not nice,” someone else jeered. “That's not nice at all.”

Then they were on him, feet and fists and laughter as they slammed his face again and again into the filth, while he struggled hopelessly at first to fight and to hold back the screaming, until one lifted him almost from the ground by his broken left arm, and another caught his wounded ankle, and everything dissolved at last into horror and agony and a last, fading hope in the growing darkness that somehow the screaming would end, and he could rest.

Then suddenly, he seemed to be falling, the screams turning to shrieks and cries of terror, as though a myriad voices had joined his own in some last, demonic testament to his suffering. Dimly through the gathering night, he was aware of being lifted once more, the touch seeming suddenly impossibly gentle as the blackness surged swiftly to engulf him.

For one fleeting moment he thought he caught a glimpse of shining blue eyes, and a face framed by long, lustrous fair hair, and wild and beautiful as a warrior maiden in one of the ancient Germanic or nordic sagas of which he taught, and that were so dear to him. He tried to speak: to call to her. But a dreadful tightness seemed to be constricting his chest, robbing him of breath and the last, fading flicker of his awareness, as a roaring filled his ears.

Then he was falling swiftly down, down into the infinite nothingness of a vast oblivion, until at last the final, flickering ember was gone, and there was only blackness to take its place.