 
UNDERLAY

by Andrew McEwan

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Copyright 2011 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

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Paperback edition published 2007 by Pen Press, 25 Eastern Place, Brighton, BN2 1GJ

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Cover design by Alexa Garside

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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# Part One: EVERYBODY'S FAVOURITE PICTURE

Chapter One: On The Roof Of A Tall Building, A Tonic For Cats

Meet Thorp, who has a franchise from Death. Meet his car, a Ventura large and black and dented. He fleeces the city for souls, folding them carefully in the boot, stacking them on the back seat like ironing, clothes no longer worn, put through the spin-cycle of non-living and stretched flat. Thorp is dead too; or so he likes to think. But that truth, like most truths, like everything in the city, is more complicated. The Ventura runs on ice-cream. Thorp smokes copious cigarettes. The dead are manifold. Everything is black and white, paintwork and frozen whip, the flake behind the wheel in his trenchcoat and dark glasses seeing the world in monochrome. The buildings, the cars, the people. Death, where Thorp is concerned, is a colourless experience. His milieu. He steers the Ventura at street level and above. Although you couldn't call it flying, he soars over the city traffic about his work. This is his domain, his territory. And Thorp likes his job. He likes it enormously...

Right now he's driving at a height commensurate with the first floor windows of homogenous buildings, their homogenous occupants stapling and faxing their homogenous selves and mailing them to the city populace, either directly, by post, or indirectly, via the magic of life.

Thorp peers in at them. It is not to the first floor he travels, however, but the roof.

He flips open his appointment book.

Jenny Pith at eleven o'clock. He hopes she won't make too much mess. Thorp always feels a little guilty about the mess, about the fact he can't take the bodies with him, whole or in bits. Someone else has to take care of that, of the brains and shit. Souls are neat, his to collect. Often he's contemplated branching out. After all, he has inside information on the juiciest flops, the messiest RTAs and the clumsiest gunshots.

But the dead are the dead. Corpses are incidental.

The Ventura's engine, although running, is silent. Thorp shifts gear and accelerates. He can't be late. He's never been late. Today though, he's preoccupied. There's something gnawing at his shins, a vague insistence seemingly lodged in his bones, flexing like cold liquorice, writhing like a pocketful of loose change. His very marrow is itching, a source of discomfort that stirs memories of less simple times.

Once, as a boy, Thorp had climbed an apple tree. The plumpest apples were always at the top, red and green and lovely as they winked at him in the sun. They cast dazzling spots in his eyes, the dew on their skins tantalizing. He had no head for heights, but climbed the wrinkled tree, breath caught as the greasy bark painted his hands. He reached with his arms and pushed with his feet, ascending through ranks of leaves and lesser fruits, his gaze locked onto one apple right at the top, bending the branch from which it sprang. His mouth and throat were dry. His teeth itched with anticipation. The apple loomed large, its shape perfect, its texture smooth and taut, its rosy hue the sole focus of his mind as his body moved upward against a gravity that would not be denied. The branches were thin this high, thin and bendy. The motion of the tree in the air was exaggerated by his weight. Thorp stretched, fingertips brushing the lush flesh of his prize. His own flesh leaned and strained toward the apple that was his heart's desire. And he fell from the tree, a seemingly endless headlong tumble that left him broken and unmoving on the ground.

It wasn't the pain he found disturbing, wracked as his small body was with an unquenchable agony exacerbated by his conscious state. It was the disappointment.

Staring now at the moon, full even in the blue of day, he was reminded of that apple.

One day he would have it, he thought. One day he would hold it in his hand.

The moon was silver; and, as Thorp saw it, the sky a liquid grey. He drove the Ventura in the moon's direction, turning aside when the building's vertical face ran out. The car could never make it all the way, was bound to the city much as Thorp was bound to the car, the two engaged in a business of collection and redistribution that despite its ethereal pretensions remained firmly wedded to earth. He parked on felt and gravel and got out, adjusting his sunglasses and the collar of his trenchcoat, as, with a few minutes to spare, he decided on a stroll.

It hadn't entered his head that he might see her, that his eye might be taken by her dance along the edge. She was an appointment he had to keep, her rendezvous with Death's proxy a routine stop. But she had that apple glow in her cheeks. He could almost see the colour, the green-red of memory tinting her flesh, shining through the preternatural greys compositing his vision.

Thorp was smitten. 'Don't,' he said.

Jenny Pith looked at him, seeing him as none should, as more than a shade. Her gaze was curious, perhaps alarmed. Thorp was sorry he'd interrupted.

Quickly, he returned to the car. Angry with himself, he leaned, arms crossed, against the Ventura's wing. It was close to eleven. In a moment he'd walk back to the edge and she'd be gone, her soul a parchment stain guarding the roof from the drop. He'd lift it like a bridal veil and fold it under his arm, her soul her body had left, abandoned like a lover on a cliff.

It filled him with regret.

It was, he realized, sadness he was experiencing. Melancholy he was familiar with. Despair and resignation were old friends. But sadness? Sadness he met with a surprised shake of the head.

The hour chimed by some distant clock, Thorp retraced his steps. The girl was gone. There was a sepia tinge to the air. He looked down at the coarse rooftop expecting to find a soul, but there was nothing. Thorp checked his watch. Eleven. Checked his appointment book. Jenny Pith, eleven o'clock, this address. There was no mistake; only there was no soul to collect. He eased a thumb and forefinger under his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. Blinking, the sepia tones were washed from the gunmetal sky, yet still there was no soul for him to stoop and pick. Puzzled, he stared out over the concrete lip, peered to the street beneath, and spying no bloody splash felt a crick in his neck like an electric shock.

Not dead?

'Don't,' he'd said. And she hadn't - hadn't jumped? He was sure jumping was her intent. Had soul and body been spirited away? Did he have a competitor? Was he getting slack?

Questions bugged him. He'd never been one for questions. He did not normally crave answers or demand explanations in the absence of facts. In his profession pragmatism counted for a lot.

Not dead?

'Don't,' he'd said. And she hadn't.

Thorp was responsible for that.

He wondered at the consequences. Were there precedents? Was he in breach of contract?

He elected to laugh. It was a ridiculous sound and made him cough. His eyes watered and he saw sepia again.

'Are you okay?' she asked.

Thorp held his breath. He was embarrassed, uncomfortable, and his discomfort made him mute.

'Isn't the view great?'

The view was always great from high up.

'I wanted to fly, you know? I was tired. Scared, too. Scared won out.'

Yes, thought Thorp, scared.

'My name's Jenny Pith.'

He knew. Eleven o'clock.

'My friends call me Orangepeel. Or did.'

Did?

'They're dead now; killed in a plane crash. Maybe you read about it. In the harbour?'

He'd been there, he recalled, the Ventura parked on the swell as the aircraft sank.

'It was like my life had ended with theirs. Only now I'm not sure. Seeing you up here has made me think.'

'About what?' he asked nervously.

She shrugged. She wore a purple dress, a simple affair draped over bare arms and shoulders. She wore no socks and baseball boots.

'What changed your mind?' He needed to know, to establish his guilt or else uncover a glitch. 'Why didn't you jump?'

She gave him a quizzical look.

'I have it in my book here,' Thorp explained. 'Jenny Pith, eleven o'clock. You really ought to have pavement in your teeth.'

She was frightened now, retreating bodily.

Thorp bit his lip. How could he let her leave? How would he explain a soul missing from his list?

'I've got to go,' said Orangepeel. 'Nice meeting you.'

'Wait!' shouted Thorp. But she made a dash for the stairhead, disappearing down the concrete shaft into the voluminous building.

## Mingis

Nancy laced her boots and got up off the sofa. The street lights dimmed as dawn zoomed in, spilling over rooftops even as she gazed out the curtainless window. She had a hangover and the sofa's rough, worn covers had marked her skin. The cushions smelled of lager, the room of dope, a combination requiring the attentive buzz of caffeine to smooth their pungent edges. His name was David, she recalled. This was his flat. He was asleep in the bedroom, in the bed she'd refused to enter. Nancy loathed to share a bed. Men and beds didn't go together. A lot of things in Nancy's life didn't go together, come to think of it, but few of those she had any control over.

Boiling the kettle, she combed her hair, short and lemon-hued. She made coffee and leaned on a bench to drink, trying as best she could to put a face to the name. No luck. A memory lapse; not unusual. There had been no coitus, she knew that. She remembered him in her hand, limp. It wasn't important. She just couldn't help herself, like there were all these men and she could take her pick. It was too easy. They were sickly antelope to her lioness. They were, almost without exception, a disappointment. It, he, whatever his or its name, was never the one, the one to avenge her misery. If that was the right word.

Seven-thirty.

The face appeared, groggy. It looked like shit. Best say nothing; keep him guessing. He wouldn't be seeing her again. Nancy was leaving in two minutes.

Fumbling with a white sliced loaf, he offered her toast.

Nancy drained her mug, patted his arse and left.

Her car smiled, languid and yellow.

It was morning. Yes, the clocks told her that. She opened the driver's door and got in, turned the key in the ignition and fired the rumbling engine.

But what day was this?

Sunday.

Driving, Nancy sang a silent tune, her lips moving to words she neither heard or knew. The tune was in her head, in the car, in the thin traffic as she pulled out onto the main road. It was in the traffic-lights and the somnolent pedestrians with their dogs and newspapers. The fresh sun was in the tune, tickling these early risers. She braked for a child, jerking the car to a halt, its yellowness a blur to the youngster whose running feet were carelessly adrift on tarmac. Boy or girl, she couldn't say. Little more than a toddler. And in such a hurry. A complicated early life. Nancy breathed deeply and continued, but the tune was lost to her. Her lips shaped no soundless words. The sun hovered accusingly. Reality became stark. She made it home and parked.

A man caught her eye. He sat on the railing, large feet dangling above turgid water, broad back to the quay. Stall-holders and their ex-utility vans (gas, electric) scampered behind him. There was colour and noise, sounds of preparation for the coming market, dirty canopies and painted signs. None of the people hastily arranging goods and tables took any notice of this lone figure. They didn't see him; not like Nancy. Sat in her car, she peered. And he turned his head, his features, although distant, openly hostile, the eyes intense as they returned her gaze. She doubted he could even see her through the windscreen; yet he knew she was there and that she watched.

The car door opened, startling her.

'Well, it's about time.'

'Where did you come from?' Nancy asked, bewilderment like tiredness in her veins.

Jane rolled her eyes and stepped back, still holding the door. 'Your place. We were out together last night. Remember? You sloped off.'

'Right...'

'Exactly. I hope he was worth it. Give your father a call.'

'Hey!'

'Hey nothing. Sort your life out.'

Nancy shook her head. She got out of the car and locked the door. Her sister was headed for the bus stop.

She cast her eyes back to the man on the railing, but he was looking away. Nancy trudged the few yards to her building and took the stairs, trying not to think about anything but a hot shower. But she could see him from the window. Pictures were a must.

Her camera was traced to under the bed. There were only three exposures left on the roll and she had no more film. She could buy some. Hadn't she meant to yesterday? Not enough time; never enough...

The man was still there when she returned to focus, his gaze fixed to the river as round him a number of strangely robotic characters arranged geographic dishcloths and cheap electrical goods. The distance was too great. She would have to get closer. The closer the better, the surer, what with just three frames to capture the breadth of powerful shoulders, the features like a stained and rumpled pillow. She headed for the stairs, hitting the quay in time to catch the first pale sheets of a drizzle.

Seeing he'd gone from the rail, Nancy walked over to where he'd sat and peered down at the murky water. There was no sign of him having jumped. She thought it unlikely anyway. The hostility she'd seen in his eyes had not been directed inward. His anger, such as it was, had a separate point of impact, was directed somewhere else.

Shoulders hunched under the increasing downpour, she remembered a jacket stuffed behind one seat and ran toward the rusting yellow TR7, its faded paintwork streaked with grime. The rain appeared to fall heaviest in its vicinity, bouncing off roof and windows as if intent on punishing the car. She ran round to the driver's side, the camera cradled in one arm as she searched her pockets for keys, only to recall tossing them on the bed. The keys to her apartment, also.

Closing her eyes, Nancy allowed the rain to drum on her head. It came down in rods, slashing at her shoulders and breasts. She stood by her car in a loose cotton blouse and jeans.

The door opened from the inside, its mechanism working with a familiar sound, not unlike that of an opened beer can.

The rain prevented her from seeing inside. She took the handle by two fingers and pulled the door wide, before sliding wetly in.

It was the man, large and sturdy in the passenger seat.

'The rain follows me,' he stated.

Nancy pasted her hair back and licked water from her lips.

'Frightened?'

'No.'

'Good.'

The man laced his fingers in his lap. His hands were huge and knurled, almost blue, as if once tattooed.

'What is it you want?'

'I'd like your help in finding my brother.' His voice was soft, unlike his lineaments, which were creased and pain-filled. 'His name is Mingis.'

'And yours

'That's not important.'

'But I have to call you something; if I'm to help you.'

'There's a story in this. That's all you need to know.'

Nancy frowned. The windows had steamed up. She could no longer see or hear the rain without. It spooked her, that quietude, like death itself.

'Who put you on to me?' she asked, fiddling with the camera flash.

'A mutual friend.'

'That could be anybody.'

He didn't elaborate.

'You're not exactly forthcoming, are you? You're going to have to give me something more to go on.'

He turned his head. The vague light picked out his nose and chin, but not his eyes.

'Tell me about your brother.'

'Mingis is a criminal. He kills people for fun.'

'Then you should go to the police,' she told him, freezing now where she sat.

He smiled ruefully. 'I don't want him caught,' he said.

Nancy listened to the alarm bells in her skull. Loudly they rang. 'Wait a minute; there're laws. I can't help you break them.'

'But you are a journalist.'

She wasn't sure what he meant. 'Yes...'

'Then help me find him.'

She didn't think she had a choice.

## The Bacon Savers

Owen and Mickey were bored. They opened cans of beer and talked of how life was cruel to them. They wanted things to happen in their lives. They put their feet up and supped. If only they had something to do, they moaned, things wouldn't be so bad. Life on the dole had its moments, sure, but they were nearly all alike. There was nothing for it but to drink beer and watch videos. Pictures flickered effortlessly across the screen, a wash of colours and happenings that side of the thick glass Owen and Mickey would dearly love to be this.

The movie over, beer drunk, cans squashed and filled with cigarette ash, sighs came over the pair. And something else. Some unnatural quality of light. To Owen it was as if he'd been seeing the world in wobbly 3D, objects ghosted, the reception poor on his reality set, only for someone to have whacked their fist on top of the box, miraculously tuning him in. His 3D lenses, shaken into place, suddenly began to make sense. Was that the word? Sense of what, he couldn't be sure, but it was giving him palpitations.

'Why don't we make a film,' he suggested, somewhere between worlds, reality and fantasy.

'Are you kidding? What with?'

Mickey would take some convincing, he saw. 'I don't know.'

'Then why mention it?'

'I thought it was a good idea.'

'It is a good idea,' Mickey said, scratching himself. He looked around at the day's collection of unemployment detritus, his best mate included, eyes darting from side to side, up and down, as if attempting to track an elusive insect. Something was occurring to him. Perhaps he ought to have worked harder at school. Owen was the brains of their outfit; yet lazy with it. But what of this?

'Impossible.'

'Not necessarily.'

'Okay. How?'

'We make it up.'

Owen had to think about that.

They sat in silence a while, smoking. The light began to play tricks. It shuffled cards and asked them to take one each. It fanned the deck and cut...

Owen crushed his cigarette out. 'Okay, let's do it.'

'What, now?' The idea of actually going through with an idea that was basically nonsense left Mickey perplexed. He pulled on one ear as if adjusting an antenna; then both, wriggling his nose at some new odiferous spectrum.

'Why not?'

'Okay.'

'Okay.' The idea of actually going through with an idea that was basically nonsense left Owen in a state of near euphoria, one he could not explain. Instinctively, he reached for the 3D glasses sitting on his face. Only they weren't there. Not on the outside at least.

They opened the curtains and left.

It was a short walk to the Railstation, from there an underground run into the meat of the city. Tower blocks shone left and right as they exited the terminal, the bodies of men and women passing about them with purpose. Owen and Mickey moved among the crowd, hands in pockets, boots leaving no indelible mark on this compacted earth. They had three hours of daylight left and nothing to do other than reconnoitre, their target a child, boy or girl they didn't know. How many captors? Another question to be resolved. It was all in the job. They stalked a shoplifter through a clothing store, a middle-aged woman who slipped items of lingerie under her coat, her shoes flat and her glasses wire-rimmed. Owen manoeuvred his way beside her, that casual danger in his stride, and leaning across the woman to a rack of brassieres he let his jacket fall open just enough to show her the heel of his gun, metal and hard under his shoulder. The woman looked at him with much younger eyes than her appearance suggested, her age part of the dissimulation. He smiled and lifted a bra from its hanger, tucking it into his pocket.

Mickey floated over. 'Time to go.'

Rush hour.

'Got the address?'

'Sure,' Owen replied, chewing gum.

'Okay, we're on.'

Owen removed the gum and stuck it on the side of a passing bus. He flexed his feet in his socks and stepped off the pavement along with Mickey. They dodged traffic, crossed four lanes to the pavement opposite and followed it down a wide boulevard. Umbrellas began to appear, toted by anonymous commuters, eyes watching shoes. Owen and Mickey swayed between like ghosts, always seeming to know which channel to take through the advancing crowd, cutting cleanly the city's flesh as it poured from foyers and spun out of revolving doors. They were slick and exact, precision machines, lubricious, untouched by humankind as they side-stepped and negotiated the half mile or so to a building housing shops on its ground floor, while up above, stretching a full eighty storeys, were homes. Rich apartments with a concierge, Owen noted, aloof and secure.

Public access to the lower mall was unrestricted. The mall itself slipped below ground via escalators, swimming beneath the city for miles. The residents above had their own private entrance. They wouldn't use that. There were cameras in the mall, but these wouldn't be focused on the likes of them. Here they could walk with the breeze. They would have to climb a floor before drawing the attention of more discriminating eyes.

Not that any of it worried Mickey. He seethed impatiently, hungry for action.

A fire exit, a blank corridor. Concrete stairs wound up the height of the building. They lit cigarettes and laughed and joked about girls.

Excellent cover.

On the fourteenth floor the pair curtailed their upward rise and made a sideways move into a corridor carpeted in mauve. And here was the concierge, behatted and scratching his side as Owen and Mickey approached, arms loose and hanging, four eyes slamming between two, walking shoulder to shoulder in a little dance of death that was unmistakable to the concierge whose single-breasted wool-mix flared open and blazed. But his bullets only pocked the wall. His chest smoked as he fell, and Owen and Mickey kicked in a door.

It mattered not what the cameras rolled over; not now. The door splintered and there was more gunfire. Owen felt his shoulder clipped. Mickey caught one in the thigh. A woman's head exploded, her teeth spinning madly before dropping into a vase by the ornamental fire, its false flames undisturbed by the storm of broken air and furniture.

Mickey's leg collapsed and he rolled onto his back, seeing upside-down as two men burst out of an adjoining bedroom, one holding a small body to his chest. The men fired wildly, their momentum carrying them toward the interlopers and the shattered door that wobbled on one hinge in the plush entrance lobby. The child was clearly drugged and hung limply. Mickey didn't hesitate. He shot both men, the one with the child first. Owen appeared, having vaulted a coffee-table. He rushed into the bedroom, the bathroom beyond. The men hit the floor, dead, one with his face smeared down a mahogany sideboard, part of his upper lip suspended from a brass handle, the other with the child beneath him, disoriented but unhurt. A girl aged about four, grazed on one cheek, her captor's blood leaking in her ear.

'Can you walk?' queried Owen, returned from his exploration of the apartment.

'I'll be okay. Take the kid. She's in one piece.'

'No, we leave the kid here. The cops will pick her up. We're running out of time...'

The light was failing. It flickered. Poor reception again.

No sooner had they left than a figure manifested on the balcony. He wore a suit and tie, a yellowed bone clip securing it to his shirt. It was a good start, he thought. The monkeys had performed well. He stepped into the room practising a few tennis swings, winked knowingly at the kid and poured himself a generous measure of gin.

The bodies slowly dissolved. They had never been.

The girl sniffed. A good little actor. Real enough. Just.

## Woodbines And Pilsener

Thorp, at his rendezvous, was uncharacteristically nervous. He shuffled his feet and drummed his fingers on the suitcase. The bar was near empty, the Thursday morning crowd of early lunchers yet to be swollen by the arrival of noon. Absurdly, he felt conspicuous; but to the few patrons he was nothing other than an empty table. The ashtray filled with dog-ends, beer bottles disappeared from the chill cabinet, but Thorp remained invisible, a negative among positives swigging and smoking in an effort to calm his nerves.

Noon, and in swept sundry office workers, their escapes timed to coincide with hot pastries and cold lager. Jackets were thrown over chairs and legs crossed with rasps of silk and cotton.

Noon, and an agent of Hell sat at Thorp's table, namely Byamol, large and truculent and staring at Thorp as if he was unfinished business.

'Let's see what you've got.'

Thorp fumbled with latches.

'What's the matter, a priest stalking you?'

'No. Nothing's the matter.'

Byamol pressed the suitcase lid shut the better to glare at Thorp, whom he sensed was lying.

'Nothing's the matter!'

'Don't tell me that. It's a priest, isn't it? Is he here? Point him out and I'll take care of him.'

'There's no priest,' insisted Thorp.

Byamol removed his hand and opened the suitcase, turning it so the contents, all neatly folded, faced him. He rubbed souls between his horny fingers as if sampling cloth swatches. 'Nice,' he said, rummaging, gauging the material. 'Nice, but there's only twenty-two.'

'That can't be...'

'You're holding out on me, Thorp. What is it? Have you got other buyers? Was there something special in this latest batch?'

'Nothing out of the ordinary.'

'Don't lie to me. You know that can be dangerous.'

'But they're all there.'

'One's missing,' Byamol menaced. 'Explanation?'

'I packed them myself!'

'Then you missed one. You let one get away.'

Thorp raised his bottle of Pilsener. He struggled to speak.

The agent grinned malevolently. 'I'm right about the priest, aren't I?'

The bottle, empty, hit the table. 'Yes.'

'I knew it. The bastards are everywhere.'

'They've been following me for weeks. You're right; there's one missing. They took it. He took it, the priest.'

'Yeah,' said Byamol, nodding. 'A fucking resurrection.'

'Right,' Thorp agreed, lighting up. He offered the demon a Woodbine, but the demon declined.

'Okay, here's what you do; you go after number twenty-three. I'll provide back-up.'

'What do you mean?' Panic crept over his shoes and tugged at his trouser legs.

'I want that soul,' Byamol whispered. 'But these priests are tough, so I'll arrange someone to ride with you, for protection.'

Protection? Thorp wanted to be sick. He thought of Jenny Pith and gulped. They wouldn't let her go so easily. She was dead in their books and they wanted to take her. They took everybody. And the priests? Maybe he could find one willing to intervene. Yet he'd always assumed the priests were weak. No leadership.

Byamol closed the suitcase and slid it off the table as he stood. 'I'll be seeing you.'

'What about my money?'

Hell's minion laughed. His shoulders jounced.

Thorp's knees shook. He'd lost his composure. Unusually, he felt almost human. Was that a hint of colour in the demon's cheeks? No, the world was charcoal and chrome, tyre rubber and bones.

'C.O.D,' spelled the agent. 'Cash on death, remember? And you've short-shipped us, Thorp, so no moolah.'

He physically drooped, head falling in shame real and pretended.

Byamol spat a farewell. 'Stay in touch!'

Thorp grimaced. Now what did he do?

He swiped another beer. Smoking, he wondered where Jenny's soul lay, in or out of her body...

There was a Hell. He'd been there. But Heaven? Heaven was a branch of Hell that took incoming calls only - only the phone was always either engaged or off the hook.

Thorp took out his diary. Langdon, James, of head wounds inflicted with or by a piano. Accidents and suicides, modes of termination in which he specialized. Not for Thorp your natural causes. He finished his beer and walked out to where he'd parked the Ventura. On the back seat was a midget. Thorp got in and tried to ignore his passenger, but the fiend had breasts like a centrefold and a foot and a half long erection.

## Paper Girl

Nancy lay on her bed, reading. What she read was incidental. It was the words that mattered. Not so much their meaning, their syntax, but their shape, their sound in her head. They were like a second skin to her. As close as that. As close as a lover. Which was perhaps why she had so many, books and lovers.

Only she couldn't concentrate, thinking of Mingis. Mingis was DANGER, in capital letters, and she couldn't resist. Something in her personality (she refused to call it a flaw) drew her to danger, toward the ugly, the undesirable. Nothing shocked Nancy. Perhaps she hoped something, some day, would.

She had had to chase her sister, thankfully soaked at the bus stop, for a key to get in her apartment. Jane was amused. She held out a while, enough time to ensure Nancy got equally wet before they trudged back.

'I'll drive you home,' she promised.

'I know you will, Nance. And you'll stay a while, too.'

'Oh, come on.'

'You will, or your key goes in the river.'

'Bitch. No wonder the old man and you get on so well.'

Jane grinned benevolently. 'That's enough of that. Daddy loves you just as much.'

They made it inside and Nancy arranged towels for them both, Jane taking longest with her curtain of auburn hair, long and glowing, that Nancy hated.

'How come God made you so pretty?'

'He thought it wise to make up for earlier mistakes.'

Nancy took the towel back, wondering if she actually missed her younger sibling, or merely the act of baiting her. They were so very different. And yet...

'Come on.'

'You'll stay?'

'I have to be back by two.'

Jane nodded and shook her hair out.

Driving, the buildings flickering by, tall and short like parents and children, Nancy wondered about the man on the railing. That man had sat in her car much as Jane did now, his brow hanging, shaped by memories she could only guess at, his mission to return his brother. Where? She didn't understand and enjoyed the sensation, the anticipation of turning that next page. He hadn't told her his name, but Nancy thought of him as Mingis too, like his brother. Maybe they were one and the same, those features moulded through killing. Or perhaps the dour mien of the Mingis she'd met reflected his brother's pain, his brother's deeds and the suffering of his victims, their faces twisted and their bodies unnaturally arranged.

Nancy shuddered, gleefully.

'You should have got properly dry,' Jane told her. 'You've missed the turn.'

'I know,' she lied. 'I like to come this way.'

Jane didn't comment. They made it to their father's house, the semi with the garage extension where Jane still lived and which Nancy visited infrequently.

Nancy and her father were the same in a lot of ways; too much alike. He was crazy, she knew, and was scared by that. Yet like her father Nancy used that madness, let it drive her. Right or wrong, she and he were driven by ghosts.

She found him in the extension brewing tea on a small gas stove, two cups ready, oily fingerprints on both as well as a carton of milk.

'Where's your sister?' Pa Kowolski asked.

'Inside.' Nancy folded her arms.

'I made us tea,' he said.

'You knew I was coming?'

'No - it would have gone cold.'

He poured and she took a cup, holding it close to her chest. The warmth and smell sent tingles through her arms and head.

'I met someone today,' Nancy told him. 'Down by the river. I thought he was going to jump.'

'And you wanted pictures.'

'Right...' But she'd failed to get any.

Pa slurped from his mug and wiped his beard on the back on his hand, his hand on his filthy overalls. He was, he told the world and the world believed, constructing in this outbuilding all hours of the day and night, a steam locomotive. The project, as he termed it, had been going fifteen years now and as near as Nancy could tell was near completion. It had wheels, twelve of them. It had had wheels from the beginning. It had a boiler and lots of copper pipe. Pa seemed to spend much of his time polishing.

He put his mug down gently. 'Tell me about him. I surmise that's why you came. Is he what you're looking for? I could use some grandsons to help about the place.'

Nancy thumped her mug down next to his, chipping it. 'He's a monster, Pa, if that's what you mean. A cold-blooded killer, and I'm helping him. At least I've agreed to. And yes, he's just what I'm looking for, a man to destroy me before I destroy myself.'

'I hope you'll be very happy together.'

'I'm sure we will.'

Pa chose a spanner and wiped it with a rag. 'Is there a story?'

'Not yet.'

He nodded sagely and returned the spanner to the blackened tool tray.

'I'll be okay,' she said.

'That's what your mother told me.'

Nancy was hurt by that. Her father avoided her eyes.

'Don't forget to say goodbye to your sister.'

She bit her lip. They avoided arguing only by spending so little time together. Always her mother was the catalyst, his insistence on keeping her in the dark.

'But I'm a grown up!' she'd scream. 'I can handle it!'

Pa though was scared the truth would come as an anticlimax. Should have told her years ago, he supposed. Now, she was armour plated. Better, as the consequences of people's actions often caused more damage than the actions themselves.

'More bones broken after a storm than during,' as his old boss used to say.

Now it was Friday. Unusually for a Friday she didn't have a date. Her phone rang, but she didn't answer, the messages piling up from potential comforters. But it wasn't comfort she needed. Nancy had a number of her own to call. She picked up the phone and dialled carefully. The number ran to thirteen digits and she wondered if she was phoning overseas.

'Hello,' a voice answered, heavy and cold.

'It's Kowolski,' she said, speaking quietly, letting the line do the work.

There was a pause.

How long was that line? she thought.

'You have something, Kowolski?'

'Questions,' she replied. 'I've been doing some digging.'

The pause again. Then, 'Ask away.'

'Not like this. I'll meet you...' suggesting a bar. 'Ten o'clock.' And she hung up, not giving him time to reply, imposing the pause before he could.

She'd had him followed, but unsuccessfully. It came as no surprise. Mingis, the Mingis that had sat in her car, was not of this world. He disappeared down blind alleys, leaving a stench of death strong enough to dissuade even the hardiest of pursuants; and Nancy's pursuants were as hard as they came. No physical violence was offered them, yet she'd used up a lot of favours in the fruitless shadowing of a man who himself was a shadow.

A stroll through the archives proved more profitable.

Nancy hated computers, but she had to admit they had their uses as labour saving devices. Like washing-machines. To her, equally glamorous. In she bunged dates and an obscure conglomerate of unsolved murders, flagging for reference the strangest and most disturbing, and the computer went to work, mindlessly correlating information as it dissolved stains and banished odours, graphing and listing facts via its miniature detergent brain. For convenience she stuck to the twentieth century; although she could have gone back to the eighteenth. There was plenty here to disseminate, however, even within the sickly bounds of Palmersville, whose borders had become confused over the years and whose precincts, both ancient and modern, had a habit of overlapping.

The resulting coil of thin unpleasant paper made difficult reading. She plotted on a map of the city those murders with the most in common, finding them randomly, if evenly dispersed.

Using a coin Nancy drew touching circles round each locus, circles like smooth gears quietly turning in the earth.

Mingis wanted her help. Perhaps he was merely approaching his next victim.

Whose circle would touch hers?

She'd chosen their meeting place that she might watch him from the first floor of the Burger King across the road. He would stand alone at the bar, she fancied, nursing a pint, those large shoulders making plenty of room either side.

No chance of him merging with any crowd; but she was mischievous, and fond of BK Doubles.

He arrived at ten by taxi, dressed in a thick ankle-length coat. He stood with his foot on the rail, dwarfing the barmaid who pulled him something dark with a head and was very deliberate with his change. The whole time Mingis never looked behind him or from side to side, never looked around to see if Nancy was waiting.

She sat methodically chewing her burger, leaning forward so as not to dribble down her front; not taking her eyes off the big man, finding her mouth with her fries and the straw in her shake.

Five minutes passed. Someone sat down opposite.

'You have something, Kowolski?'

Nancy did well to hide her surprise. She licked her lips and set what remained of the burger down in front of her in its carton, dripping sauce. 'First tell me your name.'

He frowned, much sorrow in his eyes. 'I share that with my brother,' said Mingis. 'He will kill again soon. He kills every two hundred days.'

Nancy glanced back across the suddenly congested street, but that brother had disappeared.

'Ask your questions,' this demanded.

She laid her palms face up on the table, feeling ridiculously conspicuous in the gilt and plastic glare. Dictaphone in her lap. 'Where are you from, you and your brother?'

'The city.'

'And your parents? Don't tell me you have none.'

'I don't remember them.'

'They're dead?'

'I don't recall.'

'But you were born in the city?'

'As are we all.'

'Not me; I was born in the country.'

'The country is the city.'

'Okay. Where did you go to school?'

'I went to school in many places.'

'With your brother?'

'Always.'

'Until when? When did you separate?'

'When he grew hungry for blood.'

'And blood isn't a passion you share? I imagine you're very close.'

'In most things.'

'But not killing. Have you ever killed?'

'Yes.'

'How many times?'

'I have no idea.'

'More than once?'

'Yes.'

'More than twice?'

'Yes - more.'

'But you've never killed for fun,' Nancy observed, still licking sauce from her lips, a ruddy emulsion long since washed away. Or had it? What was that delicious tang? What peculiar flavour? 'Not like your brother. He enjoys it. You told me yourself. But not you. For you killing's a burden. You view it as necessary, a duty. So where do you go from here? Are you killing still?'

He failed to answer. She saw the pain etched deep in his skin, a terrifying confession written there. He was a murderer; no different to his brother. He knew no remorse. No guilt. No conscience stayed him. He wanted his brother found not because he was evil, both were, but because he was fulfilled. And this Mingis envied that.

## Convergence

Saturday night was boy's night. Even Swene, immeasurably depressed, liked Saturday nights. Things lit up. There was the late October dark, dusk like gas pumped in through gaps in the clouds. Swene could smell it. It smelled of talcum powder. He was due to meet Owen and Mickey at seven. At six he wondered what to do with an hour and decided on fish and chips.

It rained from six-thirty onward. His walls leaked strange hues. Or so he imagined, pacing about the place. He lived alone, worked shifts in a car factory, foot down on a forklift or tow-tractor, distributing parts; hundreds of them, metal bones that offered no clue to their whole. All skeletal innards, they reflected an oily light, an undersea haze off the sodium lamps high in the ceiling, a grid of them interspersed with steel girders and insulated air ducting. He often felt like he was swimming, the day's or night's resistance a tangible weight against which his body pressed. It was suffocating. He slowly drowned, bubbles escaping, held under by the local radio station, the pumped electrical echoes of lame DJs and the same half dozen singles between double glazing ads. Somebody ought to torch the station. It had him commit violent acts on ear-plugs. It was to another world he travelled, in which he toiled, a dry wet place outside of time...

A permanent bad trip. No wonder he was always up for a good one. Exercise for the imagination.

Swene's ground floor bedroom bloomed with sodden lights, the saturated illumination combined with a damp horn note.

He rushed to the door recognizing Owen's mother's car, an old Ford Cortina with a black vinyl roof peeling where it met the faded bronze paint, the two separated by a thin chrome strip.

Exiting, hunching his shoulders in his jacket, he made for the rear door, only to find it locked. Owen dived out of the driver's seat and rushed round to grab his elbow. 'We need you up front!'

'What?'

'Get in. No time to explain.'

Mickey was slouched down in the passenger seat, one hand grasping a can of Special Brew. He reached over his shoulder and popped the rear door so Owen could scramble in back.

'Get moving, Swene; it's a matter of life and death.'

Swene, bewildered, depressed the clutch. There was something not right about the pair, his mates from school whose ways were often suspect. They didn't seem themselves, somehow - but then again.

'Faster,' Owen instructed as Mickey slurped.

'Where're we going?'

Mickey laughed, face rippling as if in a wind tunnel.

Owen said, 'Head out of town, toward the airport. I want to make sure we're being followed.'

Swene had to think about that. 'Who'd want to follow us?' he asked, wanting to take Mickey's can off him, metal money in his back pocket causing him to shift on the plastic seat. 'What have you been doing? Is it the police?'

'Oh fuck. Slow down a minute.'

He couldn't make anything out via the mirror. Owen's shape, kneeling, obscured most of his rearward vision. The road ahead was only marginally less occluded. He concentrated on driving as the rain glassed the asphalt.

'Pull into the next petrol station,' Owen said. 'We've lost them.'

Minutes later they parked under a neon canopy and got out of the car. Swene stood hands in armpits while Owen trudged to the brow of the hill. Mickey lit a cigarette. Swene could smell petrol. Owen trudged back and shrugged. He too lit up, shaking water from his head. Swene eyed the kiosk and the young girl in it, disinterested by their potentially flammable acts.

'Lost them,' Owen affirmed. 'Shit.'

'Lost who?' Swene wanted to know.

'Graverobbers,' said Mickey. 'A whole gang of necrophiliacs. They were going to freeze our arses and shag us.'

'Yeah,' said Owen. 'Chilling bastards.'

'What the fuck are you talking about?' Swene's hands came out of his armpits and opened and closed at chin height.

'I told you,' Mickey said. 'Graverobbers.'

'Okay.' Swene scuffed his toes. 'Okay. But why are they after you? Why are you sorry you got away?'

It was crazy. It was still early.

'We planned,' Owen explained, 'to lure them out of town so that we could jump them. We wanted them on unfamiliar territory. Somewhere quiet; quieter than their usual haunts.'

'Their usual haunts?'

'Graveyards,' supplied Mickey.

'Mortuaries,' Owen exemplified.

'Funeral parlours.'

'Beauticians.'

'Charnel houses.'

'Charnel houses?'

'Sure, where they keep dead bodies.'

'There are charnel houses in Palmersville?' Somehow Swene found that difficult to believe. Charnel houses were to him things from darker ages.

'Nah!' Owen dismissed the idea. 'There are no charnel houses in Palmersville.'

Swene was confused. It wasn't the first time and wouldn't be the last. Chimplike, he scratched his arse.

Mickey opened the boot and got out three beers. Keeping his thumb over the openings but failing to contain their foamy excretions, he passed them one each.

'Me and Mick, we've been doing some exploring.'

'No kidding, Swene. You should have been there.'

Swene didn't get it. He turned his collars up.

'You're not listening. I said "there are no charnel houses in Palmersville". Now you say, "then where?".'

Swene screwed his eyes shut. 'Then where?' He sensed he would regret the coming revelation, the expected punchline looming like a hypodermic. But the screech of tyres and the orange and white shape of a Volkswagen van interrupted, its windscreen filled from corner to corner with unfriendly faces.

'Back in the car,' said Mickey calmly, tossing his lager can like a grenade.

Swene wheel-spun, skidded, took out a pump. The cashier certainly noticed, her jaws working her gum as she memorized numbers and flapped for the phone.

Owen squeezed a fistful of air. 'Yes! Yes!' He wound the window down and leaned out, head grazing a lamp-post. 'Come and get us, you buggers!'

Swene blinked sweat from his eyes. It had been an ordinary, mundane, boring, tedious week, after all.

Mickey took Swene's beer and drank it for him.

Swene didn't know where he was driving. This wasn't like any other Saturday night he'd experienced. His friends, he mused as he went through a red light, were not the type to get mixed up in anything more sinister than a game of strip poker with a bunch of elderly ladies. That they were playing bait the criminal was absurd. Maybe they were just going to a party. In which case, why weren't either Mickey or Owen driving? Swene didn't know the way. No directions were forthcoming so he simply headed out of town. Only town seemed to drag on. The suburbs appeared endless, those landmarks that were familiar few and far apart, a depleted store of reference. In fact, the more he drove and the farther they got from his home, the more the unceasing rain dissolved the city and smeared it into a strange, unrecognizable whole.

He was lost, he realized. 'Anyone know where we're going?'

'Don't worry about it,' reassured Mickey, about to indulge a rare irony. 'It's only make-believe.'

Swene regarded him strangely.

Mickey laughed, lips foam-flecked, the front of his sweatshirt doused with lager.

'They're dropping back,' Owen said worriedly. 'Slow down a bit, Swene. Let them catch up.'

'I don't want them to catch up!'

Owen slapped him on the shoulder. 'We're in this together, Swene, you and me and Mickey. Stop at the next Railstation.'

Railstation. Those at least were familiar.

It was fifty minutes later, nearly nine in the evening when finally he saw one, looming out of the gloaming as if on cue. He missed the name as he steered the Cortina round bollards.

'It's okay,' said Owen, 'they caught the turn. Make a run for the escalator.'

The three of them sprinted, Mickey holding his guts, Owen's mother's car abandoned and ten or twelve unfriendlies chasing them into the bright subterranean interior.

They surfed the polished steel down ramp, one foot either side of the luggage stops, accelerating their bodies into the neon-lit concourse and onto a waiting train, its mirror finish unlike anything Swene had ridden before.

The train was long and empty and they had no tickets.

'What if it takes us back into town?' Swene asked, gazing round at an interior void of posters, adverts, graffiti.

Owen smiled. 'Bingo!'

'Huh?' Must be a new station, he figured, a new state-of-the-art train. He never watched the news and was therefore ignorant of such factors. Anyway, current events meant something entirely different given his present circumstances.

'Here they come,' said Mick.

Their pursuers, whose number had dwindled to six, boarded a few doors back. The train, although divided into compartments, was not made up of separate carriages.

All six wore dark glasses.

'I hope the others don't trash the car,' Owen said plaintively, at last sounding sane. 'My mother will kill me if they trash the car.'

Swene had the keys, but there'd been no time to lock the doors. He had the sudden impression a horizon was receding.

The three and the six watched each other, posturing manfully in cinematic vein as the train sped magnetically underground. Shops and arcades flashed by the seamless windows. But no would-be passengers...

Swene felt peculiar. He enjoyed the sensation.

'How do you feel?' Mickey asked him.

'Peculiar.'

Mickey took an automatic pistol out of his jacket where it had nestled with another. 'How do you feel now?'

Swene looked at the gun, then at his friends. 'Err...okay...err...' He took the weapon and pointed it at the men in dark glasses, but not one of them moved a muscle. 'They're not convinced.'

'They can see you'll miss. Besides, they crave death. In death they can be buggered.'

Swene's cheeks itched. 'You mean they're for real?'

Mickey shrugged. 'As good as.'

'And the charnel houses?'

His friends grinned stupidly. Owen and Mickey, what had they become?

'The charnel houses, too.'

'Only not in Palmersville.'

'Right. We drove out of Palmersville, Swene.'

'Out,' he repeated.

'Right...'

'And the graverobbers?'

Owen nodded in a way he imagined aesthetic.

Swene was miffed. 'You're full of shit, both of you.'

'Right,' said Owen, nodding again.

Mickey grabbed the front of Swene's jacket. 'Isn't this one hell of a way to spend an evening?'

'It's okay.'

'Okay? Okay? Fucking hell, Swene, it's great! And we, your compadres, your best bosom chums, wanted you to be part of it.'

'We wanted you on side,' said Owen in a tone that suggested a change of mind.

'I'm sorry. I'm just a little confused.'

'We're all confused,' Mickey said. 'It goes with the territory.'

Swene wondered where he'd heard that line before.

Owen nudged him. 'So what do you say?'

He pursed his lips. 'I took the gun, didn't I?'

Mickey spun on his heel. 'Yeah!'

'Yeah!' repeated Owen, punching the air.

'So I guess I'm on side, whatever that means.'

'It means you're on ours,' Mickey told him.

'Smoke?' offered Owen.

'Nah,' Swene declined. 'Tell me about these graverobbers.'

'What's to tell? They rob graves.'

'And bugger corpses.'

'Okay,' said Swene, 'tell me about this unfamiliar territory.'

His friends exchanged glances.

Mickey said, 'It's all unfamiliar until you get to know it.'

'Right,' said Owen.

The train halted in a station as bright and deserted as the last.

'Right,' said Swene.

They rode a glass elevator up five floors to the main concourse. Their pursuers slotted into the neighbouring car, seconds behind. The concourse was bursting with people, a sudden wave of shoppers swirling in their hundreds. The graverobbers were close, the six trailing the three through the bodies of the many out onto the wet pavement where the three turned left and walked at a brisk pace.

Swene felt the discomfort of having a loaded pistol in the waistband of his jeans. The questions he had refused to assemble into any kind of order. He was some other place, some other where. A surreal kind of twelve pints and a kebab place, only here he was sober. He almost recognized it, he thought. Like a half memory. A place he had been, yet failed to recall in this much detail.

The evening's deluge had glossed the city, myriad droplets fracturing every shade and depth of light. Neon and flame were intermixed with electric and the whites of eyes. The traffic shifted with a jellied ease, like everything wore a prophylactic.

They moved into a large café and occupied a table. A waitress slid over with a smile, a life, an existence as real (or otherwise) as their surrounds. His surrounds. Her lips were full and her teeth sparkled. There were coloured spots on her cheeks that intrigued Swene, who supposed them an affectation. The six sat a short way off. Nine coffees were ordered and each man took a similar time to empty his cup of hot bubbling froth. Next they breezed through an arcade of cubby-hole shops, but nobody spent any cash. It was a game, a piece of theatre. They played normality. Owen and Mickey didn't wish to attract attention and neither did their enemies, whose number dwindled to four at the arcade's exit.

'Better odds,' said Swene, still with the image of the waitress clinging to his retinae, rebounding along his optic nerves, determined to post a message, a warning, some desperate plea to his back-brain. He glimpsed a crudely photocopied poster stapled to a telegraph pole, a face thereupon that was familiar. A girl; another girl...

'Nothing like it,' Mickey disagreed.

They entered a tall building by a side door and climbed a winding channel of stairways to the roof. The view was tremendous, the roof-space a football pitch not in use so unlit. The grass was dark and short and full of indentations, as if from a recent match. There was no fence or other barrier round it. Swene wondered briefly how the ball was kept from disappearing over the edge. They stood in one goal-mouth.

Only two grave-robbers emerged onto the pitch. They stood in the centre-circle in their dark clothes and glasses. They toyed with knives and talked quietly between themselves, a conversation that grew more animate as the minutes passed.

They appeared to argue. And then one lashed out. The other folded about a wound, blood sliding from his belly to his boots. He fell to his knees and shook a moment before becoming completely still, frozen in that aspect.

'What's happening?' Swene wanted to know. The standing graverobber had simply walked off.

'They offer us threats,' Owen told him. 'They display their contempt.'

'By murdering each other?'

'Most killers are known to their victims,' Owen expounded. 'It's more intimate.'

Mickey nodded. 'Like sex.'

'So this is a warning,' interpreted Swene 'All part of the plan?'

Owen and Mickey looked sheepish.

Perhaps, thought Swene, they were out of their depth.

He raised fingers to his lips, creasing them in thought and smelling vinegar, that odour, sharp and acrid, taking him back to his flat and his past, now both seemingly far away. He couldn't complain really; it had been a lousy, predictable, monotonous week.

The three walked over to the centre-circle where Mickey lit up the graverobber's face with a match.

'He's alive.'

Owen nodded. 'He's apoplectic. He won't move till gravity claims him. Their contempt is as much for pain as anything.'

Swene shivered. 'These are not nice people.'

'No,' said Owen. 'Not at all.'

'But this is a nice town,' Mickey chirruped. 'Don't you think?'

Chapter Two: The Language Of Thunder And Bread

'Dynamics of the human situation,' mumbled East as he left the meeting. 'Factors immediately preceding death.' His cynicism magnified by an inexplicable bitterness, he leaned on a lamp-post. 'Self-determination and the social reflex.' The lamp-post his bosom buddy. 'Pah!' he scoffed. 'Where's the fun in that?' He slapped a hand over his mouth, realizing there might be Ears, there might be Eyes, there might be Noses. The rules were strict for those believing in them. And East did, he was a committed non-interventionist and practising thinker, a pupil of the school and as such dedicated to its teachings, namely: THOU SHALST NOT.

Bullshit.

'The hardest way is the surest,' he said, clinging desperately to the metal upright, its bright globe nodding sagely overhead. 'Temptation is not gravity and can be resisted!'

But it was no good. East was corrupted. Soon there might be Fingers and Teeth.

It had started with the month, November rolling smoothly into place as October faded, the advance of time subtle and watched, permeating the city like breath. The days were short and often damp; but the sun shone too, peeling away layers of wet. East rode the buses to and fro as usual, observing the mostly gentle interflow of passengers and discouraging the small fears that people dragged around with them like shackles or pets, fears spread and exploited by trenchermen who, it seemed, always had the last laugh. They were the do-badders, the stirrers, the tempters, the inveiglers of the wicked and the weak. Quod opposed them. Quod and the Trenchermen, their battles were political, their manifestos exclusive, the one believing in accident and momentum, the other in artifice and manipulation. Those who followed the quodian philosophy stood apart from the living world, not interfering, while the Trenchermen wanted their fingers in as many pies as possible, creating conflict where there was none, energizing the human drives of greed and suspicion. They preyed on vulnerability...all in the name of entertainment.

It was sickening. It was obscene what they got away with, thought East as he folded his bus ticket. But who was he to deny the mind-eaters? The priests might advocate their own brand of violence, demanding banishment and non-redemption, but there were extremists on both sides. Hell's politics were nothing if not complicated. Parliament was hung. Both sides debated after a fashion, but it was stalemate. And both sides greatest fear was dictatorship.

There had been as many false Gods as unconvincing Satans.

Yet it was only a matter of time...

Chaos ruled. It was unclear who benefited, as each side cancelled the other out.

'Hypocrite,' said the old lady as she took her seat.

East, dreaming, was not sure he'd heard correctly.

'Go on, practice that innocent look. Smug little shit.'

East gaped. Shut his mouth. He hadn't seen her get on and felt guilty about the lapse. 'Are you talking to me?'

'Who do you think? Sitting there like butter wouldn't melt in your mouth.'

He was embarrassed. 'I'm not harming anyone,' he countered, straightening his back. 'I've every right to be here.'

'No you haven't. You're just a voyeur. You're sitting there waiting for something to happen so that you can do nothing about it, thus perfecting your arrogance.'

'That isn't true,' East argued. 'I'm here to protect the living from your interference. They deserve as much.'

'Protect the living! From what? Me?' She peered at him out of the tops of her eyes.

'Go ahead and mock,' said East with confidence. 'But they have volition and should be left in peace.'

'Peace he calls it,' the old lady gibed. 'I'll say it again: hypocrite.'

East clamped his lips tight. He breathed deeply, unwilling to be baited. 'Is it hypocrisy to hold freedom in such high regard?' he challenged, his bus ticket crushed. 'Is it hypocrisy to respect the right of an individual, a living individual, to determine his or her own future without some meddlesome third party to confuse and obstruct? A third party, I might add, whose selfishness is driven by failure, the failure of their own past lives to amount to anything.'

'Hey, enough of the speeches.'

East, though, continued. 'It's a common trait among trenchermen that they spurned the opportunity to influence the outcome of their lives and others when the opportunity was a legitimate one.'

'Now hold on.'

'You know it's true,' he said, sensing blood.

'Not so. How many of us knew then what we do now? What about yourself? Change the course of history? Discover a cure for cancer?'

'I lacked the means.' Fact was, he had lived in a time of great change, an epoch of truly momentous social and scientific advancement, and known absolutely nothing about any of it.

'Of course you did!'

'But your interference does more harm than good.'

'Only if you're bad at it,' the old lady insisted, seizing the initiative. 'I'm on the side of the angels.'

'That's quite a boast.'

'Well, I do my best.'

'You indulge your ignorance! And you have the nerve to call me a hypocrite.'

'Still, I'm not afraid to try.'

'Or fuck up, as inevitably you must. Whose fairy godmother are you anyway?'

She smiled, enjoying the secret. 'Come along and find out.'

'No,' said East. 'I'm taking you in.'

The fairy godmother laughed. 'You're what? Ooh, say it again.'

'I'm taking you in,' he repeated. 'You're a danger to public safety.'

She laughed louder, tears streaking her make-up, feet lifting from the deck.

East stubbornly folded his arms.

'Coward,' she said.

'Not so.'

'Then come along. See for yourself. See how it's possible to make someone happy.'

'Happiness is not something you make,' East maintained. 'It comes from within. Each person must find his or her own.'

'Oh!' She wafted a palm at him. 'Now you're quoting from text. Don't you have a mind of your own? Any volition?'

'Volition is for the living, as I've pointed out.'

'Bollocks; you're just scared.' She leaned across the seat as if engaging him as a confidant. 'I'll admit there are those of my persuasion whose motives are questionable. But we all have our failings, and they are a minority whose actions are relatively short-lived.'

'Not unlike their victims.'

'Occasionally, yes,' she conceded. 'Often, though, the blame lies as much with the living as the dead. Not that I'd use that as an excuse for sloppy workmanship.'

East barely managed to hold his anger in. He may not have amounted to anything in life, but he prided himself on his ability to follow orders, to do his duty and keep his mouth shut. Besides...

'Subtlety has a much greater effect,' she went on. 'Crude art doesn't last, and it is to crude art that I, like yourself, object.'

'Whatever you call it, crude or otherwise...'

'Sophisticated.'

'...an excuse is an excuse,' East rejoined. 'The only safe course is one that steers you, and them, clear of temptation, for it is all too easy to corrupt. Whether you mean well or ill is besides the point.'

'There,' the fairy godmother pointed out. 'There you go quoting again. Don't you have anything to say for yourself?'

'I've said enough!' he snapped, not knowing what else to say.

'You haven't said anything.'

'Your ears are blocked!'

'And for that you're taking me in?' She feigned exasperation, getting his goat with a mixture of gestures and looks.

'Correct,' East affirmed, now crossing his legs.

'But you'll have to go too,' she reminded him. 'And then there are all those forms to fill in - and who knows when they might let us out.'

'I don't care. I'll have done my duty.'

She narrowed her mouth. 'Couldn't you just frighten me off?'

'No, I could not.'

'You're making this very awkward.'

'It's perfectly simple. You must be stopped.'

'Okay.' She stood ready to get off the bus. 'Stop me.'

East had no choice but to follow. If he was to apprehend her he couldn't let her out of his sight.

Thinking now of that short walk made him sick. He gripped the lamp-post like it were her throat.

They walked in silence, shoes leaving ill-defined prints on the damp pavement. He had yet to learn her name. Better he had stayed on the bus. Together they walked up to a house and she knocked.

'Mrs Beantower?'

'Yes...'

'Edith Beantower?'

'Yes.'

'My name's Lotta Dosh, and this is my husband, Paul.'

The woman was about thirty-five, East saw. She appeared to be having doubts. Already things had gone too far. He wondered if it was his failure to act there and then that paralysed him. For a moment he was back in the Crimea, running, the earth exploding, the screams resounding, the limbs flying through the air. Not charging but fleeing. East swallowed his shame. And then that final cannonade, launching him skyward, trews on fire and arse flayed.

What was going on? He peered at the old lady, constrained by highly elasticated undergarments, whose husband she professed he was, half her physical age. He peered at Edith Beantower, whose expression had coagulated into a vague friendliness.

'Lotta Dosh?' Mrs Beantower said.

Her fairy godmother smiled and nodded in a rewarding manner.

Mrs Beantower trembled, but not with fear. Suddenly she screamed, her face crumpling with excitement. 'Murray! Murray!' she shouted, flapping her arms and turning her head. 'Murray, come and see who's at the door! It's Lotta Dosh!' Then she froze. Then she yelped and threw her arms round the old lady. Threw her arms round East and gave him a big kiss. 'Murray! Hurry up! Oh...how much have we won? How much have we won? No! No, wait for Murray...no, come in!' She stepped aside and waved them across the threshold, an average hallway in an average house.

Murray was slumped in an armchair, watching TV.

'Murray, look who's here!'

Murray watched TV. 'Shut up, woman,' he mumbled.

'It's Lotta Dosh!'

Murray didn't answer.

The fairy godmother took Edith's arm and clenched it to her midriff, gently patting her wrist. She leaned forward and whispered in her ear, 'Forget Murray, eh?'

Edith looked confused.

'It's you,' the old lady cooed. 'It's yours, Edith dear. You posted the coupon. It's your name on the cheque.'

East watched as Mrs Beantower's eyes slid round her head. They moved from her fairy godmother to her husband and back.

'Mine?'

'Every penny.'

Her joy was different now; she no longer had to share it. She got to keep it all to herself.

'Edith, why don't you go upstairs and get the kids?'

Edith nodded. 'Yes...'

'He beats her,' the old lady explained to East. 'She'd have left already had she anywhere to go.'

East watched Mrs Beantower ascend the stairs in a trance.

'Murray gambles. Murray drinks. Murray loses. Murray watches TV. He beats her, and there's no way out. He beats her and she takes the beatings because she thinks that as long as he's beating her he won't beat the children. She's wrong, of course. He beats her because he's weak. But Edith is strong, strong enough to take the beatings. She has no choice. She can't leave. She's tried. Murray just calls the police. She has convictions for shoplifting and a string of petty offences, so he calls the police and they bring her back. She's the criminal in their eyes. He's a hardworking father, a provider, never been convicted of anything in his life.'

East could think of nothing to say. He knew what was happening was wrong, yet faced with the cold reality of it, the choices offered and the opportunity provided, he could not recognise the fault. He still had his own demons, after all. All those bloodied cavalrymen and their butchered steeds. They still wanted explanations, even after all this time, those moustachioed gentlemen and their proud stallions. But the fact was he had none; he had run away, run in the wrong direction, failed in is duty on that fateful day in history, 1854.

Mrs Beantower appeared at the foot of the stairs clutching her life: a small suitcase, two golden children and their teddies.

'Come along, Paul,' Lotta Dosh said, sweeping her skirts. 'Open the door.'

He stepped toward the front door and grasped the handle. As he did he realized his involvement had become tangible - but he opened the portal anyway. A great white river of spangled light rushed in and wrapped itself round them, glowing in Edith's cheeks and in the cheeks of her infants, glowing in the cheeks of the fairy godmother and in East's cheeks too. It was a magical glow from a magical source. Edith's happiness was immense. But what of the consequences? By steering the ship of this woman and her two kids, by attaching a rudder to their lives and filling their sails with wind, what might be brought about? Anything was possible from here, contemplated East as he helped usher the winning party to a waiting limousine, as he and the old lady waved a tearful goodbye to Edith Beantower and her shining children. Anything was possible, yes, but anything had been possible from the outset, from the inception of these three related lives. The facts hadn't changed, only the circumstances. Was there, after all, fault to be found? On this or any other afternoon? Those French cavalrymen certainly thought so, left to die under a barrage the British knew was coming, sending a runner with the news, a runner who ran in the opposite direction.

The fairy godmother hugged him. 'I'm Belle,' she trilled. 'Belle of the ball.' She spun and danced back to the house, where she locked herself in.

East could only stare through a gap in the curtains. What had she in mind Murray?

Guilt made him physically sick. In the space of ten minutes she had transformed a number of lives. But who could say fate or luck might not have done likewise? Or better or worse? Or what she did was not universally for the betterment of mankind?

No-one, East thought; that was the problem.

The nub of the argument.

An unwinable argument. An eternal argument among the dead. An argument that set apart the two poles of Hell. There was no possibility of reconciliation, there were only the extremes; and necessarily, for you had to belong to one camp or the other and to belong to either meant you had to invest your all. Total belief sufficed. Nothing less. There were no substitutes. You measured your strength by the strength of your enemies.

Dictatorship?

What both sides feared most. Yet, he reasoned, might it not be for the best? The power of a king, a power with no room for argument.

The priests sought the true God. He let go of the lamp-post. He'd become a priest. There would be no more compromises. That ought to keep his accusers at bay, out to condemn him to an eternity of spine-tearing, knee-breaking, teeth-pulling, skin-peeling, limb-smashing pain. All so reminiscent of the Crimean peninsular...

They'd have to catch him first, and East was fast on his feet.

## Grey Area

Thorp lit a cigarette using a match struck off the door pad. He crushed the empty pack and dropped it on the floor, where it rolled with countless others in the footwell. A week had passed since he gained his passenger, the midget whose appetite for Woodbines and gibbering proved insatiable. The fiend's occupancy of the back seat was a ludicrous feature, yet one he was forced to take seriously.

'Bugger,' the midget repeatedly continually. 'Bugger, bugger.'

Thorp inhaled, guiding the Ventura through drizzle and traffic, its windscreen wipers motionless, the red lights pallid and a deeper grey than the green - although there wasn't much between them. He meandered through the city with little direction. Nothing on till six-thirty, then a family of four and carbon-monoxide poisoning.

Two hours away.

He thought of Jenny. The perplexed feeling associated with her presence on that roof returned. He wondered if something bigger was stirring, something his mind had yet to gauge, his imagination contain, his memory recall. Something past. Nothing the future might uncover hadn't been seen before; that much was known. Things always snuck up on you from behind.

Only, how could he hope to find her with a demon for company? If, that is, he wished to find her. Thorp had still to convince himself of the whys and wherefores, etc. This was new territory. No telling yet if it was neutral.

Byamol's stooge, no less, naked and slavering down its mammoth cleavage, scratching its oversize testicles and yawning hugely without letting its cigarette drop from its mouth. The stub was adhered to its lower lip, crackling wetly there before being extinguished. Thorp wrinkled his nose at the burnt smell. He'd been forced to pack his souls in the boot, well away from the creature, but still it insisted on counting them.

'Stop! Up ahead; the restaurant!' It flopped its gruesome chin on his shoulder and burped.

Obligingly, he pulled over.

'Wait in the car,' the midget instructed.

Happy to, Thorp sucked the last from his Woodbine and wondered if they sold them in the restaurant. He was getting through six packs a day, twice his usual consumption, thanks to his companion.

His eye was hooked by a nearby Railstation. Bound to be a booth there selling tobacco and confectionery. Only the fiend had told him to stay put.

So what? Was he afraid? Or honour bound? No, so how to get rid of the little bastard? It would have to be convincing to Byamol. He didn't think he could kill it, simply because it was already dead and undoubtedly slippery. He literally had to dispose of it. He needed a method. He needed cigarettes and opened the car door, the drizzle shrinking the skin of his face and making it tight round his mouth and across his cheekbones. The air, despite the month, was warm. He crossed the road, making for the heavy grey light of the Railstation, the black of the building above abutting an aluminium afternoon. Already a few stars were visible, the rain dragging the night down. Thorp slid on his sunglasses as he entered the concourse. It was packed with people. He located a concession stand and proceeded toward it, pulling notes from his lefthand coat pocket, their bland markings reflecting a strange copper hue. He was puzzled by that and lingered beneath a large cluster of decorative lights, tipping his head back to fully swallow the glare. The rich white light swamped him; but no copper. He gazed around the concourse for the source of the tint but could find nothing.

The need for smoke driving him, Thorp purchased two hundred Woodbines. The concessionaire grumbled distantly about having no change. Thorp didn't want any anyway. He shrugged and walked. The woman would forget him in a moment and be curious later about the surplus in her till. She'd shrug then, blessing her good fortune, perhaps feeling a bit strange. An uncomfortable displacement. It was merely the unseen, glimpsed.

By a quirk of logic, or perhaps simply for the fun of it, it was only public houses where he declined to pay.

Thorp returned to his car, his passenger not yet seated. Some things had to change, he decided. Smoking cigarettes made him crave beer. He entered the restaurant.

'Would you like a table, sir?'

Was he becoming more visible?

'No? I see. You're waiting for a friend?'

Yes. No.

'Very good, sir.'

A worrying trend.

The demon was nowhere to be seen.

And then who should enter the restaurant, by name the Fourteenth Cloud, than a huddle of sycophants and possibly the next governor of this disparate metropolis, however that might be defined; Hell's rising star, Jones.

Thorp knew about Jones.

Jones was a contemporary. Where Thorp picked up the accidents and suicides, Jones catered exclusively to the murdered. Murders were glamorous, or so Jones believed. Thorp wasn't sure he disagreed or was envious. Given the choice he would favour the murder franchise. He had to admit that. There was the added drama of criminal activity, the sort of operatics that required you to visit the more exotic regions of subdom, those places farther displaced than suicide country, which was only marginally off the map. One step was all it took. Several steps and a push got you to killings. Yet there was something too zealous about Jones. He participated. Not directly; but he played a part. It was unprofessional, Thorp thought, only to be reminded of Orangepeel, Jenny Pith up there on the ledge and his intervening word.

So who was he to criticize? Jones had ambitions, political ambitions...

But Thorp knew about Jones.

There was a crash and the swing doors to the kitchen flew open. His head swivelled at the bar. The small angry shape of the demon and the suddenly animate party of trucklers occupied the extremes of his vision. Silver bullets streaked through the previously subdued restaurant air. The fiend blazed with a passion, its discharging weapon centred in its stomach, its penis and breasts radiating a deeper greyness, shimmering as the midget advanced on the squirming crowd desperately trying to shield their supernatural confederate. The silver bullets ripped into them. Not killing them, they were past that, but puncturing them and deflating their existence, the pale stuff of their construction becoming incoherent.

Thorp watched it all with a sense of irrealism, like it was theatre, an episode of some subterranean gangster spoof here filming on location. Expensive stuff.

The shooting stopped as suddenly as it had started, the midget having run out of ammunition. It dropped the ungainly weapon and strolled out of the Fourteenth Cloud, whistling.

Emerging moments after, he found his passenger in its familiar position and himself the getaway driver.

Thorp drove frenetically at roof level, dodging antennas and dishes, greenhouses, horses and the occasional chimney breast. He was low on fuel and needed a drink, needed to ditch his minder before he could be seen to be involved in anything partisan or unethical. Leave that to the Jones' of this world, he thought. Death was complicated enough.

Letting go of the steering wheel, he twisted round in his seat. With his other hand he opened the rear door on the driver's side, twisted back, took the wheel and banked sharply, throwing the Ventura onto its side and emptying beer bottles, cigarette packs and one demon out into fresh air high above the city. The monster was reluctant to fall, however, its clammy flesh gripping the upholstery as it babbled threats and curses. He brought the car round in a tight looping curve, the air buffeting the open door and slamming it repeatedly against the midget's skull, cracking it with a sound like a mug hitting concrete, until, brains spilled, Thorp's aerobatics finally evacuated it.

He arrested his dive, straightened, reoriented, quelled his panic. Landing briefly to wipe the velour and leather he supposed any respite would be temporary. But it had been an accident, hadn't it? Explain that to Byamol. He'd mention the priests. A priest secreted in the passenger compartment.

It was a short drive to the ice-cream factory where he loitered as it grew dark, supping Pilsener from a pint pot and reading the stars. The weather was surprisingly warm. There were no clouds to obscure his vision. Venus shone brightly in a firmament as black as black silk knickers.

The ice-cream was piped from an overflow tank and gurgled thickly as it travelled into the dark throat of the Ventura, which purred appreciatively, the smoothest freezer. Thorp filled the tank to the brim, stowed the now empty pint pot along with his cache of Czech lager, and got back in the car. The interior was a perfect zero. His breath misted the glass, giving it a silver sheen like a mirror. If you stood outside you could see your reflection.

His watch told him fifteen minutes till the multiple. Father, mother, two children. Thorp was nervous. Something had shifted for him and his job was no longer routine. The image of Jenny Pith revolved in his mind, tantalizing him with half-remembered colours. He drove silently into the early evening traffic. The Pickering family would have just reached home, the kids picked up from the in-laws where they'd been since school. A quick detour to the supermarket. They would be sitting in the garage of their large detached house, father with his hand on the key, the doors locked at the touch of a button. Technology made it easy for him and his wife, even now holding hands. In effect the children were victims. It was the parents who had chosen suicide as a solution to their problems, the scale of which were unimportant, the parents who knew best for their son and daughter. The kids were just along for the ride, worried now as the garage door had shut automatically. Nothing unusual there, only the engine was still running. There was a terrible quiet in the car. And their father's eyes in the rearview mirror. They wanted to get out but couldn't. They sat drugged, like puppets. Father and mother had their windows electrically wound down and were in control of the buttons. The rear doors and windows were secure. This was a very safe car.

Six twenty-five. Thorp pulled up, checked his appointment book to make sure of the address, got out and opened the boot. He tidied the souls therein, his stunt driving having tangled a few, soft and crackling as he teased them apart with a rasp of static.

Another vehicle breezed to a stop alongside his own.

Six twenty-nine exactly.

Thorp closed the boot. He had a bad feeling. As he walked toward the garage the bad feeling joined him.

'Strange,' it said, 'to encounter you twice in one day.'

'Yes,' he agreed. 'A coincidence.'

'I can see you weren't expecting me.'

'No.'

'But this is my jurisdiction.'

Thorp halted by the wide aluminium door. There was a banging noise from within and then silence.

'You seem puzzled,' Jones said. 'Perhaps you're becoming jaded.'

Perhaps he was. But Jones was no confessor.

'Shall we?'

They entered together, locks proving no obstacle, four souls like grease-proof paper languishing on the oil-patterned floor. The garage was filled with acrid smoke and the stench of death uninvited. Neither man was affected. Both reached for the souls, their fingers touching, their eyes locking.

Jones said, 'Two of these were murdered. They are mine.'

To which Thorp replied, 'They made no effort to save themselves. They were willing victims.'

'That isn't true and you know it. Take the parents; the children are mine.'

'I can't...'

Jones straightened, his tie clipped to his shirt by a clip of yellow bone. 'I know what is right,' he stated.

'Why,' challenged Thorp, 'because you're powerful?'

Jones sighed. 'We go back a long way, you and I. You know I can beat you, so why argue? If I am right because I am powerful, then I am powerful. But it isn't all power, Thorp, a greater part is timing, knowing where and when and what amount of force is necessary to get the job done. Large rocks are best broken using small ones.'

Thorp had no answer. Jones could dance circles round him. It had not occurred to him that the children had been murdered. Jones was right and he was wrong. And his appointment book? He must have misread the entry. Or had he? Twice it had let him down now.

His rival unravelled the smaller souls from the larger. 'Don't worry,' he said, 'things might soon be different, and those differences are on their way.'

There was a portentousness to Jones' words that disturbed and excited. They were preposterous, too, in a calculated way. He offered bread, but take the bread and risk a beating.

Jones played with fire, literally.

## Realization

Swene woke up and it was Friday. He lay in bed enjoying the quiet, brain bouncing back and forth between the events of the previous four nightshifts and those of the preceding weekend. He still wasn't sure how he'd got home Sunday morning. Saturday night had left him dazed, but unquestioning. Perhaps there would be more of the same this weekend. At work he had been distant and preoccupied. Normal, it seemed, as nobody thought to query his mental presence, or lack of it. His colleagues had got bored of waving their hands before his eyes years ago. 'Hello. Anybody home?' He smiled, glad the work week was over. With Christmas ever nearer he could look forward to some time off and even greater quantities of alcohol. He'd certainly been drunk last Saturday, even managing to keep up with Owen and Mickey, although the whereabouts of their prolonged drinking remained a mystery. They'd travelled unknown roads to unknown bars full of unknown ladies whose nature was decidedly friendly into the early hours of the morning. The phone rang, but he didn't get up to answer.

Only it kept ringing...

'Great lazy ape,' he could hear his mother comment.

'Hello.'

Click.

Huh, back to reality.

Then, 'Psst!' From the kitchen.

Swene put the phone down and walked into the adjoining space, not knowing what to expect. Everything appeared normal.

Shadows hung on the walls, encompassing cupboards, window frames and naked plaster. Thick shadows. And it was twelve-thirty. He reached for the light switch and as he did so there was a rush of air and the sound of much commotion. Shadows, still to that moment, charged past him, bundling him back into the living-room as they escaped through the flat, slamming the front door.

The kitchen thus emptied he travelled beyond to the bathroom and gave voice to his bowels, which spoke a deeper, inner language, one Swene felt comfortable with. His body perched on wood and porcelain he regarded the door not three feet from his face. The world, newly discovered, lurked beyond. Soon he would have to go out and confront it, a world to which he'd awoken, a world of madness, danger and shadows. He wondered if he was ready for what lay out there, and if not, what the consequences might be. He'd already had a taste of it, a taste he liked, but there was the risk of being swamped by sensation. Certainly that was a risk worth taking, Swene decided, only then realizing he was out of toilet-paper.

## Gloop

Flicking through papers, Nancy struggled to eliminate the everyday from the truly grisly. Obviously Mingis Bros. couldn't be responsible for every unnatural termination in the greater urban conurbation, so she needed to sift her data to come up with a likely last event, hopefully then to predict the date of the next. That date had to be imminent. Why else would Mingis have approached her when he did? He wanted her involvement, wanted her presence even, wanted her to find him out. His motives she could dismiss. Let others delve into the minds of psychopaths, Nancy only wished to photograph the rainbow-hued surface, probe with her oar the oily mixture and see what floated to the top. It would be foolish to dive in, breath held and feet kicking. As a journalist she was used to baiting sharks, but this was an altogether more dangerous fish.

She had much to learn. She had her instincts; often unreliable, always fearsome. She had an editor leaning on her desk.

'Problem, Kowolski?'

She smiled her best lemony smile. 'Everything's a problem,' she said sweetly.

'Good. Write it.' He straightened and patted his heavy gut, a glint in his eye that spoke volumes. 'Meantime, there's someone downstairs wants to meet you.'

Nancy's brow creased. 'Tall? Broad shouldered?'

'You're fantasizing, Nance. This one's short and weedy; looks like he likes violence.'

'Don't they all,' she commented.

'Other people's violence.'

'Right...' She kicked her boots out from under her desk and made for the exit.

She found him hovering nervously in reception, clinging to the draught at the doors as if frightened to venture any farther into the building. He shuffled his feet and peered out through the glass.

Nancy tip-toed behind.

'Kowolski,' he said without turning. 'Can we leave? It's just I've a lot of equipment in my car I don't want stolen.'

'Don't be paranoid,' she answered, disconcerted by the apparently false impression she'd drawn. 'Things aren't that bad.'

'Yeah?' He looked at her indulgently, offering his hand. 'In my experience things are generally a lot worse. Henry Eels.'

They shook. 'Pleased to meet you, Henry. You wanted to see me. Why?'

'I scour the globe,' he said. 'I'm putting together a documentary about death and romance.'

'Called?'

'Death and Romance.'

Could she trust him? Was he crazy? It would be best, thought Nancy, to forget about trust for the time being.

'Now can we leave?'

She didn't have her jacket or her bag. 'Okay.'

Henry pushed open the door and held it for her. 'My car's up here. It would be the end of me were anything to happen to it. Years of work...'

'You carry everything with you?'

'Everything. Everything's on video. Over two thousand hours of footage.'

'That's some documentary,' Nancy remarked, thinking she might slope off shopping instead.

'Don't I know. Most of it's garbage. I plan to get it down to eighty minutes. Once it's finished, that is. I reckon I've about seventy-two minutes now.'

'So you'll be filming in Palmersville?'

'Partly.' Henry's face screwed up, like she'd posed him a problem.

'You don't seem too sure,' she probed. 'You look a little indecisive.'

He squirmed. 'How do you feel talking about something you don't necessarily understand?'

Did he mean himself or her? Nancy wondered, and appreciated his difficulty.

'Here's the car.'

'A Ventura,' said Nancy. 'Not what I'd choose to scour the globe.'

Henry shrugged. 'It has its virtues.'

They stood by the Ventura, Henry with his arms folded, Nancy beginning to feel the cold.

'Why exactly did you want to see me?'

'You're my seventy-third minute.'

Nancy stared at him quizzically. 'You want to film me?'

He squirmed again. 'Kind of. You're more of a locus. I want to film round you.'

'To what end?'

'It's all part of the process.'

'Your documentary.'

'Right.'

'Death and Romance. I'm not strong on either. Why don't you tell me about the seventy-two minutes you have already; maybe show me some video.' She was losing patience with this strange character.

Henry shook his head. 'Not possible.'

'Why? Are you a fake? Is this some diversionary tactic? Is someone going through my desk? Does the name Mingis mean anything to you?'

That caught him. He gazed over both shoulders. 'You keep dangerous company, Nancy. You want to be careful. You could be in deeper than you think.'

'The risk's mine to take. What about you, Henry?'

He laughed a pretend laugh. 'Risks are my business.'

'Then stop shaking. Mind if we get in the car? I'm freezing.'

He agreed reluctantly and she squeezed in the passenger side, feet raking polystyrene cups and takeaway dishes. The back seat was filled with newspaper and strangely shaped black containers.

'You sleep in here, don't you?'

'Yes. It's practical.'

'It's smelly.'

'Well, you wanted to be in.'

Nancy made herself comfortable. 'And now I'm not leaving.'

'What?'

'Not until you show me something of interest to me professionally. I'm a journalist, Henry, I want stories and headlines and pictures and gruesome detail. What are you offering me besides bad breath and indecision?' And why did she care? What kind of joker was he?

'Damn.' He chewed a nail.

'I'm waiting.'

'You're a fascinating woman.'

'I know what I want and I know how to get it,' she said in her best Mae West.

'Damn.'

'Well?'

Henry shuffled. 'Mind if I smoke?'

'No.'

He lit up. 'About six years ago I was on holiday in Greenland.' He inhaled. 'People usually say, "That's a strange place to go for a holiday".'

'It is?'

He exhaled. 'Anyway, I met this beautiful dark-eyed girl in a bar and we had unbelievable sex on a grand piano.'

She didn't blink. She knew grand pianos.

'I was in hospital for three weeks with pneumonia and ever since I've had this fascination with the preternatural.'

Nancy regarded her boots amid the rubbish. 'What was she, a succubus?'

'I believe so.'

'I thought they only came to men in their sleep. Were you asleep?'

'No.'

'Intoxicated?'

'By her, yes.'

'And you'd like to meet her again, after she froze you...'

'She didn't freeze me; not literally.'

'But she did inflame you, or at least your lungs.'

'She did.'

His smoke was getting in her eyes. 'Death and Romance.'

He smiled bashfully.

'You're a fool, Henry.'

'Thank-you.'

'Albeit an honest one. And near the end of your search, if I'm reading this correctly. Only another eight minutes?'

'Seven,' he confessed.

Nancy scowled ruefully. He'd been filming.

'You're a fascinating woman.'

'What is that, a code? The camera's voice activated?'

'Yes.'

'An honest but devious fool. Just what I need right now.'

'Everybody's favourite picture,' said Henry.

'Explain that to me,' Nancy insisted, pushing the balls of her thumbs into the upholstery.

'Okay, listen.'

She listened, was soon restless. 'No, on second thoughts...Hold it.'

Henry pressed PAUSE.

'How much more is there? I've got a headache.'

Henry smiled. 'Altogether there's eighty minutes.'

She cringed. 'This is the voice-over for your documentary?'

'It's kind of a draft, a work in progress. I'm still polishing, see? I don't really know how it will end.'

Nancy was silent a while, just staring out the car window at the figures in the street. What were they doing out there? Who the hell were they? Then she asked, 'Why me? What brought you to me?'

'Initially?'

'Initially.'

'It's somewhat complicated,' Henry confessed, a bit scared of her, a bit excited. 'It'd be easier if you listened to the tape.'

'Somehow I don't think so,' she replied. 'Let's fast-forward, bring things right up to date. How did you find me, find my name, where I worked, whatever?'

'Your father.'

'You know Pa?'

'I know someone who knows him,' Henry told her. 'I have an interest in a number of his associates.'

'Like who?' Nancy wanted names and faces, names and faces she could put together.

'I haven't got that far yet.'

'This isn't helping.'

'True, but you asked.'

Nancy continued to stare out the window. She didn't recognise anybody out there, she realized. Even this close.

'There are eighty objects,' said Henry. 'She told me that. She told me that if I wanted to find her again, and she knew I would, then I would have to find seventy-nine things before I got to herself.'

'Does she have a name?'

'Doubtless she has many. I've spent six years searching, recording, digging, assembling the objects; some animate, some inanimate.'

'Not all people?'

'No. You're the first; but I've a hunch the remainder are, too. Or once were. It gets hazy round the edges.'

Yes, thought Nancy, it certainly does. A person was staring back at her now. A woman about her own age. She stuck her tongue out.

'Look, you're curious, you're wondering why you, what makes you special, how come you're involved, and I can't answer any of that. The truth is I don't know. One thing leads to another. One thing led to you, Nancy Kowolski. What's the connection? I don't know, not for sure; but you're in the link. You have an inquiring mind. Maybe that's it. Maybe something's set up home in your head.'

'In my head?'

'Maybe.' He reddened as she turned to look at him, not really sure where he stood with the head argument.

'So what was number seventy-two, this thing that led you to me?'

Henry, relieved to have escaped that hook, appeared to think. Then decide. 'Remember the cat you had when you were a kid?'

'Gloop,' said Nancy. 'Yes...'

Henry reached behind him and rummaged on the rear floor until he recovered a black painted shoebox.

She placed her hand on the lid. 'Take me to dinner.'

Henry lay the shoebox in his lap. 'Tomorrow,' he promised with a shrug. 'I've a previous engagement.'

'Tomorrow then.' She opened the door, which required an unusual effort, as if the air outside the car had thickened. For a moment it was like peering through a murky lens: the street distorted, the faces blurred...

'Sure,' he agreed, the excitement tangible, at the back of his throat like a stuck peanut. The fear too. 'Midnight, and let's make it a picnic.'

## Associates

Some things cease to exist once they are understood. No one understands this better than Thorp. Thus his unquestioning stance, his abject refusal to look too closely at his situation, occupation and circumstance.

Jones made him do it. Jones and Jenny Pith.

Suddenly his diary was empty. Unheard of, especially for a Friday night. Yet there it was, pages newly blank in his appointment book, as if all suicides had been revoked, all accidents outlawed unless the fatalities were zero.

It was Jones' doing. Jones had contacts.

Still, it amazed Thorp to find he had nothing to do. Worse, no souls meant no income, no income no funding for the project.

'Well,' said Pa. 'This is a turn up for the books.'

Chapter Three: Across The Quiet Sleepers, Ascending Their Threads

The gun, thought Swene, where was the gun? It had been under his mattress, then in the kitchen drawer, he'd even driven to work one evening with it shifting in the glovebox, sounding metallic and threatening as he lurched round corners and rolled through bends. He'd taken it out, hidden it under his jacket, and...where? Not behind books or concealed in a pan and not in the fruitbowl or behind the toilet cistern. He searched the chimney flue. He lifted floorboards, sweat coursing down his chin. No luck. He crawled in and inch by inch'd the cupboard under the stairs. Nothing. The gun was missing.

He sat and ruminated an hour, watching TV with the sound down. After all, what could the TV tell him he didn't already know? The shifting picture served as a distraction. A girl was singing in a video, thigh boots slapping thighs, her silver dress like a fish swimming across the screen, sparkling with a million tiny camera flashes.

Swene shook himself. Bounding out of the chair he switched the TV off, grabbed his keys, all the cash he had and his credit cards, ran from his flat to the bus stop and waited there, breath coming in snatches, clouding the Saturday morning air.

The number 1 bus took him into town.

He hadn't heard from Owen or Mickey since the previous weekend and wondered, as the bus jounced over sleeping policemen, snoozing, recumbent in the road, what they'd been up to. Had the graverobbers caught up with his friends? Were they his friends? Yes, he believed so. Anyway, he was stuck with them. And they were out there, he knew, discovering undiscovered alleys and subterranean walkways, engaged in a random exploration of a city at once alien and familiar, huge yet intimate, recognizable in parts and yet always, it appeared, on the brink of change. He sensed these new surroundings. He smelled them, and they smelled alive.

Gunless, Swene studied the houses beyond the glutinous bus window. Redbrick mostly, interspersed with more exotic dwellings of chiselled stone several storeys high. The bus travelled slowly on its circuitous route. The buildings became more complicated. There were fabulous glass castles. There were wretched slums. He spied a Railstation whose name he didn't recognize.

A naked man boarded and sat near the front. The man brought the total number of passengers on the upper deck to four; himself, the man and two middle-aged ladies with large plastic shopping bags. Neither of the women appeared perturbed by the arrival of the pot-bellied creature. He was nothing out of the ordinary in their world. Perhaps they didn't see him at all.

The bus drove past a park Swene knew and he gazed out at the trees, absorbing their leafless branches, their nakedness seasonal. It was odd, he thought, that they could wear less in winter than summer. The man too, now rapping bony fingers off even bonier knees, the sap drained from him and his flesh dormant, come spring to resume once more a youthful hue. For he was old, Swene saw, older than mere years. The man wore the age of dormancy, of patient introspection, sandwiched between earth and sky. Perhaps he rode the bus to pass the time. Youth and vigour lay months away...

There were any number of children in the park, chasing each other and different size balls. They all wore brightly coloured clothing and the balls were patterned and splashed much as they, red and blue and yellow in the clear morning air. There were dogs and squirrels. Waste-baskets alongside paths. A kite that was almost a bird, if only it could break its string, diving and swirling with a skill beyond any tugging arm. Branches raked the roof of the bus, startling him. He looked around and the two women had gone. They must have moved downstairs, he supposed, to alight. And sure enough the bell chimed and the bus glided to a halt by a post-box painted pink.

Swene laughed and thumped the seat. The naked man turned his head briefly. The bus trundled. The park fell behind and everything was beautiful. Swene was delirious. He sat another ten minutes while the bus cruised endlessly and then swung himself upright prior to his exit, his entrance on the other side of pneumatic doors cold and concrete.

The people here were unremarkable, quietly going about their business. Doing as people do. Pedestrians. Head bowed and hands in pockets, he walked in the direction the bus had taken. All he could smell were fumes, car exhausts pumping clouds of vapour as hot gases met cold. The breeze stirring in the street raised the hairs on his arms as it chewed, grazing those dead pores. Swene walked, seeing nothing but feet. Finally he gazed up, and down a lightly peopled boulevard. Spotting what looked like a clothing store he hurriedly closed the gap, feet slapping, arms swinging close to his chest as he advanced briskly on the chrome-fringed doors. Inside was warm and fluffy, apparel hanging on rails and adorning dummies, pinned to display boards and laid flat like corpses, the latest fashions in leather, plastic or natural fibres arrayed for his delight, tempting and tormenting to his chilled flesh as a smiling shop-assistant homed in on his need.

'Jacket,' said Swene.

'Red, yellow, blue, green...'

Swene was having none of it. 'Something in black.'

The assistant frowned, then pouted disbelievingly. 'Sir, this is a most colourful store. Our stock is most colourful. We don't have black.'

'You don't have black?'

'Sir heard correctly.'

'Nothing in black?'

'No items of clothing on these premises, sir. As you can see, strictly colour.'

But how could he acquiesce?

'Perhaps magenta or navy might suit?'

'No, no - it has to be neutral. Black.'

The assistant smiled again, forcibly. 'I'm afraid we can't help you there, sir. Might I suggest an ironmongers?'

Sarcasm?

'Or a roofers,' continued the assistant. 'Sir could be painted with tar. Eminently waterproof.'

Swene peered hard at the man, considering his next move and how not to appear foolish.

The assistant's fingers flapped impatiently. 'We've got all the colours in the world,' he said proudly. 'Wouldn't sir like to try something?'

'No. No thanks. It has to be black.'

'And we don't stock it.'

'Nothing?'

'No, sir, not so much as a tie. Black isn't a colour.'

'It isn't?'

'Quite.'

Swene left hugging his arms, having abandoned his fleece in the store. Outside, the flock overwhelmed, smothering. He held tight to his identity, but it was becoming increasingly fragile, tenuous, like its use-by date was imminent. The boulevard was long and undulating, the cars flowing by steadily. Their drivers and passengers seemed familiar somehow, strangers, nameless, going about their lives, encountering other strangers they knew as friends, making passes and comebacks and coffee and mistakes, some of which might find there way into Swene's life. A driver might let slip the wheel of his car, mounting the kerb and taking Swene out. Killed by a stranger, he thought, how would that feel? The same as being killed by a friend, he guessed, except a friend would be more brutal. No accident. It was impossible to be murdered by a stranger, after all. Deliberate killers possessed deliberate knowledge of their victims, even if that knowledge was fleeting. They knew their subject. Deliberate killing was the most intimate, friendly kind.

He wiped his brow, feeling warmer. A taxi pulled to a stop and he got in, realizing he'd hailed the cab even though the taxi driver was mistaken, requiring a destination from Swene as he chewed gum he hadn't been chewing just prior and stared via the mirror, which he adjusted. Swene tried to think of an address. He mumbled something and the taxi sped off, filtering back into traffic without so much as a signal.

Other cars made way, melting left and right as the road broadened and the buildings narrowed, bricks and steel rising and in some cases swallowing the carriageway which passed through tunnels that were concourses, public places decorated with huge glass sculptures and lit by streams of varicoloured light, so that it seemed to Swene they drove round the arch of a rainbow. He could see a million faces through the window, each separate, some struggling vainly to merge, others heated, blistered, pocked, lost behind veils of silk and hair. He sat with his fingers clinging to the lip of the door, a child fascinated by the grown-up world. It was all new to him. They passed under bridges and through tunnels, along tree-lined avenues. They swept down asphalt lanes and crushed slick motorways, the rubber of the tyres soundless on the pristine surface or thumping over cobbles as the taxi wound behind terraces and came to a stop outside a crude gate with the number 17 hanging at an angle, badly nailed. It was, Swene saw, his mother's home. But would she be? Hadn't she been dead eleven years? In fact this entire street had been demolished when he was sixteen. He searched the front of the taxi for a meter. The driver twisted in his seat and invited him to disembark. No longer chewing but smoking a cigar.

It was free. Swene alighted. He opened the gate and narrowly avoided stepping in some dog shit. The back door was open and he entered a kitchen full of cooking smells. There was a pack of cigarettes on the table along with a half empty cup of tea. The radio was playing.

The living-room smelled of dog hair and newspaper. It was deserted. There was a bottle top lying on the hall carpet. A shoe, one of his own, had given up halfway up the stairs and looked desperate. He carried it the rest of the way, depositing it near the bathroom door. The bathroom smelled of thyme. Swene unzipped his jeans and pissed in the bowl. The sound reverberated round the small tiled space and he smiled at the memory of it. His parents' room was tidied and aired, the floral curtains protruding like tongues into the air beyond. His brother's room was bare. His own? He hesitated outside the door. The image of it, quaintly boyish, model aeroplanes and a collection of beer cans, dissuaded entry. Who knew what might be lurking within? Some memories were best left undisturbed, like the family dog, old Farter whose favourite chair was always the one you were sitting in. Swene returned to his brother's room at the front of the house and gazed out into the street. There were a few cars and a young girl riding a tricycle, her red coat reminding Swene of his cold bones. Opening a cupboard he found what he needed, his brother's bike jacket scuffed and stygian, the zippers steel. Swene had envied this jacket from an early age, envied the associated machine, envied the elder sibling whose tools these were, the bike's noise and the jacket's blackness. A seemingly sure-fire route into generous amounts of frillies. It smelled of perfume.

A door slammed. He could hear somebody moving about downstairs. The sound of their return caused his stomach to flutter with excitement, then pain. His family were dead and buried with the exception of his father; but he was scant remembered. The cigarettes had killed his mother, their knowledge of her great and intimate. And his brother had died on the road, his jacket scant protection against the reinforced underbelly of a bomb and bullet-proof limousine. But such was fate and history, the two entangled like lovers on a beach of broken glass.

Swene, choosing his moment, turned up his new collars and retired via the stairs and the front door, closing it with both careful hands.

He ran to the Railstation and took the first train into town.

## The Round Box

Approximately halfway up the wall, hanging sufficiently free that it shaded the wallpaper, was a portrait of the distinguished gentleman. He wore a moustache and his eyes followed Mickey about a room whose wood panels and heavy furniture offered the impression of a jungle but not the cover. He squirmed and smoked irritably, a hangover in his bones. Owen was leaning out the window, his attention to forty stories of fresh air slowly understood by his comrade, who joined him dozily.

'If you threw-up now,' said Owen, 'you could take out half the building, not to mention the passers-by.'

'They'd pass in their hundreds,' Mickey concurred.

'But that would be spreading it too thinly.'

'Yeah...'

'What we want is concentration,' Owen affirmed. 'And money.'

'Money,' said Mickey. 'How much are we asking?'

'It's government, so plenty.'

A door opened behind them.

The two turned and stepped away from the window.

'Ah, gentlemen. Please, be seated.'

They sat.

'I must say you come highly recommended.'

'We're the best,' Mickey said.

'Just so. But have you the patience?'

'Excuse me?' inquired Owen, thumbing an ashtray, blackening his nail.

'This is a baby-sitting job, gentlemen; not necessarily your cup of tea.'

Owen and Mickey exchanged glances.

Owen said, 'Lay it on the table. A job's a job. But we baby-sit at a premium.'

The man nodded. 'I understand. You'll be amply rewarded.'

Mickey wanted to hear numbers.

'Half a million.'

Owen and Mickey exchanged glances, the latter fidgeting.

Owen said, 'Okay, we'll do it. Reluctantly, but we'll do it.'

'Good. The house and its occupier are in Mountfield. You know it? Or of it?'

They nodded.

'Good. There's a car waiting for you in the basement. The best of luck, gentlemen.'

They stood and left, hands in pockets till they reached the elevator.

'Is this as big as it smells?' quizzed Mickey.

'I certainly hope so.'

'I've never been to Mountfield.'

'They say it's nice.'

'Yeah, swimming pools and loose women.'

'All you can eat.'

'And vegetables that are symmetrical.'

'We can sunbathe.'

'Of course, it'll be sunny up there.'

The steel doors opened and they stepped into the steel box. There were other portraits of the distinguished gentleman on the four flat walls.

Poses.

'Now that,' commented Owen, 'is a face you can trust.'

'I'd trust that face like my uncle.'

'The one you gibbeted?'

'Maybe. I've two uncles.'

Owen laughed. 'You had two uncles!'

'No, I still have, only one's in aunt Eleanor's freezer.'

The elevator dropped gently to the basement.

'When we get up there,' posed Owen, 'what's the first thing you're going to do?'

Mickey thought. Then, 'Make a sandwich.'

The car was an inconspicuous hatchback with a briefcase on the front passenger seat full of money.

'What kind?'

'Cheese and onion.'

'Sounds good.'

'And beer.'

Owen lit a cigarette. 'No beer.'

'Okay; too risky.'

'Right. We're professionals.'

'A little wine maybe.'

'Maybe.'

'It's all here.'

'And we're here.'

'Up the ladder to Mountfield.'

'And business.'

'Business...'

Mickey drove, his tie loosened, his gonads cramped, his new shoes on the pedals. Owen insisted they make a good impression, and it had worked, but the unfamiliar clothes made him hanker for less complicated days. It was a two hour drive to the first rung of the ladder. The roadside security increased with each passing mile. They drove through scanners onto the wide shiny platform and continued upward at a steady thirty-five as the lock gates closed behind. The ladder was three hundred metres across, one hundred percent sealed, its opaque walls emanating a waxy sheen. Messages and instructions were relayed to them via a voiceless computer. They were not to smoke or exceed the speed limit. They were on no account to stop or leave their vehicle. Their security clearance was under constant review and might be revoked at any time.

The rungs numbered six. Owen and Mickey sighed on reaching the exit.

They lit up. Mountfield was resplendent, manicured, evocative, impressive. The twosome admired the gardens of the houses in a way they hadn't admired gardens before, or even noticed the magnificence of grass and bushes. They opened the windows and smelled the breeze, wondering what danger could possibly exist here. But it was their sworn mission to defend the life of the distinguished gentleman, whose fabulous abode they neared, a bungalow of not immodest proportions, its roof red tiled and its walls the white of snow. Irregular shaped openings broke the clean sweep of the walls, these openings framed by shutters painted the same blue as the sky.

Mickey pulled onto the driveway and drove till he could see a door. Theirs was the only vehicle outside the house. Owen stepped out onto crisp pink gravel and slipped his sunglasses over his eyes.

'I think we've landed.'

Mickey alighted minus his cigarette. He too donned sunglasses and together they approached the portal.

The door stood ajar, a thin dark line separating its mating parts. They could hear no noise, so listened longer, too nervous to knock. Mickey eased back his jacket and palmed the cool metal heel of his automatic. Owen let his cigarette fall, marking the perfect tiles.

'After you.'

'Maybe he's expecting us,' Mickey said.

'Naturally. Or someone who looks like us.'

Mickey pushed open the door and entered, his body language treating the bungalow like an unfamiliar and disreputable bar. Owen wasn't far behind. Together they circled furniture and made careful scrutiny of the distinguished gentleman's residence. The man himself was absent. There was no sign of a struggle, or of anybody having lived here recently. The place was spotlessly clean, no dust, everything from vases to the grand piano in harmony with its surroundings, perfectly balanced, each item of furniture, every picture and ornament complementing its neighbour as well as those objects and features across the room. Nothing jarred. Everything was in good taste. All fittings and cupboards were manufactured and installed to the most exacting standards. Their contents too, whether collectable or comestible, were scrupulously arranged and chosen. The eggs in the fridge were white and gorgeous, as were the porcelain cups and saucers. Leather bound volumes filled one whole wall; ancient; priceless; yet as new. They even smelled new, Mickey found, the print sharp and the pages virginal. He stood on a coffee-table and ran his fingers round the rim of a lampshade, but found no dirt. It was as if the very air was pure, timeless and uncorrupted by so much as foul language, bearing neither pollutants or germs. It was, Mickey thought, like Heaven.

'Now what do we do?'

He stepped off the coffee-table.

'Can you see a phone?'

'Kitchen,' he replied.

Owen went looking.

Mickey walked down a corridor past six bedrooms and stepped out onto a golf course.

Approaching aboard an electric golf cart was the unmistakable countenance of the distinguished gentleman, his eyes crystal clear, his features chiselled, his moustache immaculately groomed.

Owen laid a hand on Mickey's shoulder. 'Phone's out of order.'

Mickey didn't care, he was focused.

Owen watched too.

Who did he want to call anyway?

The distinguished gentleman's golf cart rolled to a halt two feet from the marble veranda.

Both men removed their shades in the sunshine, stowing them in breast pockets in a rehearsed reflex of politeness. Their host was smiling, setting at peace his guests. Owen and Mickey shook his stony hand in turn and nodded.

'Good to see you, boys,' said the distinguished gentleman. 'How was the trip up? Your first outing on the ladder?'

'Yes,' Mick answered.

'The trip was fine,' added Owen.

'Sir?'

'Call me Egon, son, my mother does.'

'Egon,' said Mickey. 'Your door was open on our arrival.'

'Sure, my door's always open.'

Mickey shuffled, feeling young and inexperienced next to this politician and statesman.

'I think what my partner means, Egon,' Owen clarified, looping his thumbs in his belt loops like John Wayne, 'is that your security appears lax. We're here to protect you. Make no mistake about that. It's just, well, our job would be a lot easier if you'd take these threats to your life seriously.'

'Threats, son?' Egon produced a cigar and lit it. 'You mean toward the man himself, the chief administrator of this splendid and diverse superenvironment we call Ileum?'

Something was dawning on our heroes.

'Yeah,' said Mickey.

Egon clamped his teeth round the cigar, fat and fuming, his fists clenched on his hips with indignity. 'So that's why the turd's in hiding. I impersonate him on a casual basis; you know, weekends mostly. Lately though I've being putting in a lot of overtime, even attending the odd official banquet. They'll be asking me to sign stuff next! I didn't realize his people were that worried. Must be a shit load of trouble.'

Mickey rushed back to the car to make sure of the money.

Owen slipped his shades back on and lit two cigarettes off Egon's cigar, handing one to Mick on his return, breathless but happy.

'Any beer in this establishment?'

'Sure, plenty,' said the impostor, now looking slack-jawed and portly.

They played cards by the swimming-pool and sank the empties, turning the water green with reflected bottles.

Toward evening, as the artificial light began to soften, they scoured the kitchen and made sandwiches.

'Not bad, eh?' said Egon. Then, in a room filled with animal trophies, he paused over the billiard table, plush and velvet. 'Hey, you boys really want to see something?'

They both agreed they did and followed their host to one of the lesser bedrooms, its silk and taffeta languid and flowing. Egon shouldered aside a wardrobe hewn from ebony to reveal an arched doorway the same quiet blue as the walls. Proud of the secret that was his to expose he turned the inset handle slowly, his tongue pushed behind his bottom lip and his mouth open. Beyond stretched a dim corridor that had no place in reality, being fully thirty metres long, a hundred times the depth of the wall into which it was constructed. At the end of the corridor was an ornate table and on the table a large box; only not a box, a sphere, a dark globe whose dimensions gave you a headache.

'Of course it's all an illusion,' Egon told them, and to prove it he reached in and lifted the box from the table.

The box-sphere was not as large as it appeared.

Was not a box.

'It gets heavier the longer you hold it,' said Egon. 'I've seen the man himself climb inside.'

'Inside what?' queried Mickey.

'Who knows - maybe the planet.' He smirked, juggling it from palm to palm like it was burning hot, clumsily pretending to drop it.

Owen let his ash fall to the carpet. 'Put it back.' Who did he think they were, his grandchildren?

'Hurting your eyes?'

'Just put it back.'

Egon returned the object to the table and closed the door.

Owen fell on the bed, drawing his pistol as he reclined via gravity.

'Don't shoot any holes in the ceiling!' Egon pleaded. 'It's just been painted.'

'Get the fuck out. I'm sleeping.'

'Sleeping?' said Mickey.

'Dead right. I suggest we all do.'

Egon nodded vigorously. 'Sure, sure; morning will come quicker and I like to get nine holes in before breakfast.'

Mickey watched him scuttle from the room. 'What's the problem?' he asked his partner, assiduously rubbing one eye.

Owen sat up. 'I think we're in deep shit.'

'So? I don't get it.'

'I don't believe Egon is who he says he is.'

'Then who is he?'

'Who we thought he was originally, that's who. The fucking genuine article. The chief administrator. The most powerful individual in the city. The mayor of Ileum. The genius behind this fairytale kingdom and the master of all he surveys. Only trouble is, he's fucking crazy.'

Mickey didn't say anything. He was experiencing some - snap! crackle! pop! - interference.

'We're here to fulfil our destinies,' continued Owen. 'We're been placed here for a purpose. Manipulated.' He scratched his chin, feet in the air like a chimpanzee.

'Are you suggesting there's a power vacuum among the higher echelons of privileged society and that we are merely pawns in someone else's chess game? Because if you are I'm comfortable with that and happy with the money,' said Mick, surprised a little by the sentence. Such profundities were way over his head.

'Really happy?'

'Well, it's exciting.'

'Better than killing wrongbodies?'

'Yeah. For now at least. And anyway, there's bound to be some shooting.'

Owen smirked and grunted. 'Checked your clip lately?'

Mickey checked.

'No bullets.'

'Hmm,' said Mick.

'The ceiling is safe then.'

For the two it was a strangely awkward moment, one to be shot from oblique angles with a cathartic absence of theme music, the camera slowly panning round as the intrepid pair silently reaffirmed their principles. They'd come a long way, this suggested. The movie was more than a theatre-going experience, it was for real. Ileum was for real. For false, possibly, too.

'We need to get out of here,' said Mickey, feeling a downer coming on.

But as a twosome or a threesome? Right now they were sitting ducks, dupes installed in the distinguished gentleman's residence as live targets for the sharpshooters poised to come to the rescue. Nobody watching TV would recognise them as anything more than lead-deserving villains, fleshy pouches whose blood and guts would be splattered across billions of hungry retinae, their obliteration and the saving of the distinguished gentleman providing a tasty and very public nine o'clock news filling.

ANARCHIST PLOT SMASHED! BIG CHIEF RESCUED FROM CERTAIN DEATH BY SELF-SACRIFICING POLICEMEN!

Owen and Mickey would be expected to play their full part in the charade.

But overtly?

Not so.

They made their minds up. They wouldn't go quietly. Or maybe they would.

'Here, put this in your pocket.'

'Ugh, it's heavy!'

'So's that case of money in the car, but you'd carry that, right?'

Mickey shrugged. 'I'd give the lot for some live ammunition.'

Owen agreed. He closed the door in the wall and with Mick's help slid the wardrobe back in place.

Outside the sun dimmed like a cooling bulb. Darkness emphasized the room lights and Owen reached for the switch.

'That's our cue.'

There was no way out. It was scripted. But they were undaunted. They'd improvise. A trawl of the house turned up a number of well-balanced steak knives and several lengths of what Owen's mum would call "good meat string".

Egon was roused from slumber and trussed like a turkey before being fastened to Mickey's back in a papoose made out of cut and torn cushion covers. The distinguished gentleman's surprise was comforting, suggesting as it did they were on the right track in regards to their paranoid thinking. Mickey found the weight uncomfortable but not overburdening. Balance was a problem, otherwise his load, gagged as it was, was manageable for, he reckoned, up to thirty minutes.

The intrepid pair mused over the money. They agreed it would be foolish to try and retrieve it from the car. One or the other would be booby-trapped. On the other hand, why go to the trouble of explosively rigging either cash or car when maximum TV gore would come from an open confrontation? Say five guys in peaked caps bursting in through the windows spraying the place with high-velocity bullets. Or one guy, good looking in a clean-shaven Aryan way, casually strolling through the front door with a news crew, a female reporter with a phallic mike and tight blonde hair, big eyes, taking out Owen and Mickey with his bare hands to the sound of bones breaking and throats being crushed in a subtle medley of understated violence, with her saying, 'I almost can't look.'

It made the car appear a safe bet.

Owen panicked briefly over the whereabouts of the keys, but Mickey was only joking.

His burden began to struggle. He adjusted it. The box in his jacket pocket had seemingly melted away, its previously exaggerated weight now no more than loose change.

Owen appeared in the darkened portal and waved him through, Mickey managing to strike Egon's head off the lintel. Outside everything was at peace. No helicopters flew. No special services personnel ran guns blazing from the topiary. It was cool. Pleasantly so. Mickey clambered into the back of the car and Owen drove round the bungalow whose white walls cast deep shadows. There was no predetermined route to their escape. Getting to the car was as much as they'd planned. But steering into the depths of the golf course seemed as good an idea as any. And that was where Owen took them, dancing with trees in the moonlight and leaving a trail of broken foliage.

Mickey stared out the rear window. After a few seconds he saw moving lights.

'Company,' he alerted, stroking his polished chin.

Owen drove blind.

Their hostage dribbled.

## A Vision Of The Future

Night was full of clouds. Thorp wished to scratch their soft underbellies and have them roll over like cats before a fire. But the Ventura wouldn't take him so high. Pa's locomotive, on the other hand, had the potential to climb up onto the starry mantelpiece and from there survey the length, breadth and depth of the firelit room. The two men shared a desire for escape, and in escaping, discovering the truth of the world, that truth lying beyond gravity and atmosphere in the colourless, odourless void.

Venus was Pa's goal. Thorp only wanted to be dropped off on the moon, his mistress silver and grey.

Circling over the city at night, he sensed its unnatural quiet, the gentle anguish of suicides banished, the sudden shriek of accidents muffled by their absence as everybody drove home safely. Palmersville was at peace. Ileum, too, the former enmeshed in the latter, like a facet of a glitterball. Thorp was resident in both, his beginnings distant, yet possible to call back, memories he had had no use for for decades. All but the apple tree were dusty having spent the intervening years packed into boxes in his subconscious.

He lit a Woodbine and draped his arm out the window. Below, rising like smoke, was a thin white coil corkscrewing upward. Soon the thread passed the car and climbed until it met the slowly moving clouds. And where there was one thread twisting up into the night, there were others. A few at first, then tens, a hundred white strands unravelling from the city beneath and joining with the misty roof overhead. Carefully he steered the Ventura through the growing forest. Each separate strand swayed loosely, a soft curl gently pulsing with light.

What lay at their source? Thin tentacles suspended between clouds and buildings, Thorp had never seen anything like them before. They were a new phenomenon. He steered the car to a terrestrial road and parked, alighting to investigate. Not recognizing the neighbourhood he paused a while to get his bearings. There were few people afoot, but he paid these special regard. None seemed aware of the threads rising above. Mostly they were contented couples, walking arm in arm. All appeared happy. Enraptured. He entered a tenement block and choose a flat at random. Access was easy; he hadn't lost his talents, just his customers. The flat was deathly quiet. Thorp smiled and walked into a bedroom, a child's bedroom, toys on the floor and heroes pasted to the walls. A thread coiled from a young girl, rising to the ceiling. At first he thought she must be dead, that the collection of souls had, unknown to him, become automated. The girl breathed, however.

Thorp watched, puzzled. Time alone passed. The child sat up and he thought he'd woken her. But no, the girl's eyes were shut. She was asleep.

The base of the twisting thread encompassed her small body, wrapping her in its warm glow. It became suddenly taut and she was lifted from her bed, her arms folded and her features beatific. She bobbed as if held in a thin plastic sack below the ceiling, before being drawn through it like an olive up a straw. Thorp took the stairs, running from floor to floor and entering the rooms above hers to see the girl emerge through carpets and furniture, ascending at a constant rate no matter the obstacle. He got to the roof and spun around, amazed to see that every thread had a body at its end, a dangling bundle of soft white light. The dead were being rescued, he thought. Only not the dead. They were, he guessed, heading for a better world, a world of respite. Where? Thorp couldn't say. Helpless, he watched the girl ascend through the roof and slowly rise, drawn upward into the clouds as if plucked from time. It was beautiful.

Could Hell be far behind? Had it already arrived? Was that what was sneaking up, the precincts of the dead percolating through the as yet unscalded beans of the living?

Thorp lay flat on his back and watched as hundreds of lives disappeared into the sky. He wondered what Byamol would make of it, of what the demon would do for souls now that death had been circumvented, not even leaving a corpse behind. Call it progress? He guessed not.

Automation? That didn't ring true, either. There was another purpose here. It was as if there was a general recall of angels; like embassy staff evacuated before a war. Angels, he imagined, no-one - certainly not himself - had known existed previously.

Representatives on Earth...

## The Honest Adventurers

It began snowing around the twelfth hole. Owen slid and slewed on the immaculate putting surface. Deliberately, Mickey thought, hunched in the back observing tracer red-streaking the firmament, splashing dramatically wide. They really weren't trying, he concluded. A tree exploded in their wake as if cleverly timed. It was a stunt they were filming, a complex series of near misses and pyrotechnic rain. Owen had no idea where he was driving; but it didn't matter so long as the over-staffed pursuit continued to target fresh air and leaves.

Then the car hit a bunker and sank, sand covering the front drive wheels.

'Shit!' Owen shouted. His door was stuck. He clambered out the window as a searchlight tickled the vehicle. Opening the rear hatch he helped Mickey out over the parcel shelf. The distinguished gentleman's head sagged alarmingly.

'Okay?'

'Okay - I think.' Mickey juggled steak knives, snowflakes and lasers glinting off their toothed blades.

'Okay...' repeated Owen as the two ran for cover.

They'd been set up. Even the weather was against them. Blood against a backdrop of snow, corpses silhouetted...

Owen kicked in a door to a single storey building for the use of greenkeeping equipment.

'Siege?' queried Mick, crashing inward.

'Fuck that,' Owen replied. 'Start digging.'

Mickey dug, and waited to be told why.

'There can't be too much earth between us and the actual superstructure. Perhaps only a few centimetres of topsoil. Then we just have to find a way into whatever office space or service tunnel we encounter. They must run the length and breadth of Mountfield.'

Administrative cells.

Function suites catering to visiting generals.

Discussion rooms and lecture theatres.

Private cinemas.

Toilets.

Mickey dug with a fury, Egon lolling on his back while he attacked the dirt floor with tools and machinery.

'COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!'

'That's it, we're surrounded.'

'RELEASE YOUR HOSTAGE AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED!'

At least the searchlights let them see what they were doing.

'YOU HAVE EXACTLY THREE MINUTES TO SURRENDER!'

'Perfect,' remarked Owen. 'We made the commercial break. From here on it's easy.'

Mickey redoubled his excavation efforts, tearing the earth apart with his bare hands.

The minutes passed. There was a final crackle of static. The pickaxe Owen wielded screeched through metal. Smiling maniacally he levered it back and forth like a giant tin-opener.

Smoke grenades made the building suddenly inhospitable.

Mickey dropped through the hole. Owen followed, breaking his ankle; yet he remained optimistic. 'Probably not as bad as it looks,' he said cheerfully. 'Come on.'

Mickey stopped. 'We forgot the money,' he said.

They were in a square passage lined with doors, some closed, some open.

'No we didn't,' said Owen.

'You brought it with you?'

'No, I left it behind.'

'On purpose?'

'Of course not on purpose!'

Mickey nodded, picked Owen up and started off down the passage, his limbs imbued with a peculiar energy. The combined weights of the men were easily bearable, he found. He simply focused on the way ahead, not stopping till he met with a wall that housed an elevator.

He was superhuman.

The elevator shaft, like the car, was invisible. They descended amid weather, encapsulated in a two metre square box whose dimensions were street lit and rain splashed.

They'd escaped.

## Comeuppance

'You didn't think you'd get away with it, did you?'

Portentous words. Thorp smiled. He wasn't about to deny anything. Byamol picked his teeth a while before continuing. 'The reason I'm unhappy, Thorp, is that I'm surrounded by treachery.'

But you're a demon, a high-ranking fiend, he wanted to say but couldn't.

'I don't like it when the predictable becomes unpredictable. I don't like it at all. I prefer everything neat and tidy. You understand? Order. I like order. I want order, Thorp, and what you have brought about is disorder.'

'But, but...'

'No buts.' Byamol's grey fingers tightened at the throat of Thorp's trenchcoat, the misshapen knuckles staring him in the face. 'I hold you personally responsible.'

'Me? Why?' His back was to the wall.

The demon picked his teeth once more, squirming a long nail between sharp incisors as if tightening screws. Or oiling a portcullis. Drool hung from his pocked chin like mozzarella. His free hand dropped, only to rise in a fist. 'The missing soul, Thorp. You let her go, didn't you?'

He nodded.

'I thought so. The filthy priests got to you, eh?'

He nodded a second time.

Byamol slapped him on the shoulder. 'Thought as much. Well...see you around!'

'You're letting me go?' Thorp asked, incredulous, burning his lips, his cigarette end poker hot.

Byamol offered a quizzical look. 'Sure - why not? I've a sinner or two to fry before breakfast. And besides, I like you. There's history between us, eh?'

Thorp shrugged. Alone, he rocked on his heels, hands in his pockets, staring up at the stars. The sky was clear now. Gone were the clouds, their airy bellies full of the blessed. No souls littered the ground. No souls occupied his back seat. The Ventura's boot was empty of expensive lacy treats.

He put his sunglasses on and walked to the nearest pub.

## Reality Takes A Beating

Fifteen minutes, pondered Nancy, what can I do for fifteen minutes that will take my mind off being bored? It was absurd, she knew; even felt a little ashamed. How could waiting in a graveyard in the dead of night for a known killer leave you bored? But the fact remained. Waiting was tedious, yet she'd thought it wise to arrive early. This meeting was on Mingis' terms. She didn't want to lose him. Her involvement was deep, deeper still with the appearance of Henry Eels. She'd guessed he'd be here. Their paths were undeniably crossed. Whether he had been joking about the picnic was another matter. She was certain his evening had been spent in criminal pursuit of the dread brothers, one or either destined to turn up in ten or so minutes. It was frustrating. She clasped her coat tightly round her waist and lurked in the shadows of the church, its structure circular and buttressed by centuries of ghosts.

'You're early,' he said.

'So are you.'

'You got my note?'

Nancy tried to make out his features in the dark. 'What note?'

'Ah.'

'Now you're going to ask me how come I knew where to meet you.'

'Right. How come?'

'Another source.'

'Mysterious.'

'Very. But you know him, or of him.'

'Ah.'

'Well?'

'Huh?'

'Did you bring the picnic?' she joked, enjoying their frivolous tête-à-tête.

He was silent a moment. Then, 'I left it in the car.'

'Oh.'

'Hm?'

'Nothing.'

'Sssh!'

Nancy shushed and listened. What she heard sounded very like a scream. For the first time that night she shivered. 'That was near.'

Henry said nothing. He tugged her sleeve and left her side, giving her no choice but to follow.

He was carrying a video camera, she realized. He ran at a crouch as if ducking gunfire, head up, lens to his right eye, infra red scanning the bleakness. The closest street light was a mile away. She caught up with him by an iron gate in an iron fence.

'See anything?'

'No.'

'There's five minutes yet.'

Together they circled the church, the hands of whose clock swung steadily vertical. No bells rang from the tower, but she knew it was twelve when the ground shook and the graves opened.

Henry filmed attentively.

Most of the dead were insubstantial, hazy ghouls, shapeless and without direction as they walked into each other, through each other. But two shapes were more coherent, broad and solid men whose features, although cowled in darkness, shone with a dull grey malevolence carved from the weight of years. The ghouls faded into the night like steam, but the brothers remained.

They were the image of one another. Stood side by side they were impossible to tell apart. Nancy peered intently from her vantage by the church wall, the two figures framed against a less dark sky. The chill outlined them, loaned them definition, till at last their faces could be seen, grim and cold, yet with a depth to their matched visages that spoke of hidden yearnings. There was more to these two than murder. More to the brothers than death dealing and mutual loathing. More than that driving force. Nancy blinked and lost one of them, his shape dissolving. The remainder, she couldn't say which, walked toward her and passed her wearing a dirty jacket and jeans. Henry panned, swivelling smoothly on his heel, the red light flashing on his camera as wordlessly he dogged the killer's heels.

That he would kill, and horribly, was to Nancy obvious. That he demanded an audience was repulsive. Still, she followed, intrigued. Perhaps Mingis, this or his brother, whichever they trailed, merely wished to confess his guilt, for his crimes to be borne out on film. Nancy guessed him to be the Mingis who resented his brother's enjoyment of the bloodfest, the Mingis she had first encountered on the quay, brooding over the river like a suicide. Had she met the other? She didn't know. It didn't matter. She walked in the wake of this Mingis now, Henry calmly recording his passage as you might that of a bride down the aisle. Or a convict to the gallows...a passage specific, yet full of unknowns, promises, expectations and fears weighing the body of the subject on whom the camera was trained.

Mingis knew fear, Nancy thought. He breathed it.

Did he feel it also? That question remained.

'So just how did you two meet?' Henry inquired, his posture balanced, his manner casual.

Nancy, at his shoulder, wondered how he could talk, walk and film at the same time.

'You're enjoying this, aren't you?' she replied, crossing her arms.

'I'd be insane otherwise,' said Henry. 'How else do you cope with following murderous psychopaths in the dark? Our friend here might have us for breakfast, a fact which I'm sure hasn't escaped your attention, just as it hasn't escaped mine.'

'That's as may be,' Nancy answered, smiling. 'I don't have any choice though. I'm here because I have to be. You understand. Opportunities like this don't come along every day and I'm sure as fuck not going to miss this one.' She spoke with conviction, yet remained unconvinced, adding, almost apologetically, clothing it in humour, 'This piece might even bag me an award.'

'Your motives are selfish,' he observed, not looking at her, fidgeting as they reached a bend in the narrow road. Ancient walls rose either side. They passed a series of park benches bolted to the pavement, interspersed with overflowing litter baskets. Several large rats scampered nearby.

Nancy found her whereabouts strange. 'No more selfish than yours, mister documentary film maker. I'm sure there are awards for such productions, too.'

'Yeah,' he quipped, wondering if it was empathy he was feeling - so long since he'd experienced an emotion not directly attributable to her, 'it's all fame and fortune, baby.'

'Wild nights and parties.'

'Too much to drink.'

'Too little to say...'

Mingis had halted. Henry employed his zoom from ten metres.

There were steps leading down under a stone arch, worn at their centres by centuries of feet. To the right was a small open space, the hillside terraced and planted with stunted trees. To the left was newer brick, and a doorway barely visible.

Mingis took hold of the handle. Nancy glanced back the way they'd come, but despite her memory of the distance as short she could no longer see the church, which should have been uphill from here. Instead, rising on the horizon like blunt square fingers, was a row of high-rise office blocks, structures, in scale at least, not native to Palmersville. Monoliths of a post-industrial age, they impaled the sky, sharp ends buried deep in the naked flesh of space.

Very dramatic, she thought. Almost surreal. But that they were solid she was in no doubt. Which begged a question...

Henry edged forward.

Mingis appeared to wait till the whole door was in frame before turning the handle.

Nancy tip-toed, breath held as the door swung inward to reveal a golden-lit passageway made summery by floral wallpaper. Old photographs were suspended from brass hooks on long pieces of frayed string.

Mingis stepped inside, leaving the door open for them to follow.

Henry needed no second invitation. He picked his way carefully down the steps and into the house.

Nancy, her curiosity whetted, her uncertainty pushed aside, was as close behind as it was possible to get without interfering with the video's field of reference, that field now sloping upward in the guise of thickly carpeted stairs. A banister rail creaked under Mingis' heavy hand as he moved deeper into the house.

Who might the victim be? Could she stomach the proximity of violent death? Could she be, would she be, a party to murder? The whole episode was illusory. But they were solid, these three interlopers approaching a rendezvous with murder.

She rode Henry's ankles up the steep flight.

Wouldn't now be a good time to call the police?

Mingis turned left.

Hers wasn't a sexual excitement; the opposite of that. Nor a professional one, the blood and guts of her job. These were not events she could factually write about.

Then why was she here? Research? She recalled the image of the office blocks, magnificent and strong. It was the city she was interested in, the city from whose ancient earth he had sprung. She felt at home here. She belonged. The city welcomed her with open arms.

What kind of a place was it? A place she knew intuitively, feared and loved.

The wallpaper coating the landing walls emphasized its narrowness. Yellowed bars were entwined by thin stalks of faded gold that led to metallic leaves and tired crimson blooms. The bars created a dim channel along which they moved, a deep forest path, Mingis at their van closing in on a door old and warped in its frame. He came to rest with its knotted wood panels two inches from his nose. Henry and Nancy stopped behind, the vertical bars solidifying, the flowers and thorns, which was all the leaves were, tight and sharp, seeming to spread and grow as if at the passage of time. Perhaps Sleeping Beauty lay within, Nancy mused, a somnolent princess, hair combed and nightdress virginal, a cross at her bare throat, a steady rhythm in her chest that was unbroken for centuries, while the forest nestled thickly outside her door. Perhaps she awaited her prince, and a kiss. But it was a troll making ingress, a beast of crueller appetites, a nightmarish figure come to rend her tissue and suck her blood. And they were two feet behind this monster, the thick saliva of guilt in their throats.

Mingis opened the door. A draught escaped, a perfumed river of air that confirmed this to be a woman's chamber. No surprise, reasoned Nancy coolly. Murdered girls, beautiful girls, were so much more newsworthy than murdered boys. Would he rape her? Was this to be a sex crime? She felt sure the meat would be choice for his banquet. The choicer the meat the starker the remorse in the glutton. But which brother loomed here? For one would celebrate the act while the other mourn.

# Part Two: THE MOTHER METROPOLIS

Chapter Four: Those Demonstrative Urges And Spontaneous Laughs

Benny Zine, the indefatigable being, thumped nosily down the boulevard wearing a vest and Y-fronts. The patrol car in hot pursuit mounted the kerb and sent pedestrians scattering, narrowly missed a hot-dog stand and an old lady selling flowers - who did not gaze up from her crossword but did drop ash from her cigarette - coloured lights blazing, siren loud, before colliding head on with three police motorcyclists, part of the District 17 stunt 'n' trick team. Bodies floated acrobatically, somersaulting into newspaper stands and litter bins. Motorcycles juddered like dying antelope in the road, scratched steel and grated flesh mesmerizing the boulevard while Benny nipped and tucked away.

Women loved him. Few attached blame. The newspapers lauded him, as his crimes were crimes of passion.

Once again, he made the front page.

Benny Zine, the indefatigable being. But was he human?

## Day Of The Year

Swene admired himself in the leather jacket. The zip winked and gleamed. The elbows stretched and cracked. It was the day before Christmas. There was snow on the windowsills and a strange air in his flat, an air that was somehow breathed, as if these rooms were lungs. He had two weeks' holiday, a fortnight's escape from the car factory's mundane interior, its sameness that imbued his working self with a slack-jawed indifference. Its music! There, he was a robot, a cog in the machine. It didn't matter what rolled off the production line; he barely noticed. Mostly all he saw was superstructure anyway, ribs and braces, mountings and brackets, buckets of them welded and welded over and over, screw fixings and bolts protruding, panels matched, dressing the wasted bodies like death in reverse. He still hadn't heard from Owen and Mickey. Their numbers were engaged, off the hook. Holed up somewhere, he supposed, up to their necks. Saturday nights just weren't the same. He'd become nervous of outdoors since a day in November when he'd met a girl at a bus stop, yellow hair spiked through dirt and sweat. She'd pleaded not for bus fare but directions, co-ordinates. He hadn't any. She'd taken hold of his collar and pressed her face to his in what wasn't a kiss, but an attempt to look inside his head. Her eyes garishly close, seeing more than he ever could of the inner workings, the peanut flicking and banana peeling going on in his dream theatre. There was very little between them at that moment, perhaps only time and space. Swene had had no choice but to see into the vacant lot of her skull, feel the tug of that void as it pulled him in. She was desperate, given to accosting strangers in some vague hope of redemption, of finding her way back to wherever it was she'd left. And he'd pulled away, pushed her from him. Lost himself...

He took the jacket off; put it on again; took it off. Draped it over the sofa. Took a piss, shaking himself for a good five minutes, determined to squeeze out a last last drop. Gave up. Walked back into the living-room and without pause picked the jacket up, threw his arms into it, shrugged and left the flat forgetting his keys.

Home, defamiliarized, was somewhere else. There was no going back, a voice that might have been his own, might have been the girl's, whispered to him. In which ear he couldn't tell. He had a job to do, the voice suggested. Beyond the factory gates, in a world not governed by the clock, by line speed, by sequence, by strange goggle-eyed amphibians...a world in which his place was not submerged, adhered by his own sweat to a forklift truck.

Standing outside his front door he could hear the phone ringing. Swene put his hands in his pockets and walked off up the street. There was nothing else for it. He had seen the light, and it wasn't fluorescent.

## Orangepeel

She tied their shoelaces, wiped their noses, packed them off to school. Not her own children. What if she had those? Was she fit to be a mother? It was at least a part-time job, looking after other people's offspring. There was no escape from your own brood. She didn't think she could cope with pregnancy. She didn't even enjoy the sex part. All that probing and pushing. The intimacy. Something dead in her just wanted to be alone.

A fly buzzed, destroying her reverie. Large and black, it settled on the kitchen curtains and rubbed its head confusedly. Jenny sat with her chin resting on her palm, legs crossed under the table. The fly was an anomaly. It was winter, everything mad yet slow, shoppers buying last minute presents, traffic strobed by frozen water being overtaken by those on foot, ankles wrapped in plastic and foam. There shouldn't be any flies, she told herself. At home this morning; that is, in her attic bedsit, as this was the school holidays, so she had no need to ready children and breakfasts, she let her head fill with coffee steam in an effort to clear it. The fly's buzzing puzzled her - but now it had vanished, perhaps to the other side of her square container, living-room divided from kitchen by an invisible forcefield, one that kept rug and sofa-bed and underwear that side, table, chair, cupboard, kettle and sink this. The space over there was dim and grey while over here it was cheery and white, a contrast line acting as a border centrally round the room. Sometimes she spent hours passing from one side to the other. Sometimes moments. But nothing ever changed. There was merely light and dark. It was how she saw herself, in terms of opposites. Where the two sides met was a vague line, neither here or there. Not pretty, not ugly, not brilliant, not stupid, not anything defining as a personality. Not anything much. Just Jenny Pith. Just Orangepeel.

She was feeling sorry for herself, she thought. She hadn't felt like that when she woke up. Must be the cold. Only it wasn't cold. The house was never that. Too much money to burn. Must be the emptiness. Only it wasn't empty, there were rooms full of family and relatives downstairs. Only none of them were hers. On normal days she felt like she belonged. She had a role, which she occasionally enjoyed. She had the kids, toward whom she was always good and kind. They loved her, and by loving her let her love herself. But it was Christmas Eve. She needed escape.

She pulled on her big boots and her big coat and stood before the door, terrified of bumping into any one of the dozen or so people currently holidaying at the doctor's. They'd be pleased to see her, she knew, whisk her off downstairs for alcohol and carolling. Jenny turned her back on the door and, standing on a chair, opened the kitchen window and stepped out onto the mansard.

Her big boots crunched adhesively. Closing the window behind she noticed the latch drop. She'd be returning via a different route then, if she returned at all.

If, she thought. If she'd been on that plane with her friends and died with them beneath the harbour waters. If she'd jumped as she'd meant to. If she hadn't encountered a man in sunglasses there on her chosen roof. If he hadn't spoken. If his voice hadn't been so familiar. His manner. His face. If...

Jenny's soles crunched. She was certain she'd never met him before. As certain as she could be about anything. What he was doing there, his role in her final act, disturbed her; but not as much as it ought to, she reckoned, hands in pockets as the knowledge of Thorp wriggled in her brain like a defrosted caterpillar. He was to collect her soul, that she relinquished voluntarily...only not. She'd been unable. Not, she realized, because she was scared of death, of falling those unnumbered floors, rather because...yes, she was dead already. She had no soul to give up.

She had no life. That was it. Jenny's past was mostly somebody else's. Her sick mother's, her demanding friends'. She deserved, now that she was alone, an existence to match her expectations. Only she didn't have any. So she walked, did Orangepeel, and she gazed in many shop windows. She watched others, girls and women, and wondered how they went about being themselves. It was cold, freezing, but the temperature was the least of her problems. That said, she had no money. Chewing her lip having followed her nose, Jenny Pith found herself reading a help wanted in a frosted pane, where the frost was, on the inside, stylized icing sugar.

She could smell the coffee. She nodded to herself, deciding this was as good a place to start as any.

She marched inside, quickly filled out an application, the manager looked on, smiling wryly, hung up her big coat, took off her big boots, slipped on the proffered six-inch heels, the too small uniform and frilly pinny...

It was the first night of the rest of her life.

## Seeing Was

All the lights that shone shone with a tempered urgency. They knew what was coming, suspended from trees and ceilings, perched on the ends of poles. They shared an urgency with the clocks of the city. The clocks rounded on the hour. Presents rustled and seethed beneath boughs of wood and plastic, seasonal wrapping straining against the ties of ribbons and the adhesion of sticky tape. And then it happened, and the city sighed. Cars let out their breath down still crowded streets. People laughed and smiled, or turned over in their sleep, imagining the faces of children, if they were not children themselves. The city lay pregnant with dreams. Lovers joined. Friend toasted friend. Strangers passed, shadows juddering about their feet. In Palmersville. In a million places. In Ileum, whose cloak surrounded every suburb, be it in Greenland or Gondwanaland. How else might Santa get about? Ileum, a city by every conceivable name. A city of innumerable light fittings, gas and electric; crystals suspended, candles manifold, dripping wax and casting a infinite array of shades, some short-lived, others lingering, nipping at bed socks and investing themselves in skirting, climbing inside ears and ascending nostrils. The light reached everywhere, whatever its source. It used whatever means available, be it natural or manmade. It delivered its spectrum, mostly invisible, unseen by humans, and its spectrum was, without question, recognized. The light was truth. How could anyone question the reality of objects unveiled by their eyes? Only by shutting them, but by then the light was inside, and its version, what it revealed, what it displayed, what it presented of the world, was the default format adopted by both dream and nightmare. Awake or asleep, the light was ubiquitous. What it revealed could not be gainsaid. But just how reliable a source of information was it? Might not the light, the truth, and therefore perceived reality, be tampered with? Jones thought so. Jones knew, in fact...

## The Chimney Brigade

Christmas Day.

Detectives Stack, Pot and Cowls stood admiring the wreckage of the light aeroplane. The tail fin was just visible, wedged between a sideboard and a fridge that had presumably been ejected from the neighbouring kitchen by the violent intrusion of the fuselage, which, wings and all, had collided with the sixty-sixth storey apartment of one Vernon Jones at around two minutes past twelve that morning. It was six-thirty now, and Stack wondered just whose pond he had pissed in to get this assignment when he'd a wife and child back home, the latter four years old, the former just at that stage where she was beginning to see his work as a problem. Not that he'd been home a lot lately, and then only to half-remembered conversations, a numbness between his ears that could only be dissolved by TV. Dog tired and itching. Dinner in the oven? No chance. In the past family had been the problem; or the lack of it, as conception for Cherry had been the impossible dream. He juggled his balls, hands in trouser pockets. Was there a second child in them? It was what Cherry wanted now that Franky had started nursery school, a baby to fill her days.

'I thought it was a little too quiet,' said Pot, hunching his shoulders against the cold.

'Just the usual pre-festive hiatus,' Cowls explained. 'Even the crazy people take holidays.'

And it had been quiet, Stack thought. Too quiet. He'd heard homicide had started playing role games, some lying under sheets in the morgue while others searched for clues under their toenails.

'What's the story?'

Pot let his shoulders fall. 'Attempted murder.' He gauged the other's faces. 'I know, there're easier ways, but Vernon couldn't have been expecting a plane in through his window.'

'He was home?'

Cowls nodded. 'In bed with his wives...'

'Three of them,' Pot added.

'Three wives?' Stack felt sorry for the man, then changed his mind.

'He's the nephew of that industrialist, the one kicking up a stink down Parliament Square.'

'Gerrymander Jones?'

'That's the guy; more enemies than a flu bug in June.'

'So you think this was politically motivated? Some kind of revenge attack, only not aimed at Jones himself but his nephew and associate.'

'Right...'

'Or an accident.'

Stack was confused.

'Freak weather conditions,' said Pot, shrugging.

'Maybe even suicide,' Cowls opined. 'Note the pilot's death and nobody else's.'

'Then why am I here?'

Pot and Cowls stared at each other. 'We thought forensics had sent you.'

'Yeah, to photograph the scene. That's what you do, isn't it?'

'I don't photograph the scenes of suicides or accidents,' Stack outlined. 'I'm attached to the PR department at Metrodine, seconded to police duty.'

The blank looks were to be expected. Stack hoped he didn't have to go on to explain his detective badge. He knew Pot and Cowls vaguely, from working on other cases; they weren't overly investigative, always choosing the easiest case scenario. Probably they got home of an evening.

He sighed. 'Why don't I take a look anyway, who knows what I might find.'

'Go ahead.' Pot moved away from the door. Behind him were five uniformed officers.

Cowls tapped him on the shoulder. 'We'll be in the coffee shop on the roof if you want us, otherwise we'll see you back at the station.'

Stack nodded and approached the cops.

They squirmed out of his way, not really interested, a crime scene detachment that fascinated - or had. He worried it was infectious, the empty looks and cynicism. At least he had his camera. Through the lens he could alter perspective without separating himself from the human scale of the awfulness; the mutilated bodies, the broken faces, the shock of lives brutally ended. His detachment was more that of a surgeon than a soldier. He still wanted answers, still needed to piece together what remained. But his secondment, now in its third month, left him full of a soft cold rage.

Public relations: not what he expected.

'There're using you to smooth over edges,' Cherry derided. 'What's so important? Metrodine disgusts me; it's cancerous.'

She was right, of course, yet he'd gone into it with his eyes open. Only now his eyes had matchsticks in them.

The apartment was voluminous. The aircraft had almost fitted the window, so there wasn't much structural damage. Neither had there been any fire. The pilot was killed in the crash. He asked one of the cops what had happened to the body. The cop didn't know. And Vernon, nephew of that other Jones?

'Hospital.'

'He was injured?'

'No, he owns it.'

Three wives and a hospital, thought Stack. Powerful relations. What else? He'd never heard of Vernon Jones until this morning. Now here he was taking pictures of the man's apartment. There was something impersonal about the decor, however. The furniture too was neutral, lacking any individuality. There were no family pictures or quirky oddments, nothing to say anybody lived here full-time. It was like a hotel room, he thought. Or a safe house.

Stack used a roll of film, wished the officers Happy Christmas and made for the stairs.

Pot and Cowls were laughing over coffee froth, smoking ridiculously large cigars which they stabbed at the skyline, reminiscing over butchery and incarceration.

'You all done?'

'Yes...' He stood by the glass wall admiring the view; buildings wrapped in a torpid sack of morning, a huge smoke-filled lung awaiting a new day's illumination.

'Find anything?'

'Just a piece of wing in a toilet.'

The detectives nodded, smirking wisely. It was useless Stack telling them anything, at least anything sensible. He was strangely contemplative, as if being roused from his bed at 3AM on Christmas Day had instilled in him a new perspective. Suddenly the camera to him was a thing of truth and beauty, not as Metrodine's PR department saw it, a tool in the war of reality, a weapon deployed against revolution. No wonder Cherry was cold toward him. She had friends who used cameras, moving and still, image fiends some might possibly consider dangerous. They were truth seekers, he realized, not glamorizers. He had not understood. Metrodine had given him this eye for their own purposes. Stack was quietly pliant, a piece of corporate machinery whose previous incarnation had trawled newspapers for possible libellous statements, ammunition in a conflict he hadn't known existed. He hadn't known anything, come to think of it. Staring out over the city now he felt sick. He trembled. Two thirds water, nine tenths ignorance.

'Vertigo,' said Pot. 'Better sit down.'

'Yeah, take the weight off your feet, detective,' added Cowls. 'Up here we all get a bit dizzy.'

He sat. Pot gestured and moments later Stack was presented with a full steaming cup of brown liquid.

'Cigar?'

'No; thanks.'

'Please yourself.'

Pot and Cowls exchanged secrets, dropped huge clustered rings of ash on the floor.

He foamed his upper lip.

'Is that right your wife's an actress?' Cowls wanted to know.

Stack was momentarily frightened to answer. Why was he being quizzed about his wife? Were they pumping him for information? 'Yes,' he mumbled. 'Kind of. She was in a few commercials; some low-budget independent stuff.'

'Until you knocked her up, eh?'

He found a pretend smile he hadn't known he had.

'I remember her,' Pot said, waving his cigar as if at some powerful insight. 'That ad for dermatological cream. She was sat naked astride a rocket!'

'Wow,' Cowls chimed, eyebrows raised, 'yes. She was a model?'

Pot slapped the table, filling Stack's saucer. 'That's her! Molasses, sweet Cherry Molasses!'

Cowls was shaking his head now. 'You lucky bastard, Stack. How'd you get your hands on her?'

'She ran me over,' he said without thinking.

Both men looked at him as if he was stupid.

I've just given them a fact, he thought. Not what they wanted. But she had, she'd knocked him down outside a pub. It had been the day of his mother's funeral. He'd gone to the pub alone, rather than to the ceremony. She'd been taking part in a low budget feature, the shooting of it illegal. But then why go to the trouble of getting a permit when you could snatch a take in half an hour with no-one the wiser? He'd stepped into the road and she'd run him over.

'I mean - it was an accident.'

They looked at each other again.

'How come they made you a detective?' Pot asked, changing the subject.

Stack was even less comfortable. 'The badge is for access,' he offered, peering down at his coffee. 'I collect information, but I don't act on it.'

'That must be our job,' joked Cowls.

'Yeah?' queried Pot. 'I thought we just fucked around.'

'Oh, we do that; but sometimes we're obliged to solve cases. Earn our pay, so to speak.'

A look of mock surprise came over Pot's bland features. 'Hear that, Stack? Some of us have to work for a living.'

They were on the offensive now, he thought. They'd concluded they needn't be afraid of him. They understood he was just a flunky, not some Metrodine spy.

He had a beautiful wife. A safe job.

He was nobody.

And they carried guns.

'Why don't you pay for the coffees,' Cowls suggested. Then he and Pot scraped their plastic chairs and left.

Stack picked up the table phone and dialled. It was close to eight in the morning. No reply. He expected Franky would be up, he and Cherry opening presents Cherry had mostly bought. She knew it would be him calling, he supposed.

## Pagan

Being an orphan was good for a lot of things. For a start, you owed no loyalty to any family or clan. None of your friends were chosen for you. You could come and go as you pleased. Pagan was only loyal to himself, inasmuch as he wouldn't let himself down, at least not intentionally. His success arose from his efficiency as a foot soldier. It was a role he fitted comfortably, that of mercenary, and one he chose to exploit with a freedom born of not caring in the least about consequences. He lacked a moral code, and therefore a conscience. But his freedom was tempered by Vernon, not to mention Vernon's three wives, Valery, Veronica and Violet. The Witches, he called them, schooled in the dark arts. Often he would act as chauffeur, driving directionless about town, following strangers on whom they'd practise spells.

Vernon himself would be away on business, his business being organized crime.

When not chauffeuring the Witches Pagan ran money, dropping fat envelopes through letterboxes, collecting and distributing bribes. It was easy work, seldom violent. He had an excellent memory for detail, a mental prowess Vernon had seized upon in regard to his favouring no written records. Pagan could remember every drop he'd ever made; the amount, the date. Nothing was signed for. Vernon only took Pagan's word. If a body claimed not to have received a donation when Pagan clearly stated it had, then it was Pagan Vernon believed.

He had the face of an angel. He was sixteen.

The Witches sometimes played with him, squeezing their breasts into his face, inviting him to lick between their thighs. They'd giggle over his erection and take his seed in their mouths, passing it between them like schoolgirls sharing bubble-gum. They scared him shitless, about the only thing that did. Not that he was afraid of Vernon finding out; Vernon already knew everything.

People often pointed guns at Pagan. Today being no exception, he sat calmly with his hands on the wheel while the cold steel barrel of a shotgun pressed a circle in his cheek.

The man holding it was short and curly-haired, receding, bit of an Art Garfunkel type, wearing a suit too big for him. His companion, fair-haired like Pagan, tongue lolling like a Golden Retriever, rifled through the plastic bag on the passenger seat, sliding cash out of envelopes. This man's suit was too small, stretched across back and shoulders and half way up his muscled arms.

'How're we doing over there?' short man asked of stocky.

'Okay. Should we leave a tip?'

'Sure, whatever makes you comfortable.'

Stocky man prodded Pagan, who turned his head slightly. 'Here you go, kid. For your trouble.'

'Thanks.'

'Think nothing of it...'

Then were gone then, vanishing like ghosts, melting into a backdrop of jumbled shop windows and derelict lots.

He looked at the money, threw it on the dash top. What would Vernon say? He'd been a sitting duck, had offered no resistance. Truth was he hadn't seen them coming.

He'd lost thirty-six thousand in cash and hadn't seen them coming! He was taken by surprise, a fact which undermined his much treasured invulnerability.

What now? Vernon wouldn't kill him, he felt sure of that; he'd make a living example of him instead.

Who were they, he kept thinking, that they could sneak up on him like that?

It was unbelievable. There were tears in his eyes. He wiped his nose on his fist.

## The Restless People

New Year's Eve.

At this time of year, post Christmas, Roger Coaltrain liked to stay in bed. The festive season was too exhausting. There were too many false pictures out there, too many Happy Endings. Everything and everybody had to be nice. It made Roger sick to think about it, all those smiling elves and benign references to Jesus. He longed for February and some renewed cynicism, some honest to God filth and corruption he and his crew could wallow in. Up until about the middle of December things had been pretty normal; there was much madness in the city, chaos aplenty to subvert and interpret. Yet behind it all was a wave of consciousness the full weight of which was about to topple the government. Not that the government had fallen, for its facade remained, but Roger was uncannily aware of a coup unfurling beyond Parliament's picture windows.

Its timing was perfect. The city barely noticed, being too involved with coloured lights and pageants.

He'd phoned Nancy Kowolski at the paper but was told she was off work. Due to illness? Nancy? Whoever he'd spoken to hadn't provided an answer.

That was yesterday. Today he forced himself out of bed, resolved to call on her at home.

The world was suddenly an unfamiliar one, he thought, driving through slow traffic, water frozen stiff in gutters and drains. Coldness permeated everything, made thick the air and turgid the minds of men and women, their hopeless meandering about the precincts of shopping centres taking on a robotic gait, bags of polythene and leather swinging through impossibly small arcs from hands and shoulders. He'd worked on a documentary once whose subject was depression; mental and physical, the weight of it all pervasive, a season not unlike this, a weather system that could hold a city under its influence. A large black umbrella, he remembered thinking, beneath which you could no longer tell if it was raining or the sun was shining. Palmersville had that look about it now; swathed in shadow, hidden from itself, gathered about a knot it daren't loosen for fear of flying apart.

He braked hard, swerved, hit a curb, mounted the pavement, came to a stop by a newsagents.

His head hurt.

Palmersville, he told himself. Nancy Kowolski. It had all been there yesterday. He feared it might disappear entirely by tomorrow. The sun came out as if to prove his theory. A stranger smiled at him, young and pretty.

What the fuck was going on? Properly awake now he turned off the engine and got out of the car, got back in the car and turned on the radio.

Not the usual station.

What was that called? Nancy...

His phone rang. It was Tyrone. Nancy lived in an apartment overlooking the river. If he could find that he could find his sanity.

'What?'

'I asked if everything was still on for tonight.'

'Oh. Yeah. Can I bring someone?'

'I thought you were bringing everyone. Isn't that what you normally do?'

Roger was no longer sure of the word normal. His world had been rearranged.

'What's the address again?'

'Christ, what's the matter with you? Jimmy been feeding you downers or something? You ought to know better.'

'Huh?'

'Shit...see you around eleven.'

And Tyrone rang off, leaving Roger Coaltrain empty.

Jimmy was Jimmy Head; he worked up at the hospital. Hey, me too. It was coming back to him now. Jimmy was a trained physician. Roger was...something in administration? Not a doctor. Not in the true sense. He didn't kill people. He got out of the car once more and went to buy a paper.

Evening News, read the title. Was that Nancy's paper? There had been others, but this looked the most familiar. The front page carried a story about a missing girl. There were countless pages of TV. There was a cartoon strip by somebody called Delaney.

Sam Delaney? Wasn't he one of Nancy's boyfriends?

Nancy...

It took him two hours to drive to her apartment. He buzzed the door and waited.

'Who is it?' A woman's voice, but not hers.

'Eh, Roger Coaltrain.'

'Who?'

'Roger - a friend of Nancy's. I was worried about her.'

'She's not here.'

'She's not?'

There was a pause. 'You'd better come up.'

The door opened and he entered the building, its warmth engulfing, its lift slick and bright.

She was waiting on the landing, arms folded, dark hair tumbling. Her sister. What was her name?

'She's disappeared. I thought everyone knew.'

He pushed his hair back.

'I live here now; just waiting.'

Roger didn't know what to say. How long since he'd seen her? He couldn't remember. He felt terrible. He looked at her sister imploringly, before falling at her feet like a suitor allergic to his love's perfume.

Woke up on the sofa.

'Tea,' she said. 'Next to your head.'

He rolled his eyes in the mug's direction. It still steamed.

'I'm Jane.'

That was it. 'Hi.'

'You often faint like that?'

'No. I must be running a temperature.'

'Well, you'd better see a doctor.'

He swung his legs to the floor and looked at her confusedly. The tea was sweet, just how he liked it.

'I think I'm losing my mind,' he told her.

She smiled indulgently. 'Perhaps you died.'

The smile took on a whole new set of meanings, none of them pleasant, white teeth and red lips eating into his brain, sucking the juices from his lungs and heart. He put a hand to his chest...felt a beating, fast and hard.

Relief flooded him with sweat. 'That's not funny.'

'It wasn't meant to be,' Jane replied. 'Merely an observation.'

'Do I look dead?'

'You tell me; I'm not at all familiar with corpses.'

'Me neither.'

'But you work in a morgue, don't you?' she said laughingly. 'I remember Nancy saying. You of all people ought to know what a dead person looks like.'

The cold came back to him.

'Where's the bathroom?'

She pointed.

He ran for it, pushing his face against the mirror over the basin, one hand clasped round each tap, hot and cold.

He was there quite a while, just staring. She was right, at least about him working in a morgue. Up at the hospital. Of course. How could he forget that? He assisted in the dismemberment of cadavers. Not a doctor but a technician. His patients were already deceased.

'Are you okay?'

She'd stuck her head round the jamb.

'Jimmy.'

'What?'

'He must've slipped me something. Tyrone was right. I'm fucked up. I apologize.'

Jane folded her red lips into her mouth, scaring him. 'A-ha,' she said, nodding.

He let go of the taps, their temperature differential having restored his equilibrium.

'Want to go to a party this evening?'

'Is it fancy dress?'

'I've no idea.'

'I'm not usually one for parties. Nancy would always show me up; she'd be wearing no knickers or something.'

'But she won't be there...' he said, grimacing.

'No. No, she won't.'

'You'll come then? It doesn't start till late. We could get something to eat first. What do you say?'

She folded her arms under her breasts. Her large brooding eyes threatened him, but unknowingly.

'Okay.' She shrugged, letting her arms fall to her sides and disappearing back into the apartment.

Roger was clammy. He glanced back at the mirror, imagining Nancy's face in it. Did he remember her correctly?

A morgue. Fascinating.

I live among the dead, he thought. Perhaps some of it had rubbed off.

A short time later, although the distance seemed great, sat looking at Jimmy Head, can of lager in one hand, joint in the other, he hoped not too much.

'Amphetamines, Roger?'

'No thanks.'

'Please yourself. Gonna be a long night. Don't come gasping to me later. I'm just the sound man, remember?'

'We're rolling this evening?'

'Don't we always...' Jimmy sucked nosily on the joint, swilled his mouth out with what remained in the lager tin, and belched. 'You're the director.'

So I am.

Recalling his earlier telephone conversation with Tyrone he scratched behind an ear, wondering what, if anything, was lurking there, burrowing. 'I'm not sure I'm liking this much.'

'What?'

'This New Year's,' Roger explained, as much for his own benefit as Jimmy's, 'I feel like I woke up on a different planet.'

Jimmy nodded, as was his custom. Been there, the nod said, going back again just as soon as I can.

Roger left him to contemplate the wallpaper. He had bigger fish to fry. He paused in the hallway of Jimmy's semi-detached and scratched behind his ear again. What was this, this constant need for reassurance? Just where did he get off? There was a fucking party tonight. It was the year's end, a whole new set of dates starting tomorrow. And he was taking Jane out; Nancy's sister. Shit, what had happened to her? He didn't kill people, he reminded himself as he opened the front door. Standing in the street he suffered a moment's panic as he failed to recognise his car. But it was the blue one parked right outside. Thankfully, he got in.

He was a technician. At the hospital. He placed bits of people in stainless steel trays, weighed and photographed their vital organs, handed them back for reassembly or squashed them into jars labelled by disease. In his spare time he was a film maker.

mediCINEMArtyrs...

Roger. Jimmy. Tyrone.

Others, sometimes, too.

They were the restless people, out not to get caught. They filmed what they saw and saw what they filmed. Documentaries. Features. Cartoons, if the light was right - and it looked that way now. Advertisements for products unknown.

Of course they were rolling this evening, and it was up to Roger to assemble the cast, the unpaid yet seldom unwilling friends and friends of friends and their likeable and not so likeable acquaintances to be engaged in a drama not of the Martyrs' making, but one from which all their lives, simple and confused, gathered together in a place and time, jostled and lubricated, would inevitably unfold. At the worst they could hope for fist fights and sexual misconduct. Nothing too violent. Nothing inviting the telescopic limbs of the law. Just your usual raft of misunderstandings and mad panoply of stunt flying, boys falling for girls and girls reciprocating in all manner of styles, from openly flirtatious to disgustingly snide, those unlucky pilots shot down in flames descending through great clouds of perfume, knocking over glasses and bottles and tripping over their own shoes. It was all meat to the lens. Roger Coaltrain gesticulating. Tyrone braving the burning ether. Jimmy Head sorting through the malaise of the dying, snatching last breaths and digitally wrapping sighs.

The venue was a hall of residence just off the City East university campus. Largely empty due to refurbishment, the hundred or so rooms and their attendant corridors made for the ideal nuit blanche.

## Rear Wheel Drive

The car had been following him for an hour. Sharp and yellow, it knifed through the grey afternoon, cutting a bright incision in the steel and concrete flesh of the city. It fed his paranoia. He grew sweaty despite the cold, exposed to its blinkered headlights as if alone in streets that were never less than crowded. There was no noise except his own breath, his two shoes slapping, his heart pounding in his chest. The car nosed toward him with a stark inevitability. Always somewhere in his field of vision, reflected in a bus window or streaking through a plant-shaded mirror in the sixth floor café where he sat behind steam and newspaper, fingers ink-stained and teeth chattering, not daring to look left or right. He was stalked by an automobile. It knew him. But did he know it? Who, or what, was behind the wheel?

Thorp lit a cigarette. The newspaper folded he stared at his fingernails, pale and tarnished. This new world, with its acid etched meanness, its hard and fast reality, left him on the brink of exhaustion. Gone was his previous intoxication with everything fluid, his onetime existence in a realm fantastical, yet ordinary. There was nothing ordinary now about Ileum, the Ileum of Jones and Co., administrators of power, politicians in name only. No longer did the mother of all cities lurch uncomfortably in eye corners, nursing adolescent fantasies and indulging dope fiends, but sat with its legs open, full square. Rules had been written that had no place for whimsy. And the yellow car? In a world he saw in black and white its colour was loud and frightening. It wasn't the happy apple tinge of memory, or the soft glow of the face he'd fallen in love with on a rooftop an ever-expanding universe from here. It was a hard colour, persistent, an indicator of fact. Irrevocable, inescapable, tooling about his consciousness like a vampiric canary.

Hot or cold, it wanted his blood.

'I was press-ganged.' Thorp told his cigarette. 'Not offered any choice in the matter.'

Ashes glowed at him.

'I haven't made a conscious...' one eye shut, calculating, '...in a long time.' Not since he'd gone bravely forth without his rifle, hands in pockets and no real expectancy of surviving the machine-gun hail. His was a protest march, having been corralled into a firing squad that morning.

At least this way he got to stay out of the decision making progress.

A waitress brought him eggs he hadn't ordered, two globes smiling up at him from a plate, twin suns radiant in a sky white as snowflakes - yellow stars about which the new world orbited, in a figure eight. There was no escape, he saw. There was no Death with whom to play cards. Hell and its minions had been outflanked, all arguments put aside. Sitting in his trenchcoat as the colours leaked home he thought again of Orangepeel, of how he had failed to find her, of how he had allowed her to slip away. Perhaps the catalyst for all this change, her postponed suicide the proof if it was needed that nothing was prescribed, and yet, perversely, that some things were inevitable. A philosophy neither quodian or trencherman, but the hellish doctrine of Jones.

Brilliant, really.

The cigarette burnt his hand.

He swallowed and took his sunglasses off. Immediately the cafe swamped him with greens and browns, the reds of lipsticks and the blues of soup bowls. His own trenchcoat resounded metallically, an ocean of shifting hues that was partly soup bowl, partly soup spoon. The soup itself, whether meat or vegetable, shimmered in its folds.

What a wondrous thing, he thought. Suddenly even the eggs appeared less threatening. He looked around for the car and was shocked by its absence. Gone from mirrors. Gone from cutlery. Gone from the street outside when he pressed his face to the window, then stuck his head out. There was yellow in umbrellas and shop signs, but no shark-nosed car. And it was cold. The air was cold. Thorp himself was cold. Not the cold of death, though, but that of winter pressing into his lungs, of life itself brushing against his skin and sliding fingers through his hair, his paranoid skin and hair, still tingling with fear but with the possibility of transformation, of fear becoming excitement, of generating its own heat to combat that of his previous disquietude.

Might it be? he wondered. Might he change?

Did he want to?

He hadn't been running away that January morning. Far from it. Walking, more like. To Paris. And a girl there. Always...

Thorp breathed on the glass, steaming it. A waitress, the same as had brought him the eggs, tapped him on the shoulder. She had an insouciant nose.

'Yes?'

'Your food's getting cold,' she stated.

'Yes...'

She led him back to his table, where he ate the eggs and drained his cup of coffee.

He was about to light up again when he read from an inverted V of plastic that this was a NO SMOKING table.

Rules.

Rules, Thorp sparked, inviting cross stares: there to be broken. He had something to rail against now.

The waitress, behind a fern, hitched up her skirt to pull up her stockings.

Thorp felt a reciprocation in his loins. A memory of lust, estranged.

He stopped feeling sorry for himself, watching her. He got up and took the stairs, sunglasses pushed back against brow, the last of his money left on the tablecloth. It was a long walk to the street, an even longer one to where he remembered abandoning the Ventura, but Thorp set a jaunty pace, whistling happy tunes to mirror the happier colours surrounding him, to echo the hunger for anarchy in his bones.

## Redoubt

Egon sat counting money.

Owen and Mickey paced the worn carpet, one naked from the waist up, the other from the waist down.

'I can't find my trousers!' Mickey complained. 'Hey, Egon, you seen my trousers.'

'They need mending,' he replied. Then, 'Not a bad haul, boys; not bad at all.'

Owen put his shirt on. 'This isn't quite what I'd envisaged.'

'Take it easy...' Egon shuffled a pile of notes and contained them with an elastic band. 'Revolutions always start quietly. Besides...'

'Besides?' He could smell the money. Smell the distinguished gentleman, less than squeaky clean. Smell Mickey, who smelled largely of muscle. Pity his brain hadn't grown; but then that was Owen's department, as Egon kept reminding him, 'You from the neck up, him from the neck down.'

Special Powers.

'It's a holiday,' the ex-supremo continued. 'Nobody practices sedition on a holiday.'

It still bothered Owen how they'd managed to escape with their lives from an aerial enclave whose security was reputed to be infallible. The only explanation, other than the admittedly likely one, that they'd been let out, was that Mountfield's eyes and ears were all geared to preventing ingress, forestalling burglars and assassins. Once on the inside (they'd been let in, obviously) it was simply a matter of pulling the chain and exiting via the S-bend.

Certainly they'd been shat on. Who'd shat was arguable. The distinguished gentleman, whose bruises had subsided, whose weight problem had similarly dwindled, wasn't much for enlightenment. Egon was all direct action. He'd been a figurehead so long he couldn't smoke a cigar without crying. Tears for the fallen, he described them, as daily he transmuted into something disturbingly charismatic.

And now there was no going home.

Owen turned his shoulders in his jacket.

'Not fundraising today?' asked Egon, suspicious of his attitude.

'Nope,' answered Owen. 'Going shopping. Mick here needs a new suit and I could use some pyjamas. Anything we can get you?'

'Freedom from repression,' Egon chest-slapped, 'and some of those alcoholic throat lozenges.'

Owen rubbed together his fingers, requesting hard currency, pocketed a couple of hundred and turned to stare at Mickey, still half naked. His friend and fellow good guy had outgrown everything he'd brought from his parents' house in downtown Palmersville. It had taken them two weeks to find it, squirreled away in a suburb of a district in an urban sprawl of massage parlours and miniature golf courses, neighbours distant in time and space, linked through sand traps and unguents, Mickey's detached home with a view of the ninth hole and a lady describing herself as Snaky Serena. In the end they'd arrived the easy way, by taxi, but had had to force an entry, something Owen was uneasy about the way you're uneasy about dating your best friend's sister. Criminal, somehow; he found he now had higher standards. Owen stood for law enforcement. Breaking and entering smacked of corruption, of being corrupted, of having to confront the messy reality of your best friend's domestic persona as detailed by the female sibling while you're trying to get in her knickers. But you can't have it both ways.

Anyhow, it was demeaning.

'It'll be dark soon,' remarked Egon.

Owen fastened his eyes on the curtains. Fastened the curtains round Mickey, who posed obligingly.

It would have to do.

The house they occupied was an anonymous semi on an undulating estate of near identical dwellings. The neighbours were quietly absent, homeowners whose sorties to the supermarket, the cinema, their places of employment, were carried out with ruthless efficiency. They asked no questions of the men renting, avoided eye contact with any but their immediate neighbours, then exchanging nervous hellos and inquiring only furtively about husbands, wives, sons and daughters. Behind closed doors they might strop leather and watch videos of executions, but out in the real world they were entirely passive, shy creatures whose habits were predictable, always looking the other way.

The heroic pair got in the car and drove off past the cemetery to the mall. It was New Year's Eve, so anybody curious enough to offer them a second glance would think Owen was driving Mickey to a toga party. Nearing the mall they detoured thru an enormous MacDonald's, deranged customers chowing on enormous mock-cow-burgers, then circled relentlessly until Owen found a place to park. They waited five minutes. Five minutes more and the bus disgorged them at the door. Inside was splashed with light and hung with glitter, festive scenes lifted from myriad Hollywood happy-holiday Yuletide propaganda films lifted from the brothers Grimm lifted from ancient Celtic tradition. Owen paused beneath a huge swage of plastic holly, wondering at his newfound cynicism. If he was honest he would have to say it was born of disappointment, of knowing deep down that history would come to remember him as a terrorist. Being a good guy and not a bad guy was no longer an option, but an opinion. He and Mickey were too tied up with the now smooth-lipped Egon to be anything other than on his side, fighting his corner, championing his cause, be that righteous or selfish. Egon wanted to get back "where he belonged". Whether he had ever exercised much control, physical or mental, was questionable. And if Owen was honest he was hooked by the idea of being a power behind the throne.

Steering Mickey toward a sport's store he scratched under his arm. A security guard shuffled nervously. His partner's eyes widened to a display of balls. Owen counted eighteen different sorts, large and small, ribbed and smooth, circular and ovoid. He had no idea what sports some of the balls represented, gaps in his knowledge he was happy to leave unfilled.

'What you need is something stretchy,' he told Mickey. 'Something a little big, but not too baggy.'

There were track suits in a panoply of colours.

'Nah, too urban sporty,' Owen dismissed.

There were soft cotton sweat pants and shirts.

'I don't know...maybe.' But Mickey was off down the endless racks toward figure-hugging lycra, the material of the future stretched across cardboard and over metal frames shaped into athletes.

Owen had that uneasy feeling once more. He dabbed his brow with a handkerchief and sighed deeply. Something was going to have to be done.

And soon.

## Critical Mass

Stack looked at Pagan looking at Cowls, Pot and Stack and said to himself, we have to be kidding.

'You want to sign that?' Cowls asked the boy, menacing him across the table.

'Fuck off,' the boy replied, looking disgustedly down at the neatly typed confession.

'It's all your own words,' Pot said. 'All you have to do is sign it and we can be out of here.'

We're out of here already, Stack thought. The kid was innocent. Okay, perhaps not innocent, he was one of Vernon's lackeys, but to suppose he'd had any part in the supposed attempt on Vernon's life was ridiculous.

This was Stack's fault. He shuffled uncomfortably. He was the weak link and Pagan knew it.

'Why don't you take my picture?'

'I don't do portraits...' Stack began, eyes averting.

'He only photographs corpses,' Pot helpfully provided. 'That right, Stack, you only come after the kill?'

Stack nodded, disliking the threat, understanding its intention.

'Sign!' bellowed Cowls, rising, fists on table, tie swinging free of shirt.

And, 'Fuck off,' said Pagan.

Stack dearly wished he hadn't played the investigating officer. Having established the crime his colleagues now felt obliged to come up with a criminal. Poor Pagan, for whatever reason, was the fated individual.

Their eyes met briefly. Stack felt the boy knew everything and he nothing. Theirs were very different worlds, here about to merge.

'We found the remote under your bed,' said Pot, his look sneering (all those boy band posters, the bags of sunflower seeds and countless lipsticks), his tone emphasizing the futility of denial. 'Your prints were all over the aircraft. That little box of tricks in the engine compartment; very clever. But you only succeeded in killing the pilot.'

Pagan couldn't believe his boss had sacrificed him. Yet here it was; three coppers, one confession. He thought of the milky skin of Vernon's wives, suddenly missing them. They were his mothers, he realized. And Vernon? What made Vernon think he could rely on Pagan's silence?

Answer: this was only a temporary misunderstanding, a necessary piece of arbitration between Jones and the police department. He'd be out in no time.

Only Pagan didn't like it. He knew he should sign the confession, speed the process, but he couldn't.

The guy with the camera, sweating.

This was his doing. He wasn't even a real cop. Real cops didn't force situations. Real cops bought new cars.

'I need time to think about it,' Pagan said. 'Sure you don't want to take my picture?'

Stack unfroze mentally; he owed the boy. 'Eh...okay.'

Pot and Cowls looked at him disgustedly.

Fuck them, thought Stack. 'Out in the corridor though, the light's no good in here.'

Pot and Cowls crushed cigarettes, snapped pencils.

Pagan smiled jovially.

What happened next Stack saw through the viewfinder. Again, he felt responsible, but at the same time delighted. The kid moved with the speed of a whippet, slamming an officer's face into the wall, then using him as body armour. The unfortunate policeman took several good blows to the head before he was swapped for a filing cabinet, which Pagan next balanced on a chair, castors sizzling like castanets, his dance along the corridor accompanied by gunfire in short, deliberate snatches, his exit via the sixth floor window an elegant surfing of air and glass that culminated in a finale of trashed prowler roof-light clusters and a curtaining snowstorm, H through M of known paedophiles to disguise, genielike, his exit.

And it was goodbye Pagan.

'Stack,' the voice of doom intoned grimly. 'See me in my office.'

## Party

Nancy had always been the wild one. What had it got her? Just about anything she liked, along with several black eyes and an abortion. Twins. They could tell? The thought made her shudder. Or perhaps it was this dress that unnerved her, short and slinky, spangled like a moonlit night. Crushed purple, a lush plum, it gave her curves she felt a little frightened of. And a cleavage, a dangerous feminine ravine like something out of an old western along which passed one horseman at a time. She had to admit she was impressed, even turned on by her own sexuality. She wondered blithely what Roger would make of it. What did she make of him? Jane didn't have a clue. She shrugged, which made her jiggle, and laugh. She was a different person in this dress. It had been her mother's, someone she barely remembered; someone who'd walked her to school that first morning and not be around to collect her come the afternoon bell. Pa eventually rolled up, shrugged and lifted her hair behind her ears.

A knock at the door she answered. Her father in open-mouthed awe.

'Too much?' Her confidence teetered.

He drew his breath in. 'Magnificent,' he said kindly, wiping a tear from his eye.

'Thanks. What about my hair?' She had it bunched up, undecided.

Pa stroked his chin. 'Looks prissy,' he opined. 'Let it fall on your shoulders. That way you can peer at men through it. Drive them wild.'

Jane thought maybe that was taking things too far, but unsnapped the ties and shook her head in one movement. 'Okay?'

'Divine.'

Her father sounded like some effete dress designer. He even had the hand gestures. She wondered if she knew him at all.

'Okay...shoes.'

'Magic slippers,' corrected Pa, tutting.

'Magic slippers it is,' amended Jane. 'I don't have anything remotely suitable.'

'No problem. Just let me make a phone call.'

He disappeared from her room like a spritely Puck, then moments later stuck his head back round the door. 'I'll call you a taxi.'

'Great.'

'I know just the fellow for shoes!'

'A-ha.' And he was off again, skipping lightly down the stairs.

Jane followed barefoot, convinced this was all a mistake. She should be at Nancy's apartment, awaiting phone calls, not sweeping seductively toward an evening of merriment and, hopefully, sex. Gratifying, enduring, passionate sex. Nothing less would do. All her previous experiences, from fumbles to instrument-enhanced, had been disastrous. Just once she would like things to rise smoothly, to culminate in a thrusting wavefront of pleasure, to experience a true understanding; not have things fall flat. But sex was Nancy's area of expertise. She'd seen her sister engage men in the most exquisite torture, impressed and jealous at once. Now it was her turn.

Walking into the living-room she watched as a car pulled up. A dark Ventura, its driver wound the window down. Pa approached and the two conversed. They shook hands, all Jane saw of the driver, who then handed over a shoebox before slewing off in a cloud of smoke. Pa turned, waved to her through the blinds, and quickly returned to the house.

'Shoes,' he announced.

Jane took the box nervously.

'Allow me,' Pa said, removing the lid, unfolding the blue tissue paper and raising the shoes from their grave. 'Nice, huh?'

They were beautiful, thought Jane.

Her taxi arrived. She felt like Cinderella. Bad omen. Her slippers weren't of glass, they were fish skin, silver, blue, green and shimmering. The taxi driver met her at the door holding a golf umbrella. It wasn't raining, she saw, he was merely her first conquest of the evening, all chivalrous and grinning. In the driveway of the neighbouring house two men stood gawping, one short, balding and suited, one tall, wide and wearing virulent pink cycle shorts and a shocking yellow top with a large black M on it. Jane didn't recognise either man, supposing them new tenants. The house had been empty since the autumn when the Beantowers had moved. She walked demurely to the car, folded herself into the back seat and let the driver close the door. Moments later her father rapped on the window. She'd forgotten her bag.

Roger Coaltrain, alas, hadn't booked a table. He looked at her imploringly, one elbow on the restaurant bar. Already things weren't going to plan, she lamented, twisting the stem of her wine glass. His apologies were profuse, but unimpressive. She silenced him by staring at her nails.

'Very nice,' said Tyrone. 'You're a natural.'

Flattery, certainly, but what did she care? Did they intend to film the entire evening?

Roger brightened suddenly, pressing together his palms as if at an idea, albeit not a very good one. 'Tell you what - pizza!'

She scowled, lowering the lights.

'Chinese?' he offered helplessly.

'Less of the strangled hissing,' complained Jimmy Head, twiddling his dials.

'Sorry.'

'Why don't you try bribing the maître d'?' Jane suggested. 'That's what Nancy would do.'

'Nancy,' echoed Roger plaintively.

Jane had an inkling. 'Were you in love with her?'

'Once,' he confessed. 'Difficult not to be.'

The crew concurred, mumbling, their own private memories of her sister transposing them in space and time.

'And you filmed her?'

Roger looked concerned, not sure where she was going. 'We may have...'

'How, exactly.' Now she really did want to know.

The director looked to his camera and sound man for assistance, but they were too busy doing their jobs, which had suddenly become freakishly complicated and requiring their fullest attention. Enjoying his discomfort, although they were as much on the hook as Roger. 'Yes.'

'Yes?'

'We filmed Nancy.'

'Doing?'

'Silo.'

'Silo?'

'Silo...just Silo. He doesn't have another name. He's a friend of ours. A friend of Nancy's.'

'What kind of friend?'

'A very knowledgeable and intimate friend,' Roger came clean.

Jane squeezed her lips together. 'Oh.'

'It was her idea!' Roger blurted, regretting it immediately. 'I'll go find the maître d'. Boys, empty your pockets; the lady wants a table...'

'With food on it.'

'With food on it. Come on.'

She watched him leave with mixed emotions. For a start, she wasn't convinced she wanted to sleep with him now, and not entirely for moral reasons. She wasn't shocked by Nancy's actions; nothing her sister did came as a surprise. Then what? Maybe his ineptitude, or his lack of it. He'd seemed so vulnerable this afternoon. Now, with each revelation, she saw him more as the artful manipulator, beyond trust and therefore unworthy of her vaginal canal.

A waiter and three kitchen assistants asked them, politely, to leave.

Roger was waiting outside. 'Can you believe he took the money, then had us thrown out?'

Jimmy proceeded to turn him upside down.

So it was that Jane bought the pizzas.

They ate in the back of Tyrone's van, midst strange smelling cardboard boxes, stolen road signs and sundry garden gnomes.

'It was a one off. Nancy was just so impressed with Silo. It broke all our hearts.'

Crunching, crumbs down her décolletage, Jane listened intently.

'It was up at the hospital. Silo worked for the laundry company. Nancy chased him for an interview. She was doing a story on drugs being smuggled out of the dispensary...'

Jimmy choked on his pepperoni. Tyrone slapped him on the back.

'Anyway, they hit it off. You know what it's like with Nancy; she went straight for his pants. After that they'd meet behind the boiler room most days, frolic in the back of his truck among the stained bed linen and bloody theatre smocks. Very romantic. Only Silo was late with his runs so often he got sacked.'

'Then what happened?' She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and refused a cigarette, accepting a beer instead.

Jimmy had opened the bottle with his teeth.

'He disappeared briefly, travelled about. Nancy was pretty sullen after that. Then one day he turned up in the morgue.'

It was Jane's turn to choke, spewing lager over Roger Coaltrain...as if he didn't deserve it. 'Don't tell me you filmed her having sex with a dead person!'

'No! Where I work!'

Jimmy, part way through rolling a joint, tipped over backward, laughing.

'Not funny,' sniggered Tyrone, stuffing crusts in Jimmy's mouth to silence his mirth.

Jane breathed a sigh of relief. Some things she didn't want to know.

'Like I was saying,' Roger continued. 'Silo turns up, asks me to get in touch with Nancy. Which I do. Says something about this being the last time he'll see her, how he has to go away. Nancy's angry, never seen her so angry. Silo kisses her, begs forgiveness. Nancy says, get Tyrone, get Jimmy, I want a souvenir...' He was blushing.

'That's it?'

'Everything, in a condensed form.'

'So there's just the one copy, which Nancy has?'

The boys made no reply.

'You're disgusting. Does she know?'

'We needed money for a feature,' Roger pleaded. 'It was a regrettable act.'

'Yours or hers?'

'Ours,' he confessed. 'But she never said don't make copies.'

'And Silo?'

'Never seen him since.'

'You don't think he could have anything to do with her disappearance?'

Roger hadn't thought about it.

'Well, do you?'

Jimmy snorted, finding his way back.

'He was weird,' said Tyrone. 'No more than that.'

'But they could have run off.'

'Yeah,' said Roger. 'Then where's the mystery? Nancy, to the best of my knowledge, never did anything without letting everyone know. She's an attention seeker. You know that.'

So she did.

Roger's mobile rang, placing a full stop. He listened a moment, then handed the phone to Jane. 'It's for you.'

'Me?' Who could possibly be calling her? 'Hello?'

'Jane Kowolski?'

'Yes - who's this?'

'It's Henry Eels. I just wondered how the shoes were.'

She looked down at her feet. 'Fine. Thank-you.'

'That's okay. See you around.'

She handed the phone back. 'My haberdasher,' she told them, extracting confused glances, twinkling her toes in the twelve volt light.

Jimmy Head blew smoke.

Tyrone said, 'Anybody fucking cold?'

'Freezing my tits off,' Jane said.

'Right.'

## The Silent Girl

A cold and wintry night.

Across the frozen rooftops she wandered, a landscape of water and ice, steam from ventilation systems pumping like breath, expelled through vanes and out under valve flaps. Pressures mingled, her footsteps dimpling glassy puddles and skylights, tiny reverberations sounding through the rooms below, echoing on the surface of wine lakes and beer mashes. She walked as she had walked for days, pausing only to watch the polar bears wrestle, the snow foxes gambol and the walrus fill their pipes. In the sky colours danced, reflections of an urban firmament she was beginning to understand, mirrored above a galaxy of stop lamps and traffic signals, shop fronts and advertisement hoarding, great illuminated promises with names like Coca-Cola and Nike, constellations obscured by no clouds. She crossed bridges between buildings that were invisible to the eye, delicate structures of frosted air. And gazing between her toes she saw millions of people, millions of fast-slow, go-stop lives.

A party of skiers passed her, waving. Dressed all in white they melted with the creeping glaciers that were even now overwhelming gable ends and bending aerials. Children skated on ponds whose fish wouldn't move till spring. A penguin with a notebook sat cross-legged on a gargoyle, scratching its cheek with the eraser end of its pencil, while another, high above, dangled a magnet on a long piece of string in an effort to steal its Thermos.

She laughed a little at that, but was careful not to give the game away.

She came upon a parked car, and stared at the figure in it, an unlit cigarette drooping from his cold lips, a second's amber glow poised in his hand, then pressed to the first in a hot kiss that ignited its heart. Heat travelled between them, smoke and fire. He tossed the spent brand away, coiling redly through the open window to expire with a crackle in a drift.

## Happy New Year

The usual cacophonous sound of the streets transmogrified into a wave-form of laughter and good cheer. Love was born of it, much coupling and slapping together of body parts, from lips to testes, the latter partly frozen. Stack alone was miserable. Out of a job, separated from his camera, he leaned in a doorway, suit lapels turned up, hands in pockets. He had yet to go home, yet to confront Cherry. She'd be pleased, he thought, happy he was out of Metrodine. Only he could never truly be out, merely dislocated. Still on the books, in the files. Counted. Then she'd be angry. What about young Frank? Money was needed for shoes and comestibles, washing-powder and clothing. Stack was on a hiding to nothing. So he hid, nestling amid shades, brick and plastic.

It was the boy who found him.

He pushed a gun in Stack's mouth and smiled the other side of it.

'Remember me?'

Pagan.

Stack nodded.

Pagan removed the gun and wiped it. 'I think we're even; only now I'm redundant.' He sniffed, looking more ragged than edgy. 'Vernon would probably take me back - I know his wives miss me - but I'm not sure I want to...'

He was confused, Stack noticed, unsure of even the weapon he toted, what had previously been an extension of his wrist now grown heavy and awkward among his slightly grubby fingers.

'I was going to kill you,' he admitted.

'And now?' Stack had to know. 'You're not going to kill me, right?'

'Right. Maybe I'll kill Vernon; for real this time, not like what you framed me for.'

'I'm sorry...'

'Yeah. Me too.

Breaking glass took their attention. Down the street a shop window lay shattered, a fall of unmelting crystals onto the pavement. People skidded on the glass like it was ice, then clambered through the portal, returning moments later with armfuls of computer hardware and sound reproduction equipment. Pagan and Stack, previous tenants of both sides of the law, looked on disinterestedly, strangely distant. It was a whole other world of crime, lacklustre and senseless.

'I'd hate to be a copper tonight,' Pagan said by way of passing.

Stack just nodded. Then, 'Too fucking cold.' But he was sure if he waited long enough someone off the street would commit arson. Adding, 'I'll help, if you like.'

'Help?'

'Kill Vernon. I'm sure he deserves it.'

'Probably he does,' affirmed Pagan. 'But I'm not doing it for nothing.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean let's find whoever was responsible for flying that aeroplane into his apartment and get them to pay us.'

'Don't you think they'd find that suspicious, given our histories? I'm not sure they'd trust us. I certainly wouldn't. They'd suppose it was a set-up, a police thing, that you were collaborating.'

'But you're an ex-policeman.'

'No, an ex-PR man. I was seconded from Metrodine.'

Pagan's face twisted. 'Then we were working for the same people. Only right we should...'

'Metrodine has no links with organised crime,' Stack interrupted, still doing his job by reflex. It was his turn to pull a face. 'No proven links, anyway.'

'Whatever you say. Forget politics. There's a war going on, or hadn't you noticed?'

'How old are you?'

'Sixteen. Why?'

'You talk like an old campaigner. You have a world weary tone. Just the right side of cynical.'

Pagan was flattered. People - Vernon - didn't usually listen to what he had to say, when he had something to say. Thought him a baby.

'Now you're blushing. Do your parents know you're out this late?'

'They're dead.'

'Oh.'

'I imagine.'

'Yes?' Querying.

'I was abandoned as a child.'

'Oh. You wish them dead.'

'The Jones' are the only family I've ever known.'

'And now you wish them dead, too. At least you're consistent.'

'They abandoned me...'

'Exactly.'

'I don't have any money or a place to stay,' said Pagan.

Stack daren't refuse.

They walked far enough apart to be seen as separate, Stack hunched and shoe-gazing, Pagan sweeping his eyes left to right, picking shapes from the crowd and likening them to faces. If he recognized any they were too drunk to notice, faces holidaying, not working, not hired to follow or kill him. They were there, he knew, even when he failed to descry them, eyes concealed and dangerous, cutting across his own like skates over ice, spuming and incising.

They walked to a Railstation and approached the ticket machine, which Pagan then bypassed. 'It's free this evening!' Ordinarily he would have inserted forged plastic. The train whistled thinly, a warm breeze sucking it from its tunnel, and they boarded, stepping over passengers and vomit.

The journey seemed to take forever, as if the suburbs had receded. The city grew uglier, thought Stack. Unconsciously, people moved away from the rotten centre. No matter that renewal came from degeneration, the metropolis still ran with maggots. The city was rife with diseases. It festered. He remembered when he used to run as a kid in the park near his home, run and run until exhausted. The park lasted forever, or he ran in circles, weaving his infinity. Only good things seemed possible then, and for years after. Everything that seemed bad was recent. He wondered if he had woken up or fallen asleep.

'Next stop,' he whispered.

The house, lit up as yet for Christmas, was deserted.

'Cherry?'

She'd left him.

'I'll put the kettle on,' said Pagan.

Stack sort comfort in cigarettes, snivelling as he ignited. 'You wouldn't understand.'

Pagan felt guilty. Implicated. Was that the word? Others people's emotional crises were alien to him. Emotional crises were alien to him, he who'd been alone all his life, he who didn't need anyone...

'I'm sorry.'

That confused Pagan, Stack apologising. Then he realized the ex-Metrodine PR man wasn't talking to him. His misery was centred on someone else...someone only marginally connected with the tooled-up-self-professed-loner-by-choice-get-off-my-case-or-I'll-kick-your-ass-orphan.

Pagan shrugged. He was secretly pleased his circumstances had altered; saw some scope in it.

A chubby-cheeked assassin...

Stack crushed the cigarette out having not sucked. 'Fuck it,' he said, confusing Pagan momentarily once more.

'You'll get her back. Perhaps it's even best she and the kid are out of the way.'

'Yes.'

Pagan yawned. 'Mind if I crash?' He hadn't slept in days. He didn't wait for an answer, just slid down the sofa and curled up, looking very much the adolescent, his angel face melting slowly as he was overcome by fatigue, eyes static under lids.

Not dreaming.

Stack pushed his thumb up one nostril and chased a snot.

## In The Meantime

Benny kept his jacket on as usual. Even in the throes of passion he seldom removed his jacket. His trousers were down, slim hips thrusting, but his jacket remained zipped.

The girl's perfume, rising from her loins like steam from a volcano, brushed the fine hairs of his nose, a softly buffeting scent that came at him in waves, pulsing from her vagina at each stroke. Benny flexed his member as he pumped, rolled it from side to side, all the while admiring her wetness. She was all the world to him. His concentration was total. Pelvic arches under his thumbs, he varied his rhythm, taking inspiration from the whorls of grain in the deeply polished dining-room table across which she was laid, her belly pressed to it, her palms leaving sweat stains. She cried out, one hand reaching behind her, and Benny felt himself sink deeper.

'My name's Jane!' she shouted as he clambered out the window, shinned the drainpipe and made his getaway, leaving her breathless, face up on the table, humming and stroking her pubis.

Jane was a very happy girl. She wanted him again. He certainly put Roger in the shade. He hadn't, though, to the best of her knowledge, left his phone number.

She felt most peculiar. Their lovemaking had awoken a thirst in her soul. Awoken her soul even.

She arranged herself, found a mirror and leered in it.

Benny kick-started the Bonneville and tore out the driveway, his cock still restless in his leather pants. Some days he wished he could leave it at home. Some days he just did; or rather it would insist on being left while she went a-jaunting, picking up boys, surrogate cocks she'd learn from. Benny knew what it felt like to be a girl. Her breasts, though small, gave the game away, but the women he seduced and the manner of their seduction, their willingness and molten state made it easy for him to pleasure them sexually and keep most of his/her clothes on. He was Benny Zine, and famous for it - notorious. They, male or female, desired...

She was something else again.

Indefatigable Anna.

She'd recognised the shoes, the shoes worn by Jane that said Henry was one step closer.

She recalled the grand piano. No man, or woman, had ever come as close to snaring her as had Henry Eels. She should have recognized him for what he was, a trickster, a man obsessed with the obscure, in love with the idea of angels. He toured the world in search of a Godhead, indisputable proof of a divine entity, a search that brought him, through Anna, via Palmersville, to Ileum, the mother metropolis. Hell on Earth, with the fires to prove it. Eighty obstacles she'd placed in his way, tokens mostly frivolous, with the last proof itself, if it existed, of Something Bigger.

She had to admit he was doing rather well. Reaching home she detached her penis, cleaned and fed it, sat it in front of the TV. It laughed and snickered at cartoons while she bathed, short-haired and boyish. The phone rang and was answered by the machine.

Jones wanted to see her, on business.

Things were getting serious.

The city had woken up to him, innumerable souls whose paths, charted and uncharted, suddenly wound through different neighbourhoods. A mostly bloodless coup, she was assured, but one not without its enemies. There was a thriving industry in spies and assassins. Anarchists now had something to target. Anna pulled the plug as he hung up, towelled herself while shrinking and swelling muscles in the mirror, accepted the weak cup of tea her cock had made her, drank it, then went to sleep for an hour or two in the freezer.

# Chapter Five: Incorpia And Anondyne

There had been a flash of light. He'd fallen down the stairs. Darkness had briefly overwhelmed him, then sound, a low keening sigh, scary and yet blissful, like fear transmuted into pleasure; the unknown becoming instantly familiar.

There was no more Mingis. No more Nancy. Only the stench of burnt carpet. Henry was disappointed, yet ecstatic. The preternatural afterglow of this encounter dripped from his irises for hours.

Weeks later, drooling over the footage he'd taken of Jane Kowolski (in those shoes!), he had the peculiar feeling that the snowflakes even now falling from the morning sky were identical, not an individual among them. A new order was settling over the world, one without room for difference. Yet frozen water was more easily de-characterised than people. People would offer greater resistance. With seventy-four things in the bag, Henry refused to worry about the possibility of not reaching his total before reality, by whatever name, crystallized into an overly structured uniformity. There remained so little and so much between himself and his inamorata that such misgivings were an unnecessary distraction. You might as well ask: what if the world ends tomorrow? What if this day is the last? But this day is always the last, for the time being.

The past he had on tape. The important bits, anyway.

Nancy was there, and now Jane. Who next? he pondered. Another woman? The shape of his quest was looking decidedly female. Coming, as it were, into focus. Driving through the city he stared at a million faces, youthful and ancient, girls and women and crones, smiles virginal and prosthetic, breasts the dimensions of which were false, elastically cramped and cradled. They were strange, he thought, all of them magical. Seventy-five might be any one. The trail, like the weather, had turned cold.

Not paying enough attention to the road ahead, he collided head-on with, of all vehicles, a Ventura.

Identical. Too much of a coincidence. The two scratched and dented cars were enmeshed in a street oddly deserted, either side part-derelict buildings, sheet and glass-sided warehouses and factories that appeared undecided. Falling up or down? Henry blinked through the snow at the driver sitting diagonally behind the large steering wheel, broken cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth, sunglasses disguising eyes that were undoubtedly scrutinizing. He wondered if he ought to get out and confront the man. Hadn't the accident been his fault? Henry wasn't too sure. He hadn't seen the other vehicle. He'd drifted, much as the snow, collecting about undistinguished brick and concrete structures, kerbside and in gutters.

The decision was taken away from him.

Thorp rapped on his window with a Pilsener bottle. 'Our grilles are joined,' he offered prophetically.

Hmm, thought Henry Eels.

'And she didn't?' he added later, in the company of Death's waste disposal technician.

Thorp shook his head in drunken agreement, trying to recall the last time he'd experienced such weird inebriation. Such...misunderstanding. A perverse and peculiar empathy. The First World War, he remembered sullenly; gin and tennis at the Kowolski's, Pa and Anna in whites, he in khaki, what happened after, on a caftan, flooding back with unbidden ferocity. A bedroom floor strewn with dresses, Anna face down, her pleated skirt raised, brass buttons in the small of her back and his trousers round his ankles. The war though, had swept him away, led him off along uncharted avenues. He never saw Anna again. Hers was a long and complicated pregnancy. Fifty? Sixty years? And Nancy's sister? Thorp didn't know who her mother was, although he had his suspicions.

'You love her,' Henry stated, slurring a bit, not sure any longer to whom he was referring.

'Who?' Confusion parted the curtains, but the window remained dirty.

'Your Orange woman - who else?' As if he was in no doubt.

'Oh. Yes. I think so.' Somewhat under the influence himself; the influence of madmen and brewers.

'You think so!' said Eels disgustedly. 'You mean you don't know?'

Thorp found himself on the defensive. Quickly, he gave the glass a wipe.

'Well?'

'I'm alive because of her,' he told the thin man. 'At least in theory...' She reminded him, that was it. There was so much he had put to one side, so much that had happened in a comparatively small frame of time, back then in his Edwardian prime, before the century truly went mad. It was that bloody conflict, he thought now, it had destroyed so many lives. Only his had been redeemed. Because of Anna or the child? Perhaps neither. Maybe it was her brother's revenge. Pa had forgiven him within hours. He knew into what he'd married. Jones, on the other hand...

Henry squeezed his lips together, then pressed a bottle to them. 'This is good stuff.'

'Czech.'

Nodded. 'You've excellent taste; can't see why you're vacillating.'

Thorp tapped out a Woodbine.

'Nobody's that difficult to find.'

Lit it.

'All it takes is perseverance.'

'What are you, some kind of detective?'

'More an investigator. I could find her for you. Maybe that's why we bumped into each other. All part of the grand scheme of things.'

'You think so? What's in it for you?'

'Ah,' said Henry. 'The last person I shared that with came to a sticky end.'

Thorp laughed. 'Perish the thought!'

'Okay then...' He told the story of the grand piano.

Tears welled in Thorp's chromatically challenged eyes, lenses beyond which the world was made anew.

'We've mutual friends.'

'I'd suspected as much.' Henry drained his bottle and Thorp magicked another.

'Here's to a small world,' toasted the documentary film maker.

## The Witches

Uncoiling from each other, skin tearing away from skin, hair pulling through hair, squealing steely like the tines of forks, limbs de-coupling, double-jointed, unfurling insectlike from a puzzle embrace, they stood.

They gazed at one another and smiled...glinting eyes, wetted lips, hands stretched ceilingward, fingers opening up round convex palms, dry now and cooled, fastened in flesh. It was a pleasant awakening; they were in a fine mood, moving farther apart, then to dress in different rooms, to apply gloss and matt...faces mirrored in glass, subtly altered, features having crossed, eyes slipped from sockets and noses uprooted, flowing off cheeks moistened and heated, nostrils and ears lent again or borrowed back. Fair exchange. All the prettier for it. They thought as one in the huddle, minds equally motile, bodies uniform as a single heart beating: Valery, Veronica and Violet. Each moved away from the others, taking a different direction into the city, bright Ileum surrounding, noisy with the night's traffic, cars nudging, buildings gawping, losing warmth to the streets with a profligate madness. And how they revelled in it, the night's excess packed into bars and cafés, ensconced at theatres, taking in movies or plays, an opera, the ballet, consuming great quantities of food and beverages, mouths full between sentences that are never finished, a law of language hiatus. They love the city. It swamps them. Standing on street corners, under bridges, they offer themselves, amuse themselves, swap fluids with strangers. They fuck against walls, in the back seats of autos, on wasteland, in bushes. And on occasion they kill the recipient; purely for the pleasure, a silent thank-you to that blissful phallus. But such peaks are rare. Mostly they drink sweat, man sweat from groins and armpits, pricking the skin with a suddenly pointed tooth and colouring the salt water. It is a comedy. They enjoy the laughter. They will exchange stories, too, later.

Valery relaxes amid ice-skaters. She is drinking a martini, twirling the olive. People dance on the frozen surface, illuminated beneath the stars, the air temperature low enough to gauze, high enough to remove coats. Couples hold hands, one always more poised, surer on the blades, coaxing the other about the rink. She smiles at them benignly, at all the girls and boys in their skirts and trousers, muscled thighs trembling, balanced on blunt knives, accomplished individuals she likes to give a nudge.

Oh, such red cheeks! Arse and face, face over arse, languid lady in short pink dress, crotch trimmed and competent, now with a wet patch, getting to her feet and squeezing her hands, smoothing the tops of her thighs in a vain attempt to disguise the dampness. Impossible to cover that dark smudge round her prim anus with the scant flap of her neat little costume. Shame.

She drew the olive off with her teeth, wrapped her tongue round its small body and crushed it before finishing her drink.

Veronica gazed in at a sleeping Pagan. Vernon had been cruel to him, she thought. She wished to mother him as of old, his mouth at her nipple while she stroked his hair. He was such a strong boy, yet he had need of her. Her breasts full, she stole in through the window, catching the sleeve of her cardigan on the Christmas tree, green spines falling to the floor and hanging like tiny darts in the wool of her garment. She was all deliberate buttons tonight, undoing them from the bottom up as she manoeuvred, sliding her hips in behind Pagan, rolling his shoulders, raising his head, biting her lip and batting her lashes, fanning the boy with somnolent tremors of air. She doesn't want to wake him, simply nurse him, the caress of her nipple enough to start him sucking, the weight of her breast in his face a comfort to them both. She rocks gently the slow minutes, the milk pulled from her in tune with the softly ticking mantle clock and the snores from the man upstairs. She feels the tug lessen, his mouth slip away. She watches him breathe, wipes his chin, kisses his brow. Then, impatient, she pushes her other tit in his mouth and begins rocking again.

Seagulls, half a dozen, fell hundreds of feet onto the heads of shopper. All it took was a sneeze. She laughed afterward, unconscious of the error, but finding it amusing covered her mouth with her hand in an effort to appear surprised by this grisly hail, the coats and shoes of men and women blood-smeared and shit-stained. Quite a kerfuffle, she thought. One man was knocked out cold, the beak of his assailant wedged in his cranium, flapping roadside like the plume of a fallen cavalryman in the moments before it expired. Pedestrians stood aside, she noted, next to step over the prone man, excusing themselves by imagining ambulance sirens or the person behind them to be a physician. Wasn't he wearing rubber gloves? Didn't she carry a black medical bag? Anyway, what could I do? Violet was disgusted. She knelt beside him and gently slapped his cheek. The bird rustled drily. He'd die of cold, she told herself, and so heaved the man up over one shoulder and carried him, seagull and all, into a nearby department store.

'Bedroom furniture?' she asked an assistant.

'Up the escalator; second floor.'

Thanking the woman, Violet adjusted her burden and traipsed in the given direction, grimacing as she clambered on the moving stairway at the thought of blood ruining her new moleskin cape. But there was nothing for it. She was the cause of his misadventure and obliged to make amends. She would have that beak out in no time. Hadn't she only recently sharpened her machete?

Wonderful, it had started to rain.

She watched it bounce off the glass dome and run mazelike down the sides, water distorting the night sky. Not smoothly, an evenly distributed curtain of liquid, but in globular rivers shaped by imperfections in the structure, grease stains and vomit splashes, fast food launched from one of the numerous gaudily outfitted gyrocopters available for hire in the vestibule. All you needed was an insurance waiver and two feet to pedal.

Sign on the dotted line...

Preening, she decides against another martini, puts on her coat and heads for the nearest exit. It's a train ride from here to the conference centre, her favourite haunt, and already past nine. The choicest delegates will be filling the more expensive bars, the more expensive whores in the more expensive dresses with the more expensive nasal habits just now filling the more expensive chairs, their more expensive thighs glowing with the more expensive hosiery and the promise of the more expensive pleasure. These ladies swipe credit cards between their legs and issue receipts that dry limply on their manicured pudenda. Valery, on the other hand, will do it for nothing, preferably in the gents. Which is bad for business, you'd agree?

She swallowed just as there came a crash from the kitchen.

Damn, put him away, straighten the cushions. Investigate, blouse flapping loosely: man on floor cradling photo, family group. Hey, isn't that? I wonder if he knows?

'Violet?'

'Hmm?'

'Can I have a toffee-apple?'

Such a polite child.

'But you've just had an ice-cream.'

He scratched behind an ear.

'It's not for me, it's for Rudi.'

'Who's Rudi? Keep tight hold now.'

The roller-coaster wound backward, steadily rising, all the fair crowded in beneath them as they climbed higher.

'The octopus,' he answered.

'Oh.' She nodded, recalling his tentacled guardian. 'Of course. Why not? I expect he deserves it. He hasn't tortured you or anything, has he? He's under strict instruction not to; but it's not always easy being nice, as you'll appreciate given the circumstances, what with your mother and all...'

His mother. Franky scratched again. He didn't understand about his mother. His aunts had come to collect him. He was to stay with them for the holidays. His mother was ill, they told him. She had a disease.

'What kind of disease?'

'A political disease, silly.'

A jolt, a pause. Then gravity. Aunt Violet's face goes all mushy. She thinks sticky thoughts, but it's too late, and the octopus has to pull bits of her out of candyfloss machines and hot-dog fryers, trouser turn-ups and haircuts various, bundling everything in her moleskin cape, now ruined, until Vernon comes for the boy, around midnight, and being tailed, he reckons, '...by some fluorescent character and a guy with a head like a balloon.'

## Ventura-ing

'Why don't we take your car.'

'You sure?'

'You've all your equipment,' argued Thorp, already feeling the pain of separation. But it was a lesser pain, he reassured himself. The greater was as yet largely subsumed.

Henry shrugged. 'Whatever you say.' He'd rather drive alone. Thorp looked strangely out of place in the passenger seat. He fired the engine, the car relatively undamaged by their previous coming together. What was a broken lamp, a dented bumper among the catalogue of accident memorabilia his Ventura sported?

A thick fog had descended, a gloaming to smother the afternoon. Henry realized he didn't even know what time in was. Two? Three? No matter. Ileum was the colour of fog now, steel dull and breathing. His kind of town...

The sky was grey, the illuminated grey of evening. He cast his eyes askance at Thorp, shadowed behind the upturned collar of his trenchcoat, face blossoming suddenly as he pressed the cigar lighter's hot-swirled filament to a Woodbine. It was expressionless, a countenance left to its own semi-elastic devices while the brain ordering its message sojourned. Henry could only guess where. Yet they seemed headed in that unspoken direction, Eels driving, Ileum without, teeming then empty, switching at every junction, unrecognizable under gaslight and neon, the colour of faces and dress repressed, the populace automatons. He accelerated, but the road was unending. He steered the Ventura down long winding avenues and up horizon-rolling embankments, the number of lanes growing left and right, the traffic streaming in both directions without road signs or speed restrictions, metal blurs whose impetus was noisily chemical, hummingly electric, wheeled and unwheeled, carriages and sedans, coupes and buggies, all manner of locomotion filling the highway from which there appeared no exit. Henry drove with his foot on the floor, setting the wipers in motion to clear horse shit from the windscreen, ordure kicked up from the tyres of the articulated truck preceding. Its back doors read: Photo Scenery. He made to overtake. The truck was a quarter mile long, a road train whose many trailers boasted of Trees and Architecture, Extinct Species, Warfare and Discoveries, New Worlds, Phenomena, Industry, Music, Crime and Punishment, Diseases, Parties and Funerals, Holocaust...thirty or more elongated boxes containing all the knowledge of man, all the beauty and misery. He had to wonder what this would look like in an accident. Apocalyptic, maybe.

But the Ventura was past and the road divided, separating strands of history wending through the city, a nervous centre sensitized by those experiencing it, it providing the stimuli; strangely backward, a reversal of roles that was necessary to the experience. Death there was aplenty, grim and repetitive. And living, fountains of it, great gushing geysers of creation, a non-stop amusement park of fucking. There was birth in every pore. On every corner kissing, pawing, masturbation. Like the exchange of currency, flesh rigid and floppy. Even dead flesh in some precincts, counterfeit money, rape imitating passion, a precursor to extended torture - the market sustained by orgasm, special police squads dispatched to murder the ever inflationary pressures: bursting erections, dismantling swollen organs, stitching reddened labia and cutting away nipples, jars of them in a back room labelled EVIDENCE. Nothing, however, could stay the city's seeping expansion. Ileum was uncontrollable.

Visible.

Unchecked, but no longer unmanaged, the streets rose and fell daily, feeding until starved, squeezing time from bricks and mortar that when empty turned to dust. Skin and bone too, human and animal, milked of time and then discarded.

Romance and Death, thought Henry Eels, in reverse. Parking, he got out and peered over the edge, where, moments later, Thorp joined him.

'What are you looking at?'

'Life.'

This amused the sometime gatherer of souls relinquished by accidents and suicides.

'How come you don't count?' Henry asked him. He'd been doing a lot of thinking among the traffic, mostly without realizing. His kind of town...

'What do you mean?'

'You're not one of my eighty objects. I know you should be; after all, you're fantastical...' Thorp's eyebrows rose. He lowered them. 'And yet, you don't fit. You already have your niche. You're overly significant.'

'I am?'

'Sure - it's your Jenny Pith that counts. But somehow it should be you.'

Thorp dragged the cold seabed of his memory for facts pertaining to earlier, drunken conversations. Of course, he drank to forget, so could only shrug at the irony of his forgetfulness. He found his knowledge of Henry Eels was sketchy, although he had a pretty good idea of the man's goal and direction. It was one he'd shared, he couldn't help thinking, and perhaps still did. Henry though, was a deliberate adventurer. Thorp had never actively sought the object of his affection. He was more for sticking his head in the sand. Or the shit and the mud in regard to his to particular corner of a foreign field. To have been dug up felt like an insult. What use a sacrifice if it was to be undermined by some well-meaning uber-being? And why him? His seed that had succeeded. He had been prepared to ignore that fact. That is, until now. Only now the object was different; necessarily so, as the woman then had not required seeking, only finding, the clue of her waved underwear unmissable. And her brother? he mused, recalling, the mist sweeping up and over him, the dark slabs of streets and buildings replaced by the bleached grass of summer lawns, the smell of cut flowers and fresh pastries, the tuneless gramophone records and the snapping of cards onto felt tables. Then had begun a competition between himself and Jones, who that afternoon he'd beaten at tennis. Jones who never lost at anything, whose temper frayed, who afterward trounced all-comers at gin rummy and billiards, who discovered Thorp atop his sister, dear Anna amid her dresses, who held a power over them both that did not last past morning. The cuckold, her husband, was largely absent, lusting through his telescope; John Kowolski, whose sole jealousy orbited the green planet he lacked the technology to inhabit. Off he was under that pale orange sky while his wife was similarly explored. Thorp though, had earlier arranged to meet Jones in the long corridor between the trophy room containing the billiard table and the library containing, among other things, a butterfly collection of Anna's assemblage and an array of objects collected by family past and present, souvenirs from around the continents. A duel was to have been fought, a contest of swords whose tips were corked; only Thorp failed to keep the appointment, preferring another, the company of Anna to the contempt of Jones, whose defeat at tennis was to drive him a little closer to the edge he was so determined to flirt with, a flaw in his high-ranking trencherman psyche the future keeper of all appointments had helped make real. Like he had helped make everything real since, the transposition of souls via Purgatory (for cash), the upswelling of the underworld, the dead world, the past and future world that was Ileum, seeping to the surface like an overflowing sewer.

All that pissed Czech lager added to the water table...

Jones embodied revenge. It filled his veins. He was jealous of everything, every man.

'Ahhhhhh-hhhhggg-ggghhhhaaa!'

Thorp remembered his words.

No, sadly, a passing suicide. Things were back to normal in some regards, only he wasn't up on the roof to collect the frilly leftovers, but a mere witness, from two floors down, to the fall.

'Oh, shit...' said Henry, wrinkling his nose. 'Quick! Downstairs!'

They made it to pavement in time to see men in white forensic overalls close the zipper on a black bag, their appearance uncannily instant.

A last breath hung in the air. The crowd watched these vapours, each tempted to inhale. Like a ghost they hovered, circling the scene as if to choose a new host, a body to occupy. But all the bodies here were full. This ghost was damned, a frozen roadside to haunt. Both Eels and Thorp watched intently, their own breaths still, the lights of ambulances and police cars strobing the dark air. Glimpses of colour flashed across the stark faces of onlookers, gloaters, party-goers and pub-crawlers, late night shoppers, man, woman and child...parting, opening, funnelling, the ghost paused at the possibility of redemption, its former nebulous state coalescing into a tight white ball, a single bright globe of energy that then shot away. A hundred breaths released in its wake, obscuring the trail, causing Henry to curse, his own frosted gases mixing with those of Thorp as he set off in pursuit, determined to find the body upon which the ghost had focused, crying, 'Follow that...eh...'

Thorp understood. In fact he was ahead, pressing through the milling public in the vague direction of a café cum erotic book store, kneeling thereafter to cradle the head of his newly beloved under the steaming taps and vents of a pyrotechnic samovar, odours of a thousand teas crowding his senses along with an entire spectrum of coloured glass cups reflected in and off the towering stainless steel. She had swooned, he saw. Her face was as red as a tomato, a love apple whose cheeks he dare not touch, whose flesh he was as close to now as he had ever been, the wind in the branches the draught from the café doors, the moment that before his own precipitous fall...

Henry captured it using a borrowed Polaroid.

Number seventy-five.

Thorp waited for Jenny Pith to open her eyes, scared as to what they might hold. He replayed the death scene over in his mind. The scream, the plunge, the zipped black bag; yet nowhere was there a clue to the victim's identity. That soul, uncollected, had successfully found a new home. He was truly redundant. And with good cause. Her eyelids flickered like the butterflies before the pins. Orangepeel...

'See you around,' said Henry, who stole a provocatively shaped bun from the counter and made his way outside.

Right slap bang into Jane Kowolski, who nodded without understanding why.

She was posting a letter to a friend, a letter she'd written anonymously, addressed randomly, begun: To whom it may concern. A letter composed of letters, amassing vowels and consonants in a medley of invented words, formulating sentences and paragraphs utilizing a method of comprehension she herself did not understand. She just hoped someone out there did. It made a kind of sense, expeditionarily.

The stamp bore a likeness she did not know. She'd got off the bus amid a commotion, an excited press of people that dispersed at her arrival.

Jane felt as if she had spoiled the show, disappointing all those who had congregated in the expectation, she knew, of seeing her sister, Nancy floating wasplike to pavement. But this was Jane's birthday party! As ever, her entrance provoked nothing but indifference. She didn't even know any good jokes.

Posting her letter, she looked around anxiously. The city had a menace about it, an incestuous feel of wrongdoing that made her - guiltily - comfortable. She was to meet Roger in the Libido Café. Her choice of venue. But she stood outside instead, shunning the safety of polished plastic and chipped Formica for the insecurity of the pavement. She was a new creature, one determined to fill her sister's shoes, as she had filled those of fish skin her father had secured the loan of. Here she was, enjoying her anxiety as if it was excitement, leaning into shadows with only her legs showing. Whether or not she was up to the role, Jane was undecided. The letter was a symbolic thing, the posting to anywhere of her past self, so that the future model might have pride of place.

Men paused, briefly.

## One Way Of Looking At Things

Jones lit on the roof of the Metrodine building. Across the vast plaza, pigeons sleeping, litter blowing, obscuring the marble outlines of the statues of the heroes, lay Parliament. There was a chain on its doors, twin portals whose brass-handled openings were crudely shackled; from the outside, sealing those within that had elected to occupy its chambers. The action seemed suitable to Jones, who had ordered it. The elected representatives, those would-be effectors of change, in all their noisome clamour, were here contained. Ergo: the situation was under control.

He scratched his belly. The morning air was clear, fresh and silent as it moved about the plaza, chilled by stone and concrete, water and metal, oozing a confidence to mirror his doubts and rebound them. The air would warm. He felt sure of it. Fountains sprang from the saved and the fallen.

An alliance of Quod and Trenchermen was perhaps inevitable, but he hadn't bargained on it coming about so soon. His own power, although well established, was still young enough to be vulnerable. Jones had yet to wholly weed his garden. And besides the weeds there were worms.

He had his spies, naturally. Yet for every spy there was a traitor.

Jones sighed self-mockingly and squeezed his lips. It was naive to expect things otherwise...

'You've grown so serious,' Anna had said earlier. 'You ought to learn to lighten up.'

'Sound advice from a serial back-stabber.'

'Yes,' she countered. 'But I don't deal in life and death, only love.'

Jones shook his head. 'How sweet.'

'If you don't think it credible, why turn to me for advice?'

'I search for metaphor.'

'Really...' She stroked the somnolent penis in her lap. 'A metaphor between love, life and death. I can't imagine there are any left. Maybe you should visit with poets.'

'Your sarcasm isn't helpful.'

'It isn't meant to be; I merely indulge it, brother. I just know your problem won't be anything specific. Your vision has always tended toward the grandiose.'

'And yours the grotesque.' He regretted it immediately. Even the cock woke up.

But she only smiled, patted its head and put it back in her pants. 'I have to go now. I've plans afoot. You don't need me anyway. Just change the rules if you don't think you can win by them. I thought that was the whole idea.'

Law and order, essentially subjective, were here made elastic. Yes, in playing the game, any game, there could be no room for argument. And playing to win meant enforcement. Of course the rules changed all the time, by means fair and foul, whether democratic or demographic, by a show of hands or a count of heads, the former a mockery as people rarely understood what it was they were voting for and the latter a devious means of shepherding the masses into the appropriate corals, and thence to the slaughter, suitably tagged and bagged. Power involved such crude processes. The more complex assemblies (socio-political) came under the heading MANUFACTURE. Invention was the difficult part. Promotion, sales, these were far simpler tasks. Once you had a thing it was easy selling to the masses. Never to individuals. Always groups, conglomerates, the larger the better, organizations whose composition might be as varied as summer weather, but at whose core - even if you had to put it there - was a common set of values, a selfishness engineered to provide just the right amount of antagonism toward an opponent, sufficient blind zeal and reactionary dis-humour to ensure the acceptance of whatever speech or pitch one cared to make. Ileum was Jones' ideal. The city's populace, in all its diversity, housed in its manifold precincts and juxtaposed - if any cared to look hard enough - with all time and no time, past and future discontinued in favour of here and now, be they dressed as night or day, warm or hot or wet or dry, the countless citizens of this tangibly infinite metropolis breathed a commonality induced by Jones and made manifest in a search, a quest not for self but another, friend, family or loved one, real or imagined, a person beyond themselves and yet reachable, attainable, the yearning of hearts and minds given shape, identifiable as a cause. And where there was a cause there was an effect. All those conscious felt it, and were thus preoccupied, accepting the breakdown of reality as they did the shifting of seasons: one outlook verdant, the other defoliated, but both composed of trees. Not that reality past was displaced completely; only the emphasis had changed, the light itself filtered to reveal the new world at the expense of the old, reality future introduced at a canter, then reined. Here and now, as Jones would have it. But to keep it so? The bending of rules had suited him before. Their malleability was partially the reason for his success. Now he'd succeeded, it was necessary for a few rules to become firm. Not quite how he'd pictured it. But it was important to compromise. Wasn't it? The more he thought about it the less sense it made. It was dangerous to be too much in control. Better to lurk in the shadows, he considered. Play things by ear. The risk being another might come to the fore, destabilizing all he'd struggled to achieve, usurping his control, challenging his dominion over this creation, this ideal, this Ileum whose dynamic was cold as stone.

## Counter Culture

East shuffled on his pew. Sweating in his robes, he attempted to at least appear serene, surrounded as he was by a hundred other graduates and their folk gathered in nervous anticipation of the Passing Out ceremony. Rumours had abounded for days regarding the nature of the forthcoming proceedings, but facts were few and far between. It was widely understood that graduates would be returned to the living world until such a time as death overtook them, a period more probably lengthy than short given their innate experience of the hereafter and their intensive tutoring, which, for all its brevity (a few weeks!) saw them equipped for survival beyond the usual. To return prematurely would see a person shovelling lime for eternity in some sticky backfires nether region. A poor career move. To be successful among the living, on the other hand, might get you a fearsome red tan and a toasting fork.

Ambition was everything. But ability counted, too.

Given the current political situation, East was surprised to see that the entire ceremony was to be broadcast, although whether live, and on what obscure channel, he couldn't say. It gave him a strange pride, nonetheless, the thought of friends and rivals tuning in to view him among this elite. Those Frenchies would shit in their boots. He was one of the chosen, and as close now to spiritual fulfilment as at any time in his death. He was also, he had to admit, scared.

That he had always been a radical was obvious. Hadn't he blinked at his own funeral? Not that it was much of a funeral, a common grave and an English toe to roll him in it. And what of Lotta Dosh? Belle of the ball, her chicanery had glued his arse to this wooden bench as much as any free thinking. He ought to look her up. Even if only to dispose of her. Yes, the prospects from here on in where most appealing. He'd show them, those arrogant cavalry bastards...

There was a gavel rap. The person next to him farted.

'Graduates! Fame and glory to thee!'

'FAME AND GLORY!' the hundred chorused.

Applause rippled from the galleries.

'The purpose of this gathering is clear,' rang the high voice of the Archbishop, resplendent in his stone pulpit. 'It is to bless these messengers before a most terrible journey.' Head shaking. 'A journey to the most terrible of places.' Mouth slack, tongue protruding. 'Back to life they venture, and with such willing bravery.' He consulted his notes now, as if refreshing his memory. 'The enemy has a new face, and it is terrible. Vile and hideous are its features. Terrible is its purpose and terrible its methods, more terrible than even the Trenchermen...so terrible, in fact...' The Archbishop looked up confusedly - there were a few Trenchermen in the audience, he remembered. 'Terrible...terrible is the fate awaiting these brothers. But their sacrifice is blessed. Theirs shall be everlasting fame and glory.'

'FAME AND GLORY!'

'Indeed,' nodded his eminence. 'Fame and glory!'

'FAME AND GLORY!' East bellowed, ignoring the fact that the fart still lingered.

There followed a pause while various dignitaries arranged half a dozen collapsible tables, piling scrolls atop the inlaid leather and seating themselves, after much pushing and shoving, in roughly hierarchical order.

The old man glared crossly from his pulpit until one of the priests in attendance helped him down, then walked somewhat leadenly over to the tables and picked up the first scroll. Waving it triumphantly, he smiled at those assembled.

Removing the ribbon the Archbishop unfurled the parchment. He read the name thereupon and that person rose to collect it.

'Congratulations, my son. I wish you well.'

East gagged. The fart smell was overwhelming. How many names before his?

A second and third scroll...

This was taking far too long. And where were the graduates being led to? What awaited backstage? What was the mode of transference?

He couldn't stand it any longer. Clambering over those in the pews ahead of him, he rushed onto the stage and began rummaging desperately through the scrolls. There were no names on them! He took a guess at alphabetical order and tore open the scroll he thought approximated the letter E. It belonged to Winston Crowpowder, that blond kid with the big nose he'd sat next to briefly during one typically intense lecture on the right and wrong way to comport oneself at public meetings and how best to a) attract attention, b) deflect criticism, c) deliver opprobrium, and d) (especially for East) not snore loudly unless you've a question and this is a diversionary tactic. Reverse alphabetical order? First or last name? East screamed. A table collapsed, taking three bishops with it. There was much fluttering of ermine. He tore open a second scroll, a third, eyes drilling and bottom squelching as an awful realization slid down inside his trouser leg. He froze, momentarily. Too late now to do anything. He seized scroll after scroll, his superiors foaming at the mouth hysterically, gibberingly effervescent , until he eventually found his own, and clutching it to him advanced (absolutely NOT running) wet-shoe'd behind the curtain...

'Who the fuck are you?' asked Jenny Pith, languid and headachy in her skimpy waitress' uniform.

Thorp's heart sank. Didn't she remember?

'Help me up. I need to get out of here.' She peered down at her ankles, then examined her hands, her wrists. 'Oh, wait a minute; this isn't what I had in mind.'

'There may have been a transmigration,' stated Thorp, switching to past professional mode. 'What you're experiencing is most likely the result of possession.'

Jenny turned her face to look at him out of one eye, deep and shiny in its blushing frame, steam and perspiration having caused her lashes to curl. 'Don't you think I know that?'

Thorp reached for his sunglasses.

'At least I smell good,' said Orangepeel.

The cluster of onlookers receded, sitting once more or hiding their smiles behind soft-backed erotic landscapes, feeding themselves such ambrosial delights as Fellatio Frappe and Coconut Cum Cake. They watched with flagging interest the night's events behind the gushing samovar, all spangled pipes aglitter...the man in the blue trenchcoat walking backward, the girl with her hands on her head and her skin inflamed picking her way awkwardly across a beach of broken glass, gingerly, as if on hot coals. The café door opened as nobody entered, the man exiting as if this were film footage in reverse, his car parked blackly at the kerb, driver's door hinged outward, receiving driver, who folded himself into the vehicle and drove with neither hand on the wheel, clipping several lamp-posts before foregoing the road altogether and somersaulting gently moonward like a bin liner on the breeze.

East watched from the doorway, a little terrified, a little overawed. But proud. He understood the mode of transference now, only he couldn't help wondering on the one hand whose body this was that it be vacant, and on the other, what had become of his own, of which he'd grown fond. He took a moment's pleasure in the female form he'd adopted, only to gaze at its radishlike visage in a polished coffee urn, the backs of myriad spoons, and, worst of all, in the half dozen slatted mirrors decorating the Libido Cafe's walls.

Pain. Physical pain, struck him. But it was good pain, he told himself, likeable pain, far removed from Russian shrapnel. Such agonies, diluted by death, seen under a different light, were to be commonplace in the living world.

'Miss Pith?'

'Hm?'

'Do you require medical attention?'

'No - no, I'm fine.'

'Are you sure? Only I've no-one to cover.' He fanned her ruddy complexion with a cardboard menu in the shape of a pair of breasts, pushing air at her like an over-endowed pole-dancer. 'Table three would like their bill, I believe.'

'Yes,' East replied. Wasn't he about to leave? And go where? 'What's my first name?'

The manager, so she presumed, crossed his eyes. 'I don't recall.'

'You don't?'

'I'll have to check your application.'

East smiled, he hoped, winningly. 'Please.'

'Very well. Table three?'

'I'm on it.'

'Thank-you, Miss Pith.'

Right, thought East, extemporize.

He had no idea how long it would be before his target was identified, or for that matter how he'd go about executing those orders on arrival. His training had largely consisted of Correct Procedure and How To React In A No Win Situation. Being a volunteer wasn't the same as being head hunted. There was a lot of elitism in the priesthood. Chosen, he may have been, but East himself had done the picking. These were strange days, they'd taught him. Exceptional circumstances bred exceptional people. East had bought into that idea. He held it close still, hugging himself and his pinny.

'Miss Pith!'

'Okay, I know: customers.'

'Jenny Pith.' He handed him a piece of paper with an address on it. Hers?

The manager winked conspiratorially.

'I see.'

'We close at one,' he added.

'In the morning?'

He didn't answer.

Waitressing came easy. He tip-toed, all girlie, in shoes not entirely uncomfortable, laughing off lewd remarks and swatting stray digits, occasionally squirting whipped cream down shirt fronts and dismissing his flushed complexion initially as sunburn, then more colourfully as the consequence of hiccups and fire-eating. A clock behind the counter dripped wetly toward twelve, which every regular customer knew to be the hour of orgasm, numerals crushed and moaning, the clock framed in vulvalike folds as it heaved from the elasticated wall, then sank back with a groan, the second-hand sweeping all curly to cheers and orders for half-price Buttock Butties and tonight's special, Ejaculate Rolls.

## In The Neighbourhood

Smoke poured from chimneys, pumping skyward from iron-clad fires the temperature of which moulded great brass bells, cathedral ornaments it took forty dray horses to shift. Pulling ropes whose braids shone golden in the fresh morning light, the horses' breaths steamed, adding to the gaseous tumult. Their neck muscles strained beneath studded leather yokes, the ropes attached by steel links, fibres cracking under the weight as the bells moved slowly through the foundry arch toward a much delayed meeting with winch and scaffold.

It was a gargantuan effort, thought Egon, who then switched off the TV.

'What's this?'

'There's a reward,' said Owen.

'A reward?'

'A substantial reward,' said Mickey.

'"For information leading to the capture of..."' read the distinguished gentleman. 'So?'

'He works for Vernon. Or did.'

'This Pagan character? He's just a kid.'

'A mean kid,' Owen clarified. 'And Vernon wants him. And we want Vernon, right?'

'And Vernon is Jones' nephew and Jones wants me. Boys, tell it as it is: one fucking great big conspiracy. Okay; suppose we nab the kid and claim the reward, what then?'

'That gets us in with Vernon. Close enough to Jones to do some real damage.'

'Which is exactly what Jones wants. Vernon too, probably. Nothing in this world happens by accident.'

Owen rolled his eyes. 'Don't you think I've thought of that? The problem here isn't the obvious one...'

'Getting us all shot.'

'...rather how best to play our hand. Vernon's simply fishing; Pagan's convenient bait.'

Egon reached for his putter and rolled its shiny heel over a ball. 'How convenient?'

'We recently took a small donation from the lad. Drop money it was unprofessional of him to give away.'

'Oh.' The ball was propelled toward a glass. 'Think he'll remember you?'

'I reckon.'

Mickey laughed, stretching in his lycra.

'I don't know,' said Egon. 'I'd prefer to, you know, lay low for a while.'

Owen was nonplussed. Mickey regarded him strangely.

'Wait a minute. Why the sudden change of heart?'

'Up the revolution!' shouted Mick, thumping the ceiling. Silently, he apologized.

Owen wafted plaster dust from his eyes. 'You're not going soft on us, are you? Me and Mick have taken a lot of chances on your behalf, what with the fundraising.' And why are we doing this anyway? Until a few days ago it had seemed the sensible option; they needed each other. Owen and Mickey, not being political creatures, needed Egon, who represented a higher authority, a standard-bearer for their own as yet ill-defined morality. They needed to raise him up, to idealize. He was a figurehead, the banner about which they and their compatriots could gather, rallying to the cause. Which was what exactly? They were on this side entirely because they weren't on the other. And the money? To date they'd procured nothing more harmful than takeaway Chinese. 'About the war chest, Egon,' intimated Owen, winking at Mickey, who frowned.

'What's that you say?' The ball missed the glass by a good two feet, instead finding its niche in the hoover nozzle.

'Mick...'

'Boys?'

'You've got ten seconds, Egon.'

'Boys!'

'Five...' On which count Mickey put the distinguished gentleman's head through the TV screen. 'A little premature there, my friend. Never mind. Grab what you need and meet me in the car.'

He should have suspected something wasn't right when Egon shaved his moustache. But all that was behind them now. There would be no guerrilla activity, no hostage taking or blackmail involved in this campaign, all of which made Owen feel better about not having a plan. More plaster dust fell, followed by Mickey's foot through the ceiling.

'Hurry it up, will you!'

He wondered who they'd done the bigger favour in eliminating Egon, themselves or Jones? Maybe he had been a fake all along, M and O court jesters to a pretend king. The politics disgusted him. Too many distractions. Too much opportunity for compromise. What they needed now was a return to earlier values, a reappraisal of which brought to mind the absence of their old buddy Swene. They ought to swing by his place, buy him a beer. Then go after that scumbag Vernon, through Pagan if needs be. Both were wrongbodies, evil-doers of the worst kind.

Mickey appeared at the foot of the stairs toting a bowling bag, his toothbrush in his spare hand.

'Ready?' Owen lit a cigarette, coughed, stared at the hotly glowing end.

They stepped outside. Paused. Someone had stolen the car.

'Repossessed,' said Pa Kowolski. 'At least that's what they told me.'

'When?'

'Four o'clock this morning. I was putting the milk bottles out.' Adding, 'They had the keys.'

A door opened across the road, twenty metres past crooked rose bushes and clumpy grass verges, a few stray wraps of mist giving the tarmac-rivered panorama the aspect of a miniature Somme.

Two men stepped out. More accurately, a man and a boy.

Pagan reached inside his coat.

Owen's eyes narrowed.

'Hey, looks just like the kid in the picture,' said Mickey.

Stack, closing the door behind, turned in time to see Pagan disappear over a fence. He froze in surprise. Across the street were a couple of strange individuals and John Kowolski, who Cherry always called Pa. He waved tentatively. One of the strangers ducked behind a bin and the other produced a bowling ball.

Kowolski cupped his hands to his mouth. 'It's okay, they're unarmed. Come on over. Both of you. I'll put the kettle on.'

'Don't listen to him!' Pagan hissed from some nearby bushes.

'Why not? Maybe he's seen Cherry and Frank.'

'That's what he wants you to believe. For fuck's sake, those two clowns with him are more dangerous than they look.'

Stack could make out the top of a rapidly balding pate behind the corrugated waste receptacle.

Kowolski was approaching, wearing a jovial grin. 'Morning.'

'Morning,' Stack replied.

'Sorry to bother you. I know we haven't talked much before, but then we haven't really had occasion.'

'I can take you down, old man!'

'Yes. Now why don't you get up off your arse before you catch your death?'

'How do I know this isn't a trick?'

Pa cocked an eyebrow. 'Because you'd have shot me already. I didn't bring you into this world to take unnecessary risks.'

Pagan had to think about that.

'You know him?' quizzed Stack, wishing he knew more himself.

'I'm his father,' Pa confessed. Then to the boy, 'Ungrateful whelp!'

'I don't have a father! I'm an orphan!' Cracks began to appear in Pagan's reality.

'Oh, if you say so...'

'And those other two, I suppose they're my uncles?'

'Now you're being ridiculous, George.'

Stack smiled. 'George?'

'His mother's choice,' explained Pa. 'Now would you come over? You people should really meet.'

Pagan, shielded by frosty undergrowth, couldn't stop shaking. It wasn't fear, he told himself, but something far worse, something he recognised in the man's features. They seemed familiar, but in an unfamiliar way, like eyes, a mouth and nose he'd glimpsed in a mirror, flashes of an older self come back to haunt him, to mock his surety, his youth. Or perhaps they were a memory dredged up from the primordial mud of his earliest days, this the face that had deserted him. In which case he should shoot it, the parent here declared, and right that wrong.

Surprisingly, he couldn't.

Sat one side of a kitchen table while Pa fussed with mugs and filled the sugar bowl, Pagan felt only slightly less ridiculous – but less ridiculous, all the same. Things just weren't as they used to be.

'Ah,' said the man, water boiling, a cluster of tea-bags between his fingers like see-through knickers, 'life's one long party when you've friends and relatives!'

'Have you seen my wife?' Stack wanted to know.

'Left you, has she?' Pa answered, nodding. 'Don't take it too badly. Probably not your fault. Biscuits?'

Mickey put his hand up.

'Nice shirt!'

'Thanks. I think I've got blood on it, though.'

'Well, let's not go into that.' He poured following the whistle and placed a tray of mugs on the table, together with the biscuit tin. 'Help yourselves.'

'Might I be right in thinking you know more about us than we do about you?' Owen inquired casually. He crossed his legs and stirred his spoon, having lifted its quota from the silver bowl, gilt peeling round its edge to reveal plastic.

'I strive to keep abreast of events; but things have been difficult lately,' Pa replied. 'It was a lot simpler in the old days, before this craze for reactivism.'

'You're telling me,' said Pagan, sulking.

Pa thought it best to ignore him a while. 'Used to be all a dead person had to do was lay low, bide his time. Sleep for eternity? That's okay! But now?' He shook his head.

'You're dead?' inquired Stack, drawing his own conclusions from amid the general insanity.

'Strictly speaking - well, no.'

'I don't get it. Did Cherry say anything to you before she left?'

'She dropped off a card. Jane saw her.'

'Your daughter?'

'I have a sister?'

'Ah, let's think. Yes, I believe she is.'

Pagan felt sick.

Stack said, 'Is she home? Can I see her?'

'She's in bed...'

Stack bolted from his chair, out the kitchen and up the stairs.

Pa pulled a face. 'Hope she's in a good mood,' he joked. 'Now, where were we?'

'Reactivism,' said Owen, sipping brew.

'Right. A more efficient use of resources. A leaner, fitter Hell. About the only thing the mud and the water ever agreed upon. Of course the results were disastrous. There was no overall control so nobody knew what was going on. The bureaucrats had a field day. Not to mention the black market. It was only a matter of time before a character like Jones stepped in.'

'You know Jones?'

'He's my brother-in-law. Very competitive type. But the real tragedy is he couldn't have children. Not legitimately, anyway. And he has a strong sense of continuity, Jones; not to mention a foul temper.'

There was a crunch. Stack first moaned, then picked himself up off the floor.

'Don't you have any manners?'

'I'm sorry...I didn't mean...'

'Would you step outside? I'd like to get dressed.'

'Yes...I'm sorry.' Pinching his nose he stepped back through the door and leaned against the wall. 'Your father told me you'd seen my wife.'

'Who?'

'My wife. And Franky.'

'She had to go away,' Jane told him, realizing who it was that had burst in through her bedroom door.

'Oh.'

'But she said Frank was staying with you.'

Stack slid back to the carpet, a thick mucus shuffling in his nostrils. Maybe cartilage. He made some minor adjustments. 'With me?'

'Yes. She said you were better able to look after him.' Her head came round the jamb, curious. 'Only?'

'I haven't seen either of them.'

He was crying, she saw. She was having that effect on men lately. She had entered a phase of accidental and deliberate emotional brutality. Just ask Roger. She'd left him at Nancy's apartment, handcuffed to some furniture, bruised about the torso following a sex game that had turned into an interrogation...

Kneeling next to Cherry's husband (what was his name?) suddenly made her feel soft and womanly, and the temptation was to use it, to use him, squeeze from him extracts of pride, lust and jealousy.

Sadly, he was pathetic.

'Look, I don't know where she is or what's happened to Franky, but if it makes you feel any better I'll sleep with you.'

It at least got his attention.

'I'd better start looking for my son,' Stack reasoned, all but immune to the offer. 'But thank's anyway.'

There came a loud metallic groan as the garage door was opened, a sound Jane hadn't heard in ages.

'Well, what do you think? Two careful lady owners.'

Mickey grinned enormously.

Owen wondered if his head wouldn't hit the roof. Said, 'It's perfect.'

'Come back some time and I'll show you what's in the extension,' Pa promised.

'We'd love to. Wouldn't we, Mick?'

'Can I drive?'

'Sure you can, buddy.'

Hands were shook. Pa jovially advised the pair to steer clear of trouble.

'As if!'

Then, back in the kitchen, having introduced a still trembling George, aka Pagan, to Jane, he turned to Stack, fingers wrapped round a third mug of tea.

## AA

Swene. He did push-ups. They didn't help, just filled his nostrils with carpet. He was no longer who he used to be, which came as a relief; but part of the package was coming to terms with a new self. Scary stuff. A bit like going nuts, he thought, forehead pressed against a stone arch, part of some Victorian railway bridge. Behind him, a man sat amid chicken bones. He knew the future, or so he claimed. A prophet. And Swene? Swene, it transpired, was the Avenging Angel.

As destinies went it sounded okay, but the usual suspicions remained.

'I don't get it. Why me?'

The man looked irritated, like he was tired of people asking stupid questions.

'I mean - how come?'

'You're asking the impossible question.'

'Isn't that the whole point?'

The man fell over laughing.

'And?'

'I only cast the bones...'

All he could think of was Clint Eastwood, that film where he painted the town red.

He zipped his jacket, stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked, once more shoe gazing. He walked across a glass ceiling, old couples gyrating, arm in arm to unheard music. Across wasteland, bones in the earth, the music different but the dance the same. Then onto pavement, stepping on the cracks, under a ladder, dancing his own dance off a kerb and into the road...

He was lost, he realized. He was teetering.

The sun came up. Desultory figures in overcoats slid down to the nearest Railstation, bus stop or fluid fill. They boarded trains, buses and the speeding air-bubbles that were drawn underground by the actions of distant turbines, hydroelectric megaliths perched on concrete islands off the coast. Clouds lined up, ready to be wrung like giant dishcloths over the funnelled mouths of the power stations' sluices, fat gaseous cows that for days previously had grazed the fickle ocean.

Riding a bubble, bouncing fitfully along the subterranean tube, you could see everything and nothing. The only light was your own. The lights of a thousand others crowded you, but they were for the most part a blur of refracted images. Very occasionally, another's bubble would become attached to your own, held fast by surface tension for as much as a few seconds, your face up close with theirs. Perhaps an old man. Perhaps a beautiful women. Swene longed for these encounters. He rode the fluid daily in the hope of recognizing features in the maelstrom, those of past friends with whom he could exchange fleeting glances, enough for him to believe in the reality of self, of consciousness.

He lived in a fridge underlooking the crystal-ball floor of the Specimen Hotel, its patrons gaudy smudges through the glass and water, residents who dined in colourful opulence, in heat and dryness, observed by the poor in their sea-bottom dwellings, refrigerates in near quietus. Work was a factory building fish, perch, carp and trout whose gills and vents were all alike, production line vehicles whose bone structures, a jigsaw of many pieces, he trailed from the press shop and, lineside, delivered.

Each day was the same. The hope of seeing a familiar face in the fluid sustained him, kept his dreams of escape alive. All that remained of his pre-life was his brother's leather jacket, his sole possession. They were allowed one, a small identity fast across his shoulders whether he be hot in the factory or cold on his slab.

The fluid delivered him each morning. Evenings, too, the swing shift identical in every detail.

At work his colleagues griped, complaining at overtime or the lack of it, spending the long hours in cynical bemusement, laughing and joking and baiting and playing cards, drinking coffee, each activity regulated, or not, by the buzzer, the shrill noise of shift a constant backdrop, the deceptive slowness of the part-assembled fish clanking ceaselessly through the day or night or weekend. Bones added, flesh coated, innards fitted. Swimming away...

Innumerable. Traffic. Schools swept out to sea. A person slammed into him, their bubble breaching, spilling light and air as it collapsed. Swene witnessed their horror magnified through the lens of his own pressured skein, then that too gave way, snapping him free. But to drown? It was not the escape envisaged. The person grabbed his collar, heaving him backward before he could swallow. Together they tumbled, forced along at enormous pressure, their outstretched limbs puncturing bubbles left and right, people torn from them like foetuses, the disintegrating sacs of their commuting bursting in a chain-reaction that eventually blocked the plastic vein of the fluid fill and created an air pocket full of bruised and jabbering people.

Saved, thought Swene. It couldn't last. The vein itself tore, and he and his fellow travellers were sown like so many water-borne seeds from the flailing hosepipe of the fill, ejected with blinding force into a rush hour heavy with whales and porpoises. The fish-spangled ocean slowed him, his breath caught once more in his lungs. A shark bus swerved to avoid him, nearly tipping sideways, but the sea-horse-cyclist behind had no chance, mowing Swene down with a slow inevitability. Its rider was catapulted into the path of an oncoming haddock, which in turn slewed into a bass whose fins, in their confused array, flipped it over completely. Another fish slammed into it, adding to the chaos while Swene fought to orient himself. Only a few seconds had passed. He caught sight of the horse-cyclist and kicked for him, grasping the man's helmet and pressing his face to it. Battered and desperate, he pulled the helmet off, its owner floating deadly, and pushing his own head inside, bloody behind Perspex, he breathed at last, salt-water snot dribbling into his mouth and a sudden violent headache causing his whole body to go rigid with pain. Round him all motion ceased. Bones protruded from scales. Those vehicles with ruptured swim-bladders sank slowly, their occupants either unconscious or clawing madly behind exaggerated lenses, eyes looking through eyes at the crash scene where floated fins ventral and dorsal. Swene, approaching panic, searched the wreckage-strewn sea-lane for the horse that had run him over. It was jammed head first between two cod, the driver of one screaming inaudibly, gesticulating with angry fingers at the other, who sat passively, smiling at Swene as he freed the cycle, tearing the colour-coded lip-bumper off the screaming man's fish to do so. It didn't appear too badly damaged, starting second time, the blue flashing tails of electric eels pulsing into his lava-filled brain as he rode through the frothing aftermath and escaped down a service tunnel.

In the darkness he accelerated, a stream of foam behind. He could hear nothing but a music station, a mermaid's high chords slicing between his ears, strangely soothing. The tunnel ended, beyond it a semi-circular expanse of advanced military hardware, crabs and molluscs at parade. Above them on a broad terrace, flanked either side by an octopus like some alien spaceship bristling with antennae, was gathered the top brass, uniforms decorated, hats on heads, olive drab coral. The generals were taking the salute. Swene hovered, conspicuous. The octopi twitched, their sonar locking onto him.

Collared.

He woke with his face in a puddle.

'Your nose is blue,' she told him, blowing on it. 'Better?'

The mermaid, surely.

'Come on, up you get!'

Swene's legs worked without him asking. Upright, he breathed suspiciously, as yet unsure of the surrounding medium.

She was holding his shoulders. Blonde hair fell over her eyes. She removed it.

'I met my husband in similar circumstances,' she said, waving the wig absently, twirling it round a finger.

'Huh?'

'By running him over,' she clarified. 'Only I didn't, you know, run you over. That was someone else. We were just passing.'

'Oh...'

She wrinkled her nose. 'I don't mean to be rude, but you could use a bath.'

'Fish oil,' rejoined Swene, brushing himself.

'Do you need a lift anywhere? If you're okay, that is...'

'Not necessary,' he argued. 'I'm the Avenging Angel.'

'You are?' She smiled at him sweetly, knowlingly... 'What are you avenging?'

Swene remained puzzled. 'Not sure yet.'

She shrugged her shoulders, looked over one. 'There's an awful lot out there, injustices every place you look. All manner of misdoings. Sounds like a job for life. Anyway, I have to go; they're calling me.'

He nodded, standing now on his own two feet. Or were they? The places they'd taken him lately those feet might have belonged to someone else. And he'd followed them slavishly, knuckles swinging...

She smiled again and put the wig back on, its lemon glow swamping him like a tide of butter.

## Clear Meat Soup

Understanding nothing of the inner workings of the machine, Pagan nonetheless found himself engrossed by its complexity. It was new to him, this fascination with the mechanical, and he was enjoying every minute, awash with a boyish happiness he hadn't known possible, wide-eyed and attentive as he handed his father a spanner.

He admired Pa's patience, he realized, rubbing his chin, keen for the few hairs their to sprout a familial likeness. Pa used the spanner to loosen a copper nut, then tighten it again. The tightness of nuts was important, Pagan saw; although, as yet, he didn't understand why. The locomotive filled the garage extension, its boiler polished and its footplate gleaming. Its twelve wheels rested on a short section of track replete with gravel-spaced sleepers.

Nervously, he glanced over his shoulder at the half open boiler door, taken suddenly with the dread image of its closing. Trapped inside, he and Pa might become a consommé, pressure-cooked until the flesh left their bones.

But it was Jane's face he saw there, his sister with her arms folded and her lips pressed, her hair brushed forward and her collars turned up to make a tunnel of her lineaments, pale and dark. She held his gaze a moment, satisfying herself of something, then walked away.

Pagan was unsettled. It was too much for him. He wasn't convinced he believed in the reality of the situation. He had only Pa's word that he was his son, placed into care as an infant and thereafter fostered by Vernon Jones and one or more of his wives. Whereas he had always considered Vernon the closest thing he had to family, he had no memory of their relationship beyond that of the day to day collection and distribution for which he displayed such talent. His earliest memory was of money. Of counting money. Of spelling names and addresses. Of learning through business transactions the value of any currency, be it skin, steel or paper. It came as a surprise to him to discover a connection other than that between employer and employee. He wondered if Vernon had actually cared for him. His wives certainly had, but not necessarily as mothers.

So why had Pa given him up? It was a tricky question.

'Your mother left me. She was transient.'

'They weren't married,' Jane had chipped in, back from spying on the departing Stack, departed with the mysterious Henry Eels. 'We're illegitimate. Eggs mugged by sperm in dark alleys. Accidents. A pair of bastards. Although it's kind of nice to know I'm not the only one. There's Nancy - or was; but she's only a half sister. Right, Pa?'

He looked appalled, but not for long. It was nice to know she could do that to him.

Pagan was uncomfortable. Too many revelations made him so.

'The past catches up with you...'

'You and your enemies,' he qualified. 'Not that you'd know of any, my girl.'

Her nerve went. She washed the dishes...more than a little enjoying the sharpness of knives, the spiked tines of forks, all manner of cutlery impressing her skin. There was a focus to be found in pain, she thought, a desire.

Pa Kowolski took Pagan outside.

Pagan couldn't believe it. There was the garage, empty now, Owen and Mickey having driven off in the yellow Triumph TR7, and built on to it a space twice as wide and as deep again, stretching into the adjacent field and forming part of a sand-trap at the back of the ninth green. The locomotive, he was led to understand, less by words than gestures, was important to Pa, vital to his plans and to both their futures. And it was nearly finished. 'Just a few outstanding expenditures, a couple of kilos of tektite and several thousand gallons of water to get her rolling.'

Which Pagan interpreted as him having run out of money.

## The Marvellous Factor

'Time?'

'Eleven fifty-nine.'

'Place?'

'Outside Swene's flat.'

'Mission?'

'See if he's home.'

'And if not?'

Mickey searched for the right answer. His balls were all squelched up in his cycle shorts.

'Well?' prompted Owen.

He guessed. 'Drive round to the off-licence.'

'No - not right away.'

'Ehh.' It wasn't his balls, he realized, it was the ball, the round box he'd stashed with his gonads. Something was up...something important. 'Force an entry, search the place for clues to his whereabouts.'

'And?'

'Find him, before it's too late.'

'Exactly. Only we shan't be forcing an entry. I know where he keeps his spare key.'

Rescuing Swene from whatever peril had become a priority with Owen for reasons that weren't entirely understood. It had to do with the bigger picture, he supposed. Swene was vulnerable. Their friend was in danger. It was down to them to locate his person and save his arse. Which was their job, after all.

He got out of the car and walked up to the door, rang the bell. There were traces of snow in the sky. No answer. He felt under the door bottom. The possibility of Swene being at work crossed his mind, but in that event his flat would appear lived in and it would be a simple matter of waiting for him to come home before the rescue could begin. Owen located the key in its neat woody recess and raised it to the brass lock. Inserted. Turned. The door creaked inward. There came a musty smell. The smell alone though didn't signify desertion; an absence, mysterious or otherwise, of Swene. He waved to Mickey, who levered his bulk pavementward.

'There may be booby-traps,' warned Owen.

Shadows lay thick in the hallway. There were car parts, tools, an old pinball machine.

Mickey's eyes lit up.

'Not now,' the short man admonished.

The curtained front room was stacked wall to wall with computer hardware, consoles bleeping, screens flashing oscillating patterns of red and orange. It looked like airport traffic control, thought Owen, only more sinister. Aeroplanes weren't tracked, not with this equipment. It was technology more sophisticated than any he'd seen, surveillance furniture of a Top Secret genus. He backed out, slid round into the living-room. The shadows looked immovable here, solids that spilled like cooled lava from the kitchen. Mickey, at his shoulder, mumbled something he didn't understand.

Everything went quiet.

The absence of sound, its earlier presence subtle, took Owen a few seconds to recognize.

Shades dissolved like stains in a washing-powder commercial.

Owen squinted at Mick, who was holding a three-pin plug by its flex like some odd plastic flower.

'Let's get out of here.'

Mickey dropped the plug and followed.

The door was blocked, a figure silhouetted against snowflakes the size and shape of lettuce leaves.

And they'd left their guns in the car...

'Quick, the back way!'

They rushed into the bedroom, took out the window with whatever came to hand - a chest of drawers, a pair of underpants - and made their escape over the garage roof and along the back lane, circling round the terrace to rendezvous with the car, thankfully unmolested, outside Swene's now closed front door.

'Drive!'

They drove. Owen checked his shoes. Mickey wrinkled his nose at the dog turds.

'Shit!'

'Yeah...'

'I mean - we must be getting soft. Christ. Fuck. Damn. I mean, not having any explosives to hand. Can you imagine?'

'You want to go back, O?' Mickey enquired.

'No, too dangerous now. We'll post a letter-bomb or something.'

'What about Swene?'

Owen took his shoes off, wound down the window and threw them out. He opened the ashtray, fished out a lipstick'd butt and depressed the cigar lighter. 'First things first. We need to get tooled up. Stop at the next post-office.' The cigar lighter popped. He pulled it from the dash and pressed the element to the stump of tobacco, paper and nicotine-stained foam. 'I've been saving this,' he told Mickey, 'for just such an occasion.'

Mickey observed the speed limit, confident they weren't being tailed. He glanced across to see Owen grinning behind a giro cheque.

'You're kidding!'

'Not so, my elasticated friend. And look here, I've juggled the numbers; even added a nought or two.'

'Amazing,' said Mickey, squeezing the word out slowly.

'Thank-you. Now turn around and drive back to the post-office we just passed.'

East wondered at all the commotion. He stepped back outside momentarily and checked the flat number. Yup, this was it. Having spent the night at the Libido Café, sleeping on and off, drinking coffee, he'd pulled on Jenny's big coat and big boots and taken a nostalgic stroll round the old town. Everything appeared different given a living perspective. Time was once more a component. Using his tips he rode a bus and played the tourist - only he seemed to be the only tourist, the greater metropolitan area wholly deficient in camera toting outsiders in loud clothes, souvenir carrier-bags over their shoulders and inadequate maps to hand. Must be the off season. Everybody, whatever their constitution, looked at home.

He re-entered the hall. Closed the door behind.

Opening the boot, chewing gum, Mickey found himself transfixed. Owen too, walking round the car to see what was keeping his partner. Their gazes were sucked from their skulls by an assemblage, interlaced, grasping, shaking, gesturing, pointing, depicting, severed at the wrist, neat stumps, some bearing jewellery, watches, charm bracelets, fingers adorned with rings, tattooed, bitten, painted in their hundreds, clipped and filed, ragged, tight and loose skinned, hands. Children's and adult's hands. Old and young massed in the boot like crabs, all joints and knuckles, frozen in their aspect. They appeared fresh, at least those the two men could see. There was no discernible odour other than a vague smudge of rubber from the spare wheel buried under so many digits. The flesh was somehow preserved.

'There's hundreds,' Mickey said.

Owen scratched his chin. Were they individual or in pairs?

'Do you think he knew?'

'Kowolski?' Owen wasn't sure. If he did, there was surely some purpose to it. Pa hadn't struck him as the kind of man to do things without a reason. Of more immediate concern was where they were going to put all the dynamite. The car was only a two-seater. Owen already had Mickey's bowling bag behind his seat. Not to mention the carbine under it and the small armoury housed at his feet and in the glove compartment.

Mickey was looking to him for an answer.

At school Owen had been taught that God had no hands, that people were His hands, set on Earth to do His work for Him. Aged eight, he hadn't known what to make of such a statement. It seemed peculiarly relevant now, although he still didn't understand. Were these spares? Hands of God for emergency use only? To whom did they belong? he thought, closing the boot lid. 'Let's hope we don't get a puncture.'

'What about the boxes?'

'We'll strap them to the roof.'

A stupid idea, Mickey's expression suggested. But he couldn't think of a better one.

Owen began hunting around the Enormomart car park for odd bits of string, tie-bands, Sellotape, anything.

Mickey came up trumps with several square metres of plastic webbing.

'Where'd you get that?'

'Off the back of a lorry.'

They secured the half dozen boxes of high explosives, disguising the various high explosive symbols with pieces of newspaper, flattened pizza boxes, crisp packets, even an old banana skin.

'That ought to do it,' said Owen. 'Now to find Swene and cut him in on the action.'

East put the plug back in. Died in agony. The shadows, reanimated, looking suspiciously dashing in their deeply polished riding boots and heavily braided tunics, shredded his person. Tore him asunder.

Or so it seemed. To his electrocuted eyes the agony of appendage separation was very real. But to the eyes of the body left in Swene's flat the dislocation was altogether not the same.

She blinked, did Orangepeel. She sat up and was groggy. She needed answers, she thought, and fast. She stood, wobbled, wandered outside. There was a taxi waiting. The woman driver smiled.

The priests congratulated themselves on a good piece of forward thinking. Quodian philosophy, they reminded one another, was all about forward thinking. Well executed (ergo, no living witnesses), it appeared that fate alone had arbitrated, deciding the outcome by random factors. Re-energized, their equipment could quite miraculously go on crunching, dismantling information, digesting variables, plotting subtler means than those already at their disposal. It was hands off, beautifully legitimate and truthfully hypocritical. No-one could accuse them of breaching their own tenets and get away with it. They had Eyes in unusual places. They had Ears and Noses.

Their new trenchermen allies didn't trust them. But neither told the other secrets.

Trust belonged with the living. They'd argument and suspicion, were unable to agree on a joint approach to the problem of Jones and so carried out their own plans behind each other's backs, plots and schemes which often failed, the consequences of which Quod could explain away with little effort. Random factors again, gentlemen, we're unused to this forced intervention, we're new at the arts of manipulation. Frankly, sirs, we find it undignified. Trenchermen are well practised in getting their hands dirty; so leave the dirty work to them. They've more excuses than a Satyr in a harem. Jones, in his arrogant amalgamation of Before and After, will come unstuck eventually, we assure you, and when the inevitable happens and the sky unhooks itself from the ocean, then we'll be well placed to fill the vacuum. Of course, our quodian consciousness won't let us impose order from chaos; quite the contrary. But those damn trenchermen mustn't be allowed to either! We must oppose, fellows, and yet maintain our distance. We must conquer, but not vanquish. We must rely on the mistakes of others and express our surprise and astonishment at the way these things work themselves out to our advantage. It must be the weight of our morality tipping the cosmic balance, don't you know.

Marvellous.

## The Twins

Mingis looked at Mingis looking at Mingis. They had identical desks. They shared an office deep within the labyrinthine Metrodine building. They were its chiefs. Their business was pain. They had a monopoly on pain, as they administered both its application and its assuagement. Theirs was an incorporated body. They had grown from one foetus.

# Part Three: BEYOND GEOGRAPHY

Chapter Six: The Words And Deeds Of An Attractive Single Girl In Her Twenties

Cherry put down the phone. They'd been no answer, not even from the machine. The guilt of separation, herself from Franky, ached in her bones. Strange, she thought, how it was possible to rationalize your own shortcomings, and so easily. She blamed Stack, of course. Stack the determined provider. Better he had stayed at home. Why else had she bought a dishwasher? It was all the fault of her husband and his career. How he could work for those Metrodine creeps was beyond her. They made her skin crawl.

Billy was leaning on the phone-box. He had that lurid smile of his. Possessed, she described it.

'Come on, sweetie, we're losing the light.'

Billy Producer. He claimed it was his real name.

'Okay - where do you want me?'

'By the car,' instructed Billy, reversing his monocle. 'What's the matter?'

'Looks familiar.'

'What? The car?' He was impatient. It was three-thirty.

Cherry shivered.

'I don't give a fuck. Just perch your arse on the bonnet.'

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, she thought. Maybe Stack couldn't manage. But she'd been offered the part and taken it. Seized it, the first serious part to come her way in ages. The shoot was a projected three weeks. She hadn't seen an entire script yet, was given her lines either verbally or on scraps of paper, strange missives passed out of a pick-up with the legend Molten Lead on either door. A monochrome flick then. Great for her cheekbones, but the bags under her eyes would be a problem.

She posed obediently, a chill winding its tongue up her short skirt, the man approaching heavy-jowled under a Homburg that shaded his eyes.

'Kowolski?'

Her mind went blank. His eyes twinkled. She'd thought the name a coincidence, nothing more. But the car, she had seen its like outside Pa's.

'Who wants to know?' She smouldered, despite the cold.

'A friend of a friend,' he answered, leaning closer to whisper, all dead breath and flat gaze 'of a friend of mine.'

Nancy. It was her name. Pa's other daughter, the character she was playing here, in this peculiar biopic. It was, she reckoned, as if someone (the film's backer, the invisible money man) was reinventing history. To what end remained to be seen. Often though, the version brought to your local multiplex was more convincing than anything recalled as actually having happened. Not that she was clear on that, on the reality or otherwise of these jumbled events. There was nothing linear bout shooting a movie, and Billy seemed determined to keep everything, the plot included, to himself. Obviously Nancy Kowolski had got herself mixed up in something. But what? Would the celluloid version bare any relation to the facts? Probably not. Films were always shot in a different light. It was always necessary to dress things up. And directors liked to play God. Which left producers, executive, to don the horns of Beelzebub.

Spooky. She could see Billy Producer with his face in his hands. The camera moved behind her, framing her silvered hair against the blackness of the man's chest.

They hadn't been previously introduced.

He pulled something from his pocket. A knife. He touched it to her chin and she could feel it was sharp.

'You don't scare me.'

'I don't mean to.' He turned his head sideways, ducked and kissed her.

'What was that for?'

'For being a good girl.'

'What if I'm not? What if I'm bad?'

The knife returned to his pocket, he stepped away. 'Just remember who you are, Kowolski; and what brings you here. You know you can't resist a conspiracy.'

No, thought Cherry, never could. We have a lot in common, you and I, girl.

'What about Silo?' she pleaded.

'He'll be in touch.'

'Through you? That's not good enough.'

He laughed as if to himself, walking off toward the Railstation, leaving the road silent, the air itself unnerved.

## Motion Sickness

It was unnatural, decided Roger. Whatever was going on, whichever side of the lens, had been corrupted by TV. The small screen was a quick fix, the easy option, a money up front and who cares so long as the station's happy.

He was jealous. Insanely.

Jane had left him with bruises, almost symmetrical thumbprints and high-velocity vegetable echoes. Not that he minded, spending hours admiring these faux tattoos in the mirror of an evening. They spoke of love, he reckoned. What more could a man ask for? He thought he'd seen Nancy in a shop window and froze to the damp pavement, squinted through the frosted glass, past the naked mannequins. She was floating among lipsticks and eyelash pencils, not a few disappearing into her pockets. Could it be? No, another, more beautiful yet less alluring, an actress he recognised cast in the role of the missing person. He stalked her through what turned out to be a break in filming a TV movie with Nancy as heroine. Only not Nancy...

The story? Roger was nervous. Perturbed. Miffed, as he was sure there was a copyright infringement somewhere. Should he get a lawyer? Best gather some video evidence first. He felt he ought to know the storyline, but didn't. He recognized the laundry van as Silo's, the thumping from within as Silo's and Nancy's. But who were all the strange orderlies? Some in black with guns.

Tyrone, thankfully, came crawling through the undergrowth.

'Jimmy?'

'Fracture clinic.'

'Shit. Never mind. See if you can get some close-ups.'

Tyrone slid off, sloughing his white overcoat to reveal a camouflage jacket.

Roger watched him go with a sense of panic. Were the mediCINEMArtyrs to be upstaged? Was the previously unknown Molten Lead even now recreating that last scene where Nancy Kowolski had her love in a painful-looking head-lock?

The entire scenario was depressing. He squeezed his eyes shut, pushing the cold from his face in an effort to compose himself, sucking breaths that left his teeth feeling stripped of enamel.

Tyrone, glimpsed through bushes, filmed the film makers, agitated now by some discourse that to Roger Coaltrain was inaudible. There was an argument on set, arms flailing, fingers pointing, limbs blurred, gesticulating madly. He needed Jimmy Head to be in the midst of it, immortalizing noises, himself hovering in the background, chin on palm in an attitude of greatness. He needed to be in control of this production. That it was happening without his special touch was a peculiar heartache, a chest pang, as if that other director, whoever he was, had stolen his girl. It was Roger's day off, however. He had no reason to be within a hundred miles of the hospital, other than having nothing better to do. Doctor Jimmy was straightening limbs; which left Tyrone creeping through the short grass, actively suspicious. The van doors opened and closed in quick succession. Someone who looked like Silo walked round the vehicle, trailed by a cameraman. He bumped into the someone who looked like Nancy and they exchanged words. He slapped her. He kissed her. He collapsed at her feet, face turned upward, questioning, a knife in his belly glowing hotly, redly, the cameraman back-tracking, Nancy stepping away, blonde hair blowing in her eyes. And all Roger could think was: what will I tell Jane this evening, everything or nothing? Was truth fiction? Whose version?

There was more shouting. Someone had spotted Tyrone. Guns were aimed. He came out with his hands up, leaving the camera in the grass. Roger hoped the Molten Lead crew wouldn't see it. But no, one of the orderlies picked it up, holding it over his head like a trophy. They ushered Tyrone inside, leaving only Silo, his back to a wheel and his features vacant.

## Squelch

Stack didn't like what he was hearing. Henry's monologue had him worried. Not only was the weedy man telling him his wife was in great danger, but his son had most probably been abducted by devils.

'Listen, if it's any consolation, I've a one hundred percent detection rate.'

Stack's stomach rumbled. He thought about calling the cops. Not a great idea, he told himself. He could go direct to Metrodine for help, but they'd likely ask for his signature on some dotted line. He was in enough debt as it was. And Metrodine, what he knew of its machinations, its slimy, far-reaching tentacles, all the things he had done his best to ignore before...well, Cherry would never forgive him if he got them involved. Or were they already?

Henry unwrapped a boiled sweet and put it in his mouth.

Gazing out the car window, Stack couldn't tell if it was day or night. He understood this to be January, but he failed to recall which day of the month it was, or whether it was Tuesday or Saturday. He remembered listening to the football results on the radio, but not when. Henry Eels appeared to be thinking. Perhaps he had a plan; or maybe he too was ruminating, undecided, playing back a tape in his mind, freezing frames and indexing, taking particular note of colours and shades, angles of reflection, contrasts, the juxtaposition of people and place. The buildings looked glazed, painted over with some thin syrup. Light spilled from every orifice, doors and windows both emitting and receiving an abundance of rays, waves of an invisible sea constantly pummelling the city, shifting it in time and space. The inhabitants mingled on floors and through corridors, in rooms full and empty, empty and full with the passing day, each separate hour unique in its composition, broken down into separate, unique minutes. You could repeat a second. You could blink and miss it. Nothing longer endured in Ileum. There was only the moment that lasted forever.

Stack, thought Stack, was filled with paranoia. Justifiably so, he reasoned.

He had a picture of Franky in his head. The picture told him he was alive, vibrant, confused, but too young to worry over absent parents. Franky was on a tyre swing. It was a summer's day, the sun gently pounding, igniting the child's hair and face, gleaming, smiling, leaning forward toward waiting arms. Perfect. The image was burned into Stack's memory. Only there was something else in the picture now. There, in the background, standing by an oak tree. He couldn't make it out. A figure, watching, waiting to steal the child away.

There was a loud thump on the roof of the car. Stack and Henry both gasped, wrenched from their private worlds by the dull impact. Seconds later came another, and a third, a percussion roll...

Everything beyond the windows appeared to suddenly moisten. They looked at each other. Henry shrugged.

'Hailstones?'

'More like snowballs.'

Wet, greasy snowballs. One hit the screen and slid bloodily down to rest on a wiper arm.

'That's a frog,' said Henry.

'No,' replied Stack; 'a toad.' He had dissected hundreds during a brief stint as a green activist undercover at a leading cosmetics firm. So he knew the difference.

Ah, the exuberance of youth, he thought.

Henry grinned. 'Exceptional!' He opened the driver's door.

'Where are you going?'

'I want to see if it's localized.' A bloated amphibian hit him on the arm and he laughed theatrically.

Stack just shook his head. It was all getting too much, the Jack Daniel's and Marlboro route looking increasingly inviting. Why should he give a fuck? So much easier to let go, to blame.

Henry disappeared into the toad storm for a few minutes. When it subsided he trudged back carrying a distended plastic bag. 'Yep, pretty local. Look.' Besides toads there were fish and...

'Ergh...puppies!'

'Indeed. Everything in about fifty square metres. That's pretty accurate. Pretty flattering, too.' His grin was sickly now, the grin of an obsessive. 'Certainly someone knows we're coming.'

## Supposed Reality

Pa wasn't her father, he said. Jane wasn't her sister. Yes, she'd murdered Silo; at his behest. This was how it was, he said.

Did it have to be?

The question lingered. They all did...

'Things happen for the smallest of reasons,' Jones told her. 'The end result, be it ineffectual or catastrophic, is what defines existence. Still,' rubbing his front teeth with the pad of his little finger, right hand, 'outcomes can be manipulated.'

Spiel, thought Nancy, squirming under his thumb; it's fucking political speech time.

But for once the tyrant was less than forthcoming.

How was this for a story?

Mingis and Mingis, her aborted sons. It was herself in that room, up those stairs, down that corridor with the floral wallpaper. She lay on the bed, her belly swollen way beyond her memory of it. This was Nancy's life, the Jones' edit, the termination on the cutting room floor. They exploded from her, ripped her, tore open her womb. Jones' boys, those he chose to protect. He'd had to take the world on to do it, move Hell and Earth, change all the locks and shift all the doors. And he had, determining the end result. The consequences of it were far reaching; any fool could see that. Yet his motives, in the end, were human. It had been her decision to abort the pregnancy that had forced him to act. She'd never been able to admit the error, the pain of it stowed deep. Nancy viewed the entire procedure, from start to finish, as a tactical call. Her sexuality was her strength. She couldn't afford to have it undermined. There was her career. Although in expressing it, she recognized the flimsiness of that particular rationale. It was disgust, really; disgust had forced her hand. Disgust of Jones. She'd met him on the balcony of her apartment, two in the morning, a transparent figure, almost how she imagined Death - not a scythe gripped in his left hand, however, but the throat of a man. She was about to be murdered, he claimed, strangled with one of her own stockings buy this amateur burglar, a puny-looking lad. He was here to save her. He was breaking all the rules. Did she realize just what a risk he was taking? And why?

Nancy understood only the threat. It would take everything she had inside to forget his presence, there on her balcony, later in her bed, the bed she never shared.

It would take another man.

She stepped out into the road, was nearly run over by an express delivery vehicle, its form as its logo, indistinct, a varicoloured blur. They didn't stop for anything. Not in Ileum. The few things Nancy understood about this city - next to its all-pervasiveness - appeared trivial next to the impetus of express delivery personnel. They fed the bureaucrats and the bureaucrats returned in kind. It was always the mundane that undid you.

Settling herself, smoothing herself down, imagining herself a little girl, Nancy looked left and right and skipped off the kerb. There was a cathedral opposite, spires lost in clouds. But it wasn't the cathedral that interested her. Nancy had never been one for architecture; or religion, for that matter. Stained glass windows she liked though. There was something romantic about coloured light, as if it had yet to be purged, yet to be melded. Holding their individuality to the last, those stubborn wavelengths were a reminder of how beautiful it was to be different. How real and unique was the experience. Their contribution was more than a token celebration of spectral independence. It was, Nancy realized, a fulsome endorsement of all that she herself held close.

Jones was her uncle, he said.

Fine. But nothing, absolutely nothing more.

## Boomers

Owen couldn't keep the calculations out of his head. Peering at his baldness in a mirror, he could see formulae superimposed over a brow large and bloated, grossly babylike in proportion. He didn't find his appearance unattractive. A bit Elmer Fuddish, perhaps, only not as dumb. It was all this particle physics and continuum mechanics criss-crossing the silvered glass that annoyed him. It was as if his brain was projecting its inner workings, vortices of numbers splashing from his head like water put through a sieve; streams of consciousness he had no control over, no understanding of; the workings of his thought engine alien to him in all but context. Something strange was happening. He saw it in Mickey, too, a gentle restlessness, a readying.

The toilet flushed.

Magnificent Mick rolled out, holding his guts, the giant M of his T-shirt stretched like some rippled balloon. 'Phew!'

Owen tapped his foot.

'Sorry, was I long?'

Owen shrugged. 'Come on, grab the cases, there's still some way to go.'

Mickey had devised a kind of yoke to carry the dynamite, so that he resembled a burly milkmaid. He had to turn sideways to pass through doors. And doors there were aplenty: doors opening onto corridors, into rooms, some no more than cupboards, others the size of orchestral halls. Not one was occupied, or furnished beyond the occasional chair or row of chairs, all of them bolted down. The bathroom had come as a surprise, a useful amenity with hot and cold running water and toilet-roll. Owen had no idea where they were going or what they meant to explode. He just knew that if they kept on their quest would be resolved. There'd be a giant flashing X or something, some sign reading PLACE BOMB HERE. Meantime, the calculations zipped past his eyes, strobed in his orbs, burst like tears composed of numbers each time he blinked, seeding the doors and walls with fractions and integers, a whole digital code, streams of complex mathematical runes that increasingly occupied his world. He tried to think of them as co-ordinates, which in a sense they were, but not only to his space and time but the space and time of every interactive being, routes and issues his brain disgorged as if sifting information, searching for an individual's whereabouts midst the jumble of a trillion souls, the living and the dead of Ileum and Earth.

A roll call.

Mickey walked uncomplainingly behind. He knew their direction to be true, regardless of where they might end up. The motion in his cycle shorts had ceased upon entering this room and corridor realm, the round box wearing his balls as a hat asleep now in his pink lycra pants. He thought fleetingly of his bowling ball, tucked in its bag behind the yellow Triumph's passenger seat. He worried about all those hands in the boot, the fingers that might be tempted to penetrate wood. Ingresses lubricious with sweat, the oils of his bygone youth. Three holes. 'Just like a woman,' as Egon had said.

A peculiar jealousy. Turning sideways once more, Mickey entered a room more brightly lit than any before, so bright it was impossible to gauge its extent. The walls melted to either side. Owen was in silhouette, one hand up to shade his eyes, the other rooting in a jacket pocket for sunglasses. Finding some, he handed Mickey a pair.

They didn't help. No new detail was offered up. The light, although filtered, remained all there was.

## Antimatter

The sun shone. It hadn't done that in ages. Ileum took on a new aspect, reflecting itself in glass rather than puddles. Its edges were sharpened, making its joins stand out, welds and rivets like those in the hulls of ocean liners. Seams of cement like digital fingerprints. Fields of steel and stone, upright and angled, transfixed by iron. So much detail. Swene couldn't help but absorb. He was truly a citizen of this grand metropolis, lost somewhere in its maze of streets and underpasses, cold and hot, wet and dry, stealing from fast food outlets and sleeping in supermarket trolleys. He spied on courting couples in the parks, benches slippery under trousers and skirts, fingers moist under hems, tongues bouncing in mouths from which steamed breath. Conversing with squirrels, Swene's own breath passed through his nose. He could watch the couples for hours. The squirrels teased him. Shouldn't they be asleep? They didn't hibernate, they told him, they had central heating and 24 hour shopping. They didn't even hoard nuts. Berries came fresh from warmer climes. They drank beer and watched videos.

Then there was one girl alone. Always one, he thought. Was this why? Why he was here, involved? Perhaps she had the answers he craved.

Missing...

Swene followed her. She walked endlessly. He had no idea where she was headed. It suited him, this aimless wandering. Day and night, outside of time, her feet meandered, through retail outlets - she bought a long frock coat - and restaurants - she ate expensively, never seeming to pay. He collected the scraps from her plate, salivating in her wake, eating salad leaves and oysters, drinking wine and coffee as he skipped between tables, too slippery for waiters, too blurred for surveillance cameras, resuming his pursuit, the girl not once glancing his way. That she knew she was stalked Swene thought obvious. It was in her smile, her body language, the way she lingered in malls, sauntered about galleries, deliberate and mannered. She avoided cabs, buses and crowds. She read pages at random in books and magazines. She stayed in hotels, always leaving the lights on and the curtains open in her room. The sunshine gave a citrus hue to her hair.

She'd asked him for help once before, he realized, only her eyes had been empty on that occasion. He wondered what it was she wanted now. Had he helped then, he wondered, might he have escaped the greater debt, been let off with a warning? Like his mother, had she gone to the doctor's sooner. The cancer she bore might not have had such a lethal grip. She might have escaped it. Lived another ten years. His father might have stuck around. His brother might not have gone "off the rails". His leather jacket that Swene now wore.

A cause without a rebel. So far.

'Seduction,' Nancy breathed into her Dictaphone, not trusting it to record. It hadn't before, there in Burger King before that knock at her door. 'The obedience of men and the respect of women...' She sat in bed with a cup of tea. It reminded her of her father, of Pa, who it transpired was only playing the role. He was very good at it, she thought, not saying that out loud. He'd fooled her. 'The apportioning of blame,' she continued, a destination in mind but no route planned. 'The counting of the dead, each corpse a score. Plots and schemes; some deliberate, some accidental - consequential, taking shape through action, never intended to be employed as a means to an end. Delivered clumsily or proclaimed majestically, each action determining the actions of others, changing and shaping others, the actions of others, the acts themselves, all tumbling helplessly toward a fall.'

Blah, blah...

Her tea was getting cold.

She gazed out the window. There was light, muffled noise, images and sounds that might be the result of a million things, incidents in the city's life reverberating off buildings until eventually they found their way to her ears and eyes. She was taken with the sudden idea that she was the control in an experiment; others out there, perhaps billions, suffering every manipulation, indignity and consequence.

'Coincidences shape history,' Nancy intoned, then smiled. 'History...men, violence and guns.' She paused long, emptying her cup. It was too easy to blame them for everything. They were weak. Given the option they'd rather make love than war. But which was more dangerous? 'History is sex, two people fucking in order to shape events, orgasms spilling pleasure over flesh, deciding upon a relationship, an alliance of sticky body parts, seminal fluids, juices and blood. If orgasms coincide, then so too can events. History is born. The world is redefined. Cause and effect.' Her features squirmed. Did she have a plan of her own? She slid from the bed and walked to the window. Peering out, she could see him. He looked cold, shoulders hunched under bruised leather. Opening the window, Nancy signalled for him to climb the drainpipe.

'You're a cold-blooded killer, Nance. Face it; you enjoyed it, the penetration, the knife going in. You're the perfect mother, an example to your sons...'

Her own voice, coming from the Dictaphone, frightened her more than anything.

But it wasn't her talking. Not Nancy.

She lay on the floor with Swene. His sleep was total, occupying him as if by force. She almost felt she loved him. Perhaps she had to love him, or else slip away. She needed that warmth.

If only she could be good she wouldn't be bad.

This Nancy, she thought, feeling her heart, feeling his; not that. Thinking of that Nancy made her heart fade, his also, slowing in his chest like her Dictaphone when the batteries were low.

Good Nancy, not bad.

Hearts quickened, recharged.

This was what she needed him for. What if he didn't love her? Was just fucking her, using her to engender history, a past with her face and breasts, her open legs, her wet mouth. What if neither of them could love at all? She needed his forgiveness, having told him, in brutal detail, of her involvement, her very particular relations with these shenanigans. Things she could no longer ignore. Did he think her complicit? Was she to blame for his own misfortune? Swene didn't see it as that though.

He wasn't terribly bright, she thought. Swene's Ileum might still be fun.

Jones, his seed refreshed by foul means, a course of witch therapy and excruciating testicular injections, had impregnated bad Nancy, filled her womb with twins.

Good Nancy was forced into hiding.

Here now, engaged in some hiatus, she rocked gently, nudging his somnolent form, wanting the world back the way it was before. The good world, the world without murder in it, the world of Palmersville and a private clinic, the world before history itself got fucked, where plots and schemes were smaller and she was in control. It had to be out there somewhere. Finding it would be difficult, but it was where she was headed all along. Jones gambled on her loyalty, on her good self being overwhelmed. The city would devour her. The city had too much to offer one of her tastes. And Nancy had tasted, dipped her tongue and swallowed whole. The delight of it was a recent memory. A disturbing journey. The first of many. No coincidence.

She'd murdered Silo, he said. At his behest? For her mother's sake, he said. Her mother? That dark mysterious creature. Who was Silo anyway? Just a man, one of billions, one whose heart she could not recall...

Her palate had altered, though.

## The Light Of Day

He decided to tell her everything.

'That's preposterous,' she said. 'What happened to Tyrone?'

Roger didn't know. Shamefaced, he made some lame excuse about a fire drill.

'Well, haven't you tried to contact him?'

He shook his head.

'Give me your phone.'

'They'll come after me!'

'Who?'

'Molten Lead productions! That's who.'

Jane calmly assessed his paranoia. Perhaps it was justified. Certainly something peculiar was going on. 'Okay - we'll go look for him.'

'At two in the morning?'

'Why not? Jesus, Roger, he's your friend.'

'I'm not sure I can go back there,' he admitted. 'It's no longer the same place.'

'The morgue?'

'Right. It's full of dead people.'

Jane's mouth puckered. 'I thought you liked dead people.'

'Not these ones. They walk.'

'Well, too bad. Let's get going.'

It took forever to drive to the hospital. She didn't bitch or complain. Roger was just being circuitous.

The place seemed unusually quiet.

The only noise was the rush of the incinerator; hospital waste, human remains, parts of sterile packaging and bits of people fuelling the oven.

Everything was dark, from the lamps in the car park to the windows visible in the hospital's east wing.

The double doors to the morgue were open.

Roger Coaltrain was terrified of what they'd find.

Jane had brought a torch. She shone it, opening the gloom, light bouncing off stainless steel and porcelain. There was the familiar carbolic smell, an odour deathly clean. And a lot of blood, black and shiny under the artificial light.

'Can we go now?'

But Jane was curious, excited. The danger here present aroused her, bottom lip swollen as she picked her way between tables. Dragging her fingers in the blood she found it sticky. She smelled her fingers. They smelled burnt. She licked them. Tasted fear, her tongue interpreting the chemical shock of a victim's last seconds. He'd been severely beaten, naked and vulnerable, blunt instruments and sharp. Tortured into some confession. Tyrone? Something told her no. There was a noise, a shuffle of feet behind her. She turned. Roger had disappeared. Perhaps of his own accord, she couldn't say. Her torch flickered, its life spent. She gripped it tighter. Shook it a moment, then ceased.

The darkness intrigued. She moved through it without difficulty, pushing aside soft doors, walking silent passages, pipework clutching their ceilings. She passed through wards whose patients were memories, their physicality removed, through treatment rooms and theatres whose walls still echoed joy and pain, birth and death, separation from organs, the stark realization of cancer cells, amputation, sewing, mistakes too easily made. Silent apparatus, desks, tables and chairs littered the hospital corridors, along with posters advising contraception or warning of infection, their language subtle or blunt depending on the message thus conveyed. The floors were carpeted and tiled, alternately rubbing and squeaking under her shoes. There was a steel basin clatter, sound cutting like lightning as a rat scampered across her toes, others climbing over one another as each took a bite from the mound about which they swarmed. She could hear their teeth tearing, cloth and flesh. There were the scrapes of claw on bone. Not lingering, Jane passed through another door, entered a large open space, a canteen emptied of furniture. Moonlight filled it, streaming in the tall windows, shades of blue-grey casting long rectangular tongues over a fractured linoleum surface. Beyond was the city, mile after mile of it, galaxies and constellations separated by vast tracts of dark. Was there life out there, or was everything dead? She was at the centre of one such void, she realized.

All the lights would be extinguished in time. Or drowned by greater blazes. It was a question of feeding fires.

Her torch came back to life.

A door opened at the canteen's far end, and in rushed a tide of workers, white-coated doctors and blue-banded nurses, a great babble of conversation decking them like tidal foam. They made for the serving benches, polished steel and glass shelves behind which staff in net hats and pinafores ladled from scratched containers foods from across the globe. The smell was overwhelming, rising from pots and casseroles, swelling like a new day, tea and coffee odours, breakfast and lunch bouquets, clouds of steam from dishes cracking the restored light into rainbows.

This was a different hospital, she saw, as full of life as death, a place where miracles could still occur. If she wandered back down to the morgue what might she find? Would Roger be waiting there? Jane didn't think so. He was a coward. She extinguished the torch and slid between trestles and chairs, dodging people balancing trays. The sun rose over Ileum, introducing a fresh set of circumstances, one as full of possibilities as the last, chock full of events in a myriad of lives, good and bad and indifferent, every second framing love and hatred, nurture and murder, the vast majority of its performers unknown to her, scenes from their lives she would never witness, stories that would go unheard. Jane could only touch so many. People, events could touch her, affect her in a multitude of ways. She had no control over that. But she as an individual still had the right, if not always the option, to choose. And what she didn't like she could rationalize. She could invent names for things too frightening to be called by their own. She was a human being and she could pretend. Reality had no hold on her. She could go with the light or the dark. Both were equally valid. And she could interpret either in any way. The day was at her discretion, to succeed or fail as she wished. It was as she perceived, only her experiences to date left her incapable as yet of determining how that might unfold.

Outside it was raining.

Mundane.

'Shit.' Snatching a newspaper from under the arm of a man in a suit, Jane ran to the nearby Railstation holding it over her head. The pages ran with ink, oily and thick like spilled Guinness. Words stained her fingers with the previous day's misnomers and killings, fact and fiction interspaced with advertisements and cartoons. She didn't dare read the front page. That was someone else's interpretation. The newspaper was binned under the terminal arch.

Commuters shuffled on a platform spotted with chewing-gum. Jane sought anonymity among them, bodies functioning independently of others, alone in the city that housed them, ordered them, grouped and dispersed them. Each had his or her purpose, whether instilled or primal, ambitions and goals they'd either attain or compromise. They collected here awaiting transport, avoiding eye contact with people they'd seen every day for years, as familiar as house plants. Most would sit in the same seat on the train, powering underground in a work-day ritual at once fixed and changeable, governed by a fear of the unknown. Change might liberate them, she thought. A bomb in a suitcase would make them over, alter their physical and mental states. She toyed with the idea, liking it, to be stood here primed to explode, to enforce chaos, the rule of chaos a contradiction - but routine was just chaos contained. Released, its power was manifold. Jane tasted that power. It was the taste of the blood in the dark morgue, the memory of what had happened their alive in her bones.

She boarded without a ticket, lingered in the gangway, soliciting with her gaze.

Men were troubled. Less so boys. She chose at random, he nondescript and middle-aged. She made him sit on a toilet and spooned her breasts from her blouse. He tasted her then, tongue washing her nipples, small and sharp. Would she strangle him with his own tie? She couldn't decide. Perhaps it wasn't necessary. She could feel the pull of it, however, that stygian desire. He began unbuttoning her jeans and she angrily slapped his hand away. His eyes shone. Doubt crept over her. He was too strong, too hungry. Pulling her head down he kissed her, biting her lip. She felt his teeth against hers and pushed her tongue against them, tasting the blood, warm and thin in her mouth like wine. He pulled at her jeans again and this time she didn't countermand. They were round her hips, and his thumb inside her, upturned, the knuckle of his first finger rubbing her clitoris. Breath left her hard. She reached round his neck, took hold of his tie and yanked it with all her strength while pushing his head to one side. His skull connected with the aluminium sink. His neck twisted. His thumb locked in her vagina, hooking her like a fish. She beat his head against the sink repeatedly, not loosening her grip; but his own was as fast, even in death, his thumb curled and rigid, embedded in her soft flesh. Jane searched her pockets for a means of cutting it, but found nothing but paper handkerchiefs, bus tickets and loose change. Pushing him upright she went through his jacket, his wallet with the family pics, details of a life ended. A messy respite. There was a nail file and she began cutting away at his hand with that, stabbing the joint, blood collecting in the crotch of her pants. Desperately she hacked, reaching bone and sinew, two fingers over her slick pudendum holding the thumb while she tugged at his wrist. Flesh stretched, eventually tearing, the joint coming apart like a chicken wing. Quickly she mopped up the blood, stuffing his hand in his shirt and hauling her jeans up. Her jacket came half way to her knees, but still there were visible stains.

The train slowed to a stop. She had no idea where she was. How long did she have? His thumb inside her moved. No, no, it couldn't. She looked at herself in the mirror. The face was Jane's, her own. She recognized it, although it had changed.

What would Nancy do? she thought. In seeking to emulate her sister, had she gone too far?

The thumb rubbed her as she walked. She felt compelled to climb an escalator rather than stand and ride the moving stair. It was pleasurable, building slowly, moving her toward orgasm. Emerging into daylight, the rain suspended, Jane pushed her way through crowds of travellers and shoppers. She had to find a doctor, she told herself. But she couldn't; she had no way of explaining this. The thumb would have to come out sooner or later. It would rot in there, poisoning her. A filthy root in her wet soil, it would have to grow or wither, establish itself or drop from between her thighs. Then what would she become? To have this digit sprouting inside her like a worm. It made her feel nice. She accepted that. But it was just part of the invader's rouse. It would feed off her, devour her, and yet calm her at the same time. It was a successful parasite. It had evolved.

Didn't she deserve it? Hadn't she been bad?

As a punishment, this lacked hurt.

She'd compromise...leaning on a stanchion by a kiosk selling multi-vitamins and herbal teas, fresh basil and thyme, bunches of fennel like barbed wire...no she wouldn't. She'd deny the pleasure, forego its rewards, throw herself down a flight of stairs.

But, ahhh...Janey, Janey...only one man had made her feel this way, New Year's Day, belly sweat-painting a table.

Benny Zine, the indefatigable being. But was he human?

Was she? Perhaps she'd imagined everything, and thinking it smiled. She hadn't imagined Benny's cock inside her. No. But this...thumb? It belonged elsewhere, didn't it? There had been no murder, no crime.

'My love,' she whispered, eyes watering. She had to find him, Jane decided.

The woman attending the kiosk spoke to her but she failed to understand. Various tinctures passed under her nose. She was made to sit down.

'Eighty.'

'Hmm?'

'Eighty objects,' the woman repeated, her big eyes knowing. 'That's what lie between you and what you crave.'

One more than seventy-nine.

Yes, she had her first.

'Relax, dear...'

He'd had a shaving rash and a side parting.

'Don't grip so!'

Odd shoes...

'There now.' Swishing something round in a pickle jar minus the pickles. Suspended in pale vinegar.

## Entertainment Being Illegal

Cherry smiled her best Molasses smile at Billy Producer. The movie, peculiar from the outset, had taken on a sinister aspect. Still, it was a movie, she told herself, hopelessly reassuring, and Billy Producer had stated the project's oddness, if only recently, as if he'd just realized it himself. 'We have to be careful...but not too careful.' Cherry was experiencing the emptiness of Frank, that was all, she was missing her son. Deliberately, she wiped a tear away.

'Okay,' said Billy, enthusiasm spilling from him like foam out of a pan of boiling milk; 'what I want you to do now, girl, is demand an explanation.'

Chance being a fine thing.

'He's your boyfriend!'

This cartoonist?

'Just what the hell does he think he's doing?'

His voice was so high Cherry's face felt as if it was being sucked forward.

Some of the crew were holding their ears.

Billy, though, just kept shrieking. 'It's corrupt! He's disgusting! You can't let him get away with this, sure-ly! The man's a criminal, a peddler of filth and misinformation! He's a social disease! He has to be stopped, you hear me, he can't be allowed to go on poisoning the body politic! He must be an-nihilated! And soon...' The last two words were whispered, soft echoes off a fractured door mirror, glass falling like sharp petals from a chrysanthemum dipped in liquid nitrogen. 'Get the picture?'

'But what did he do?' Cherry wanted to know. Of all those present, close and peripheral, acting, pretending, she felt the most at ease at that moment with Billy's temper tantrum. He was trying to frighten her, she supposed. The more he did that, the less vague her situation became. She understood shouting all too well; was, in fact, a bit of a screamer herself.

'Do?'

'Yes.'

Billy grabbed Sam Delaney by the shoulder. 'Tell the lady.'

Sam looked puzzled.

'Well?'

'Eh, I drew hideous caricatures of those in political office and made a mockery of the achievements of those individuals responsible for, among other things, the betterment of mankind and the advancement of the state in a time of crisis against a background of corruption and repression which said individuals fought with all means at their disposal and at great personal cost to themselves and their families in order that ingrates such as myself might sleep at night safe in the knowledge that those of a higher moral standing were committed to the ideal of democracy and the rule of law and that those base enough to want to undermine the state in whatever fashion would be singled out for correction and/or rehabilitation in accordance with the values of a society as administered by those very politicians whose sacrifices had earned them the dubious right to be so grossly portrayed, in all absence of decency, justice and truth, by the likes of me.'

Oh, thought Cherry, that cartoonist.

'Okay, okay...' said Billy Producer. 'Enough. It's redemption time, sweetheart; you're in the newspaper game, so's he. Disgusted by his actions, you confront the little shit, demand an explanation, an end to his sick ways, or else you'll expose him for what he is, bring him down in flames.'

Sam was quaking in his boots.

There was a commotion a short distance away.

What, again?

Men were shouting, running back and forth. There was a scream, a screech of tyres.

'CHERRY!'

Huh? Stack?

'Fuck!' Billy nudged Sam Delany's forehead with a pistol and pulled the trigger.

Cherry vomited, buckling like a hinge.

A black car thundered by, a man hanging out of each front window, one holding a video camera, the other her husband, mouth held wide by the wind.

'CHERRY!'

Billy Producer squeezed off a number of rounds.

The car skidded, slewed, disappeared behind a brick wall.

Her head spun. The sky revolved about an axis horizontal to a nearby telegraph pole. She felt her arm pulled, was dragged bodily round the pick-up, where Billy unhitched the tailgate and rudely lifted her onto the metal bed, cold with rime, slippery with fluid. Cherry lay back, nausea turning her skull to stone. And yet some part of her was willing to enjoy this. The engine fired and the clouds shifted in a new direction as the pick-up took off, trailing a pall of dust.

Camera equipment jostled her for space, none of it secured, rolling as she rolled as the vehicle changed direction, throwing buildings up into her eye frame, snapshots laid indelibly across her consciousness each time she blinked.

Managing to turn, Cherry focused successfully on the beaten steel bed, its scratches and indentations matching those she herself felt, transportational scars gleaned over a lifetime of such journeys undertaken without knowledge of destination, shambolic episodes, adventures on film and in kinema. She'd been in a commercial once where the director had required her naked flank to lie in juxtaposition with a crocodile's snout. That hadn't scared her nearly as much. That was fantasy, the croc sedated with two morphine-saturated sheep. This was very different. Real life had a way of coming awake and chomping down on your arse with the least amount of finesse. Reality knew nothing of foreplay. Consequently, one had to act.

Billy was driving with one hand on the wheel and the other out the window, loosing faster than sound death knells at the car in front, taking out shop windows and passers-by. They appeared to be catching, the black car hitting traffic, mounting kerbs and side-swiping other road users as it snaked its way. Cherry, kneeling, held fast onto the guard at the back of the cab, peering over Billy's shoulder, through two layers of glass. She could see Stack was driving, his passenger in the back seat with the video camera repeatedly falling to the floor, or forward, banging the camera lens off the window. They had to be mad, she decided. Her stomach was steely calm now, her mind razor sharp. There were sodium lamps in the back of the pick-up, a battery, all sliding from side to side in a jumble of telescopic limbs and strangled wires. If she could connect a lamp and shine it in Billy's eyes...

They collided with something, a person, a soft impact that brought a body slithering over the top of the cab and into her lap. Its face was missing. Cherry shut her eyes and wriggled out from under this newest encumbrance. She wasn't about to be distracted now. Sirens. Blue lights and screaming. The dead person clung tenaciously to a white plastic bag.

They crashed.

Cherry and the corpse flew through the air, overtaking Billy as he had to first negotiate the windscreen. Braked by glass, his body tumbled slower than theirs, falling short of the flower stall into which they were flung cleanly and with the extra push of the pick-up as it levered to forty-five degrees on impact with the Ventura, itself having nosedived into a delivery van. The two drivers, Stack and an unknown woman, met in the van's passenger compartment, the woman's neck bent over backward by the weight of Stack as he passed through not one screen but two, crashing in over the her deployed air-bag.

Henry Eels, having relinquished the wheel and clambered into the Ventura's rear, found himself sandwiched between the back and front seats, trapped amid cardboard boxes and recording equipment, video still running, camera jammed painfully against his right eye. Through the bloodied lens he peered at the pick-up's torn innards, the stump of an arm knotted round the steering wheel. The limb was Billy Producer's, the remainder of him having cleared the Ventura only to land on the roof of the van before sliding, breathing yet, into the gutter.

Also sucking air were Stack and Cherry. The corpse even had a healthy glow to it, although this was more due to the buckets of dahlias it had fallen among, a colour palette to paint its broken features, reassembling them from petals and plastic fern stems. Cherry lay on her back, legs tucked under her, the fractured uprights of the flower stall about her like a wedding-night four-poster. The base had shattered, softening her protracted descent, for which she was grateful, aromatic and soaked.

In the van, Stack blinked. He could smell the unconscious woman's breath, hanging in her mouth like the gas cloud in a volcano. He hurt all over, especially his face. Henry had goaded him so much he'd felt he had little choice but to rescue Cherry from whatever it was offering her threat. At high speed, necessarily. He'd show those Metrodine bastards he was a match for any cop.

A second Ventura pulled up.

Thorp, all nostalgic, gazed out.

Floating to earth, an empty angel, came a white plastic bag. He watched it dance, pale and fitful, as if forgetting its moves, or deaf to the music of breezes and car horns. Blue lights reflected grey in his orbits. The bag turned end over end, quiet above the commotion of policemen and fire rescue crews as they set about disengaging the victims of this collision. They went at Henry's car with giant hydraulic pincers, severing the roof from the body and spooning him out, still filming, an insider's view of automotive carnage. Bandages, whiter than even the plastic bag, were wrapped round the skull of the other man, plucked like a root vegetable from the metal and glass growth medium of the delivery van. He was tied to a stretcher under protest, unable to speak properly or to see much beyond the gauze.

Henry escaped, however, dodging medical help as he ducked under a police officer's grasping arms and began exploring the wreckage, hunting for his subject, tripping over something that moved, a gun in its hand, but not the strength to fire it, enabling Henry to pan around.

He found what he was looking for and angled for a close-up. Thorp, out of the car now, used his greater elevation to descry a woman, bruised yet conscious, roses in her hair. She looked vaguely familiar. Henry had an ecstatic mien. She was a milestone to him, just like Orangepeel...who Thorp would rather not think about. Not yet. He distracted himself, turning his attention to the man on the ground. One of his arms was missing. He was clearly trying to get up. The raised gun swayed, threatening, but none of the officers crowding round at that moment appeared concerned. They recognized him, despite the blood. Two plain clothes detectives exchanged words on the subject. Billy protested, spilling froth, his mouth awash with white foam. The two suits elected to help him to his feet. Behind them, Henry lifted the woman over one scrawny shoulder, staggered, got his balance and sloped away unseen. He is one lucky bastard, Thorp said to himself, before following the pair, electing to help.

Stack, meanwhile, was livid, energized by pain. Rolled on his stretcher into the back of an ambulance, he struggled against the restraints, flexing every muscle in an effort to free himself. He had a very bad feeling about the paramedic with the syringe. Her uniform didn't appear to fit. She had a maniacal glint in her eyes. Fury boiled in him. One of the straps broke. She shook her head, admonishing, waving the syringe from which shot a fine jet of liquid, recipe unknown. Stack screamed, tearing himself free as the ambulance pulled away, only to fall back as she stuck him expertly in a finely worked manoeuvre, feinting left, dropping to one knee and bringing the syringe up in a single fluid motion, sticking the long needle in his arse and depressing the plunger before he even knew he'd missed with the rabbit punch he'd aimed at her, collapsing face down on the stretcher, mouth agape and tears spilling, the pressure of fingers at his wrist the last thing he was to feel for a while

You must be cra-zy, ba.by

to feel the way you do;

I must be mad as Hell

to feel it as well,

but I know this feeling is true.

The noise in his brain was at least comforting. And there were pictures, too, scenes from his past he barely recognised. Different.

He serenaded Cherry, kissing her between versus.

The world could never be the same again.

Someone was shaking him.

It was Frank.

'What?'

'Who's the lady?' he wanted to know.

'What lady?'

He nodded toward the shape under the duvet.

Stack scratched his face. He needed a shave.

Franky prodded him, impatient.

'It's your mother,' he answered, sucking his bottom lip.

The boy just looked confused. He thought a moment before saying, in his best grown up voice, 'But isn't she dead?'

Stack was horrified. He couldn't take his eyes off their son. Franky was too young for jokes, especially sick ones.

'Go to your room,' he instructed.

'But...'

'Please - go now.'

The boy traipsed off. Outgrowing his pyjamas, Stack noticed, before sliding out of bed.

The shape, for that was all it was, lay unmoving. Asleep? Cherry usually came awake at Franky's voice. Perhaps she was ill. He took hold of the edge of the duvet and inched it back. There was her hair on the pillow. At least it looked like her hair. His memory of it was suddenly muddled.

Now what?

Franky entered the room again. Clutched in both hands was a bread knife. 'You have to kill her,' he said, approaching his father with the blade. 'She's not mummy anymore.'

Stack, though, was frozen stiff.

The figure in the bed shifted, let out a sigh, turned under the cover to expose her face.

It was his wife. It was sweet Cherry Molasses. How could Franky think otherwise?

She opened her eyes, deep pools of brown, squinting dozily at her family at the foot of the bed. 'Is it morning yet?'

'Just gone six,' Stack replied, glancing at the clock.

Cherry wiped a hand over her mouth and smacked her lips, grimacing as if at some unpleasant taste. 'I had the most awful dream,' she said. 'I've got goosebumps the size of strawberries'

'Huh?' It was the one sound he felt able to make.

She seemed puzzled, dismissing it with, 'I don't know. What's the boy doing up?'

Stack stared down at his son, the knife pointing up at him.

'Did you have a bad dream too, Franky?'

He shook his head.

'Well?' Cherry prompted.

There was a long pause, during which Stack's bowels began to tighten and relax.

'Oh, for Heaven's sake!' blurted Cherry. 'Haven't you figured it out yet?'

Franky dropped the knife. Climbing onto the bed and into his mother's arms, he cried.

I must be mad as Hell

to feel it as well,

but I know this feeling is true.

Stack woke up, nausea swilling in his brain. He felt an incredible weight of guilt squashing him. He could hardly breathe.

It was him the boy ought to have been accusing. Stack the terrible father. When had he last seen his son? he wondered, shame oozing from his every pore.

'Visiting time,' said a woman, '...begins in five moments.'

His head was hanging off the back of a table, he realized. He was peering at a pale green radiator.

'Hell-o?' As if getting his attention. 'Anybody in?'

Stack gritted his teeth and brought his head up, coming face to face with an enormous tentacled jelly.

'Don't mind Rudi,' the woman piped, hovering to his left in her ludicrous nurse's uniform. 'He's mostly harmless. Just no sudden movements, hmm?'

Chapter Seven: The Missing Chapter, Extraordinarily Enough

It rained, like winter melting into spring. Daily the temperature rose, melting the ice lakes and frozen roof-top vistas. Tundra thawed and flowed, pouring from gargoyles and off window ledges, bright streams that evaporated before reaching the ground. Wraiths were dissipated by the warm updraughts of engines, human and mechanical, the opening and closing of doors and mouths.

Witness to such events, hungry still for others, experiences both inside and outside time, behind the wallpaper and under the carpet, Henry Eels sat in quiet reflection of a search that had taken on parameters surprising even to himself. He was having trouble keeping up. Losing the Ventura was a significant headache. His documentary was lost, crushed, impounded, torched, censored, expunged, deleted, in the hands of the enemy, whoever they might be. Henry really wasn't interested in taking sides, in politics. The fact of his absent love remained uppermost, her cold heart and soft throat.

The fact he was close.

Driving this Ventura, pleasantly chilled, in mind as in body, propelled by ice-cream and surrounded by empty space, steeped in the charred perfume of cigarette ash and shaping his arse to an unfamiliar seat, he practised a victory smile, all cheekbones and teeth. There was none to see it though, if you discount the odd pigeon. The city at present was underfoot, gleaming like a cutlery tray fresh out of the dishwasher, knives and forks, spoons vertically arrayed, the metal hair of a planet grown hirsute.

Among the beer bottles in the footwell were several opened packs of Woodbines, from which he helped himself, depressing the cigar lighter and the clutch, slowing amid a brief hail-storm, frozen debris ringing off the Ventura's much damaged bodywork. Henry steered toward a roof garden with a miniature golf course, came to rest in a water hazard and stepped out.

'Am I late?'

'Early.'

That bothered him, although he couldn't say why. Perhaps his watch was fast. But he wasn't wearing one.

'What've you got for me?'

The demon Byamol scratched an armpit. 'Depends,' he grunted. 'I'm freelance these days, you know?'

'So Thorp says.'

'How is the old bastard?'

'Barely sober...'

'Uh-huh.'

'Thinking of retirement,' Henry went on, expressing thoughts that Thorp himself might not have room for in his skull. The demon was crafty, he'd said, short-tempered and pedantic. Diversionary tactics were a must.

'Pity,' said Byamol, in a tone suggesting his own future was undecided. Unknown, at least, which put him on the Ark with everyone else. 'I kind of liked him. We had a mutual trust. I was his first assignment, you know? Blew my brains out with a shotgun.'

Henry sucked on the Woodbine while the demon rooted out a handkerchief and emptied his snout.

'It wasn't a brotherly thing to do,' Byamol said.

Henry was confounded. 'You're...'

'Oh shit, no. Not what you think. I was a novice; just couldn't stomach the absence of God.' He was dewy-eyed now, recalling the seminary. 'They fucking excommunicated me. Can you believe it? Those fucking priests. What choice did I have but to go underground - at least dead I had some time to think.'

'And?'

'There is a God,' he stated without pause. 'Why else should anything exist?'

Henry was happy to leave it at that. His ultimate goal was to discover a prerequisite to life, some meaning to existence beyond self that would prove a divinity; a purpose other than survival, which served no end, only the intermediacy of struggle.

The demon was staring hard at him, a flicker of recognition in his heavily lidded eyes.

They had something in common, that look said. It was just taking a while to sink in.

'To the matter at hand,' Henry prompted. 'Three ladies of your acquaintance?'

'What about payment?'

'Where can I find them?'

'Here, in Ileum.'

Where else? Henry elected to play his trump card, half knowing the demon was expecting it. Thorp had been reluctant to give him his former contact's mobile number, finally relenting under mild hypnosis...a little monkeying of Henry's own.

'Will an IOU suffice?'

Byamol frowned; not a pretty sight.

'Index Ophidian Ust,' murmured Henry Eels, sweat cooling between his toes. Win or bust.

Byamol began drawing a map.

Pursuing a rainbow, ears popping with the drop in altitude, Henry allowed himself a peek behind that particular door in his mind he'd closed long ago. Byamol was right, he acknowledged, even if that truth remained unspoken. Between brothers the recognition was tacit, necessarily subtle. Either might be mistaken. Exposure confounded the idea of a chapter, a brotherhood that was anything more than myth. There were no secret handshakes here, just a blithe respect. Loneliness was part of it, too. They were all hermits, hopeless outsiders with a perspective born of selflessness and maintained through non-observance. No doctrine. No dogma. No bright robes or clandestine meetings. No grand designs or intricate plots. Only transient definitions, their uncounted number always busy, always somewhere else. Thus the door, a portal always closed but never locked.

Gravity, thought Henry Eels, it was like gravity. His guiding force was an invisible consequence of mass, omnipresent yet possible to nullify, even temporarily escape.

Shaking his head he braked.

He was parked outside a hotel.

There was no question of him driving up the facade, he figured, that defied the logic of the place. He would have to enter at ground level and work his way to the roof.

Contemplative, he lit another Woodbine.

He opened the door and got out.

The hotel extended for hundreds of metres in either direction, its corners lost in an insubstantial blur of pedestrian and vehicular traffic; like the buildings they veered between, warped by the intrusive structure that had seemingly pushed through from beneath, stretching the skein of reality about its edges without destroying the surface - rather displacing it, moving it aside as if it, Ileum, was liquid. The images Henry gleaned of the city about the hotel's vague peripheries were contorted and out of proportion, steel and flesh sliding, reflections in a breath-misted spoon-back.

Inside was utter darkness.

Outside, the Ventura stood motionless in an empty street. Not even the litter moved. No light braved the interior. It was like staring at a photograph, one that slowly dissolved, leaving only memory and the shuffle of unseen dancers to fill the void. Henry listened as dresses swirled, shoes hinged, shirt sleeves rustled. He thought it a polka. He walked toward the sound but found nothing, no obstructing limbs or tripped over toes. His infra red camera was lost along with his car, leaving him blind, unable to record events he couldn't see. All he'd saved from the crashed Ventura was the video camera he'd used to record Cherry Molasses, number seventy-six in his series culminating in the woman he sought, a rendezvous with whom motivated his soul. But even that was abandoned, left with Thorp as he'd run out of tape. No time to visit the nearest convenience store. Henry hadn't thought he'd miss it, not at this juncture. Death and Romance was little more than a scrapbook, a visual notepad whose function was to organize the disparate threads of his quest, enabling him to focus on his next objective, that which manifested through a lens of detailed observation and meticulous research; a process gradually sharpened by experience, culminating, he'd thought, in the eventual redundancy of the very enabling hardware. But it wasn't easy to let go. The camera kept him at a distance, not personally involved. Danger was rationalized, impatience, frustration tempered by glass and plastic, the displacement of occurrences - fact and fiction - onto film.

He walked into an elevator, rooted in his pockets for a match, found several that were damp. Only wet sparks came of his attempts at establishing some visual reference, so he pressed a button at random, about in the middle of the briefly glimpsed brass plate. The car lurched, then seemed to move sideways. Someone, he imagined, was fooling with that much treasured gravity, his primum mobile.

There was applause. Music. Conversation he caught the odd snatches of, drowned on the verge of making sense by the creaking elevator as it shifted in every direction, leaving Henry clueless as to which, if any floor...

Byamol's map, such as it was, had brought him this far. Vernon's three wives were his goal. Everything pointed to their inclusion in his quest. The unlit car clanked on, like it was on rails, some fairground ride. Funhouse or Ghost Train? Depends on your definition of humour, he supposed. Right now, it was as if he was being shuffled through an infinity of hotels, the possibility of countless foyers and corridors looming. Every transient room.

It might go on forever. He shrugged, scratched his chin. He might be lost in a labyrinth, this his damnation, his reward for having stalked a preternatural lover. He needed a shave. He scratched under one arm, twisted a finger in his right ear. There were bolts of light, vertical snatches like the slits in a zoetrope. Henry leaned his head toward them, hoping to spy the moving picture inside the revolving drum.

## Re-entry

Nancy watched Swene brush his teeth.

'I can still taste you,' he said, mouth foaming.

'How do I taste?'

'Minty.'

They exchanged conversation like a longstanding couple, she thought, words that didn't mean much, but spoken with a familiarity beyond their brief tenure. They were happy, she realized. Content. She shivered as if someone had opened a window, rubbing her arms and twisting on the balls of her feet, naked under a slip. It was odd. Never before had she needed someone the way she needed him. All the men in her life had failed to somehow cross the bridge separating Nancy as body, flesh, hungry and holed, from Nancy as...what? Herself? Hidden away? That was a strange idea, her hiding. She was still getting used to the idea of Jones and his manipulations, her family and its secrets, being that they were all...if not dead, then somehow expired, past their sell-by dates and yet still fresh. Her father at least. Although not as ancient as Jones, Pa had started life as prentice to an apothecary in Pergamum, a city in Asia Minor circa 200 BC. Famed for its library, Jones told her, a jewel of Hellenist architecture. And Jones himself? The father of her children, be they living or zombified, had been a goatherd in Persia around the time of Alexander the Great. His role model, she thunk.

'What's up?'

He wasn't asking her directly, more the air itself.

'We have to leave.'

Swene nodded and proceeded to dress. He hadn't got around to telling Nancy about his supposed Avenging Angel status. They had this connection, was his excuse, telling himself that she knew already and it was of no moment, not to one whose rape was the cause of all the upheaval in the world to begin with, the submersion of the everyday by the extraneous organism that was Ileum. Swallowed - beyond the event horizon otherwise known as Hell. It came with the territory, this need to be constantly on the run. To remain one step ahead of...

They took the lift, carried no luggage, arrived in the lobby, there to be greeted by a chorus of several noisome Pekinese and a woman haranguing a bell-boy in an unintelligible language wearing lace up boots and a large feathered hat. The bell-boy, a pubescent Buttons, was leaning back, face turned to one side at the lambaste.

Dogs and woman then fell abruptly silent.

Somebody pointed. Whatever it was marking them as fugitives blazed in capitals on their foreheads. He guessed they didn't have much choice hereafter. Either Ileum would masticate them, digest them, or be forced to spit them out.

Wishful thinking perhaps. But Swene was phlegmatic.

Nancy gazed over her shoulder as the lift doors shut.

The next sound was that of a telephone receiver being dropped, a moustachioed gentleman at reception fumbling with it, fingers struggling to locate the correct numbers through the telephone's brass dial. He recovered the receiver from the polished desk top, held it cable topmost, briefly mumbling into the ear-piece before turning the bulky instrument the right way up.

Calling the police, Nancy supposed. A Bonnie and Clyde end-game surfaced in her head.

Taking Swene's thankfully dry palm she walked with him through the lobby, patrons sneaking looks over newspapers and from behind pot plants, men and women whose sole concern was to be somewhere else, yet taking secret pleasure in the closeness of the threat, such as it was, the fugitives a highlight in their otherwise dull existences. Something to tell the grandchildren, in which future scenario Nancy and Swene would each possess a swagger and be armed to the teeth.

Stepping carefully between tables laden with silver trays and china, all frills and little cakes, she marvelled at the level of detail, distracted by intricate doilies and the patient application of tiny icing rosebuds.

The doorman tipped his hat.

Nancy, unperturbed, hailed a cab.

'How much money have you got?'

Swene emptied his pockets. Change.

'Shit...'

'I'll just drive, shall I?' the driver asked.

'You'll just shut the fuck up!'

They moved into traffic, stopped at a light.

Nancy opened her door, opened the driver's and dragged him out.

'Hey!'

Drove herself. There really was no point in hanging about. It might all be over by the time they got to the start line, wherever that was.

'Where are we going?' Swene questioned, slithering on the back seat, denim and leather in a low-friction environment of manmade fibres and erratic course adjustments.

Nancy replied by putting her foot down. A long way in a short time, this seemed to say.

Ileum bled, smeared through the translucent medium of the car windows. The faster she went the less difficulty she had in negotiating traffic. The highway was crammed, yet vehicles shifted, as if pulled to one side, the cab electrically charged, repelling other road users who then slotted in behind. Buildings leaned in their wake, distorted by velocity and the intervening air. Colours melted from facades and floated free, suspended like globules of wax or oil. The cab's meter, glowing in the dash, kept flashing NO FARE.

Nancy let go of the wheel and climbed in the back with Swene.

'This is all my fault.'

'I know.'

'Thanks.'

'Don't mention it.'

She wiped her nose.

'Did you have a nice life?'

'Mostly.'

'So it wasn't all bad...' She wasn't sure, inwardly apologizing for the platitude, but felt perhaps there ought to be a critical speed that, once reached, enabled them to progress beyond the bounds of reality itself, past the ordinary and into the extraordinary, as much as those words meant.

Bits of the car began flying off, pieces of rubber and metal that spun into the vortex at their tail. The windscreen turned orange and sagged. Flames licked round the dials.

Now what? thought Swene.

He was at a loss for words. There wasn't the air to express them. The zipper on his jacket winked at him and he winked back. Avenging Angel? More his brother's calling, he protested, watching the sum of his visual cortex being consumed like an ignited crisp packet.

He felt himself shrink, then slip down the plughole of existence...

Nancy let go of Swene, who breathed for the first time, breath in his lungs a reflexive shock. His teeth stung, tasted of lead. The temperature dropped. The half dozen small fires about and under the dash winked out, as if their combustible supply had been turned off. Smoke meandered, forming a cloud base just shy of the headlining. She returned to the driver's seat. It spilled foam, ruptured. The steering wheel was buckled from some invisible impact. The engine had stalled. She failed to start it. A flick of the wipers cleared snow from the windscreen, revealing a fractured landscape.

'We're in a drift,' she stated. 'It put the fire out.'

Swene thought: lucky us.

'Come on, it's freezing in here.' Nancy pushed at her door, found it stuck, tried with her feet on the passenger side, which budged. Slush fell wetly to the sill. The door swung back under its own weight, slamming shut. Angrily she gave it a kick, snapping it open and bracing it with a heel while she slid across to that side of the car, all the time glaring at Swene for not helping.

Outside it was night. They were off the road, in a ditch, in a sodden puddle of ploughed ice particles and pale illumination, the sodium lamp overhead flickering, teasing the shadows about her feet, millions of them drawn from crevices as the light briefly waned, only then to be expurgated. Nancy opened the back door and motioned to Swene. 'I think we walk from here. Anyway, it looks safe.'

Swene wasn't sure what she meant.

It was somehow less cold outside the vehicle.

Nancy threw her arms round his neck.

Kissing her, he was reminded of another girl, one whose features refused to coalesce, as if surfaced via a dream, the memory of her painful and thus stowed deep. What was her name? A quiet, fluttering moth, her eyes had spoken, peering up at him as Nancy was now, deep glittering pools of conversation, questions for which no answers were asked. A childhood sweetheart, he had no memory of an epithet. Hadn't she moved away? Just those eyes, deep and lustrous, that tongue, sweet and sharp, writhing magically behind teeth.

A love lost. A destiny gained?

'So, where do you suppose we're at?'

Not the same place they were before, that was for sure. The realization of space, a horizon, even one only dimly visible, came to Swene in a rush. If this was a park it was a park smelling of cow dung and rotting fence posts, a landscape of hedgerows and gorse bushes and farm machinery, rusting hay-rakes like exotic skeletons made redundant by the season, come summer to collect grasses between their sharpened ribs and weave each strand diametrically. Swene remembered such fields from childhood, he and his brother with limbs flailing, kicking up storms of harvested debris. But the heat of those days, past and future, seemed far removed - yet closer, as it appeared they had departed Ileum.

'Maybe we're somewhere we shouldn't be,' he commented.

'Ooh,' she said mockingly; 'I like the sound of that.'

'Maybe we're nearer the beginning.'

Her head tipped to one side, blonde hair falling away from her face like fine gauze.

Swene watched the sun rise through it.

'Look over your shoulder.'

Nancy did so, briefly, smiling as she looked at him again. 'I don't see anything but reds and greens. It's like a memory.'

He agreed. But who's?

Brown earth and pink sky. He could see the snow melting, like frost off a lamb chop bunged in the microwave.

They walked along the road a way before turning down a deep-rutted farm track, mud and puddles in abundance, but no sign of human life. The farm itself, when they came upon it, was empty, derelict in parts as if vacated over a period of years. The barns and animal pens were worst affected, roofs fallen in and railings powdery with corrosion. The house and associate buildings, those designed for human occupancy, were less dilapidated; but much of the furniture was removed or broken, pulled apart by rats and dragged into a thousand stinking corners. Swene and Nancy only gazed through the windows. A black cat stalked them defensively, as if they were about stealing chickens.

From the farm they continued cross-country, avoiding the worst of the ground conditions, a circuitous path across fields sloped and hummocked, under which lay centuries of ploughing. All were fallow. The last crops had rotted. And the people? Nancy thought they'd escaped to the city, to a better standard of living. Swene didn't agree. His imagination had X-ray vision. There were no grave markers, but it was only a matter of time before they came upon an excavation. Where once the ground had yielded turnips and potatoes, now the soil was occupied by corpses; new and old, the graves revisited. Clothes and flesh were still recognizable, lying among older bones, a gruesome compost of generations, each hummock perhaps a family tomb, opened here to accept the latest in a long line of guilt and innocence. There was no clue to the burial party, no upright spades or footprints. The earth might have opened of its own accord, ready to draw breath exhausted from bodies, closing again over flesh still cooling. Swene didn't believe the past and future occupants of these burial mounds were all victims, rather he saw a cycle of life and death, destruction and creation that was the very essence of the earth itself, organic and indestructible. Fathers and mothers begat sons and daughters. The bodies of grandparents returned to the nurturing soil to feed via their corporal selves the busy worms of the underworld, whose industry produced children of a likeness, a family resemblance, manufacturing human beings in an endless chain of succession; semen leaked amid clays and ovaries wedged up the nostrils of slender invertebrates. To be buried in the wrong hole offered diversity, a practice considered perverse, yet widespread, as each tried to better the lot of their siblings, cuckoos whose spent vessels were interred alongside the remains of the more talented and beautiful in the hope of improvement. Of course, such interlopers, if discovered, faced certain destruction. The chance lay in them remaining undetected; being, via putrescence, accepted into the mulch.

So, for the betterment, was many a bastard born, ejected come spring and subsequently harvested, children whose identity it was for them to discover and make apparent. Their lives were spent searching, seeking others of their kind that they might die happy, safe in the knowledge of the genetic continuum,

Nancy shook him. 'You're wool-gathering.'

'I am? Sorry.'

'Look over there,' she instructed. 'What do you see?'

Swene held a hand over his eyes, shading them. Slowly winding down a hillside, mud-spattered and approaching, was a yellow wedge of metal.

'That's my car,' said Nancy. 'I'm certain.'

They'd left this field and two others, climbing over stiles and limboing under barbed wire before the car finally met them. The road it was on was narrow and falling away at the edges. Its wipers fanned once, clearing a brown sludge from the windscreen, revealing an interior of green check and zero occupants.

Nancy jumped up and down, whooping and punching the air before bending to gently stroke the Triumph's bashful headlamps, each in its raised pod of aluminium. The door hinged for her and she got in, waving to Swene who had to pull hard on the opposite handle to get it to budge. The car was perhaps jealous, he thought, wanting Nancy alone in its compartment, ensconced in a warm dry womb of plastic and carpet.

'All I need now is my camera,' she said excitedly. Adding, 'It is nice to be back. Do you think we'll find anyone alive in the city?'

'Which one?' Swene was trying to move his seat. Failing, he reached behind him, twisting to pull a heavy bag free. The bag came loose like a tooth, at the same time unzipping. The subsequent pain was numb and final. There could be none, he imagined, to beat it.

Even Nancy grimaced. That's got to hurt, she was thinking, the bowling ball in Swene's lap like a huge fishing weight or a tiny planet.

And they were mobile again, travelling and breathing as people should, learning and growing while sometimes standing still, becoming more of themselves and each other, adopting the characteristics of their fixed and transient surroundings, extant through the medium of motion. A whole new adventure over the hill.

## Rabbit Hole

Henry stood well back. Owen had calculated, by means he wasn't able to explain or Henry understand, that they were under Parliament. He was using Mickey's cycle shorts as a source of ignition.

Owen was convinced that creating a big enough disturbance in whatever temporal or spacial framework they were trapped in was the only way of escaping it. With no cover, the suggested detonation, its rapid expansion, would look like suicide to any sane person. Henry understood the rationale, however, and was prepared to gamble. Science had never been his strong suit.

The elevator had rattled on for fifteen minutes or so before jarring to a sudden halt, a square of brilliant light round its sliding doors suggestive of a destination. As good a place to start as any, he reckoned. His parents had run a hotel. He had the strange feeling he'd be stepping back in time when the doors finally opened. Instead, he stepped out into a white expanse, a space without temperature or readily definable walls. It reminded him of the inside of a fridge, oddly neutral, the light on as no-one was looking, believing it to be dark in there with the door shut, dark and cold.

Sitting on a pile of boxes were a couple of mischievous-looking individuals, who, far from expecting him, seemed relieved he'd arrived.

'I'm Owen and this is Mickey.'

'Henry Eels.'

'Pleased to meet you, Henry. Going far?'

A peculiar question.

'I like to think so,' he answered truthfully. 'Depends on the company.'

Owen nodded. 'We've fallen in with some rash types ourselves, haven't we Mick?'

The giant nodded. His pink and yellow jarred beautifully with the all-pervading white. That which they were about to disturb.

Robbed of his lycra pants there was, observed Henry from an uncertain distance, something extraordinary about his genitalia.

Owen waved, he and Mickey strolling over. Only as they neared they appeared to be getting smaller, shrinking as if through distance, their proximity contradicted by their proportions. The pair vanished before they reached him, dropping from sight as if descending a receding escalator. Henry found himself alone with the dynamite, cases arranged in a crude pyramid. Panicked, he ran toward it, convinced now that the closer he was to the epicentre the more likely he was to survive the accelerated chemical process. There was no way he could hide or outrun the explosion; it would occupy every possible vector. He might though cash in on its vacant centre, put himself where it had been, his momentum carrying him beyond the here and now and into the dynamite's missing volume.

## Underlay

Byamol had long questioned the veracity of experience. Back at the seminary, prior to the launch of his tonsils, he'd argued with the monks on the rightness and wrongness of any given situation, engendering much spittle and red faces, a diet of bread and water and a lot of "downtime" at the feet of the Abbot. Faith simply wasn't for him, not the way the fathers taught it. The lone of a shotgun was an invitation to join another order. An extreme form of recruitment. What he was to then experience, the absence of time, the dichotomy of flesh and spirit, he found no more convincing; but inherent in death, and specifically damnation, was the perspective of mimicry. The dead parodied the living, their institutions, their conventions, their hopes, fears and passions. Ultimately, they had nothing to lose; they could only gain, and so they needn't take any of it seriously. That Jones had imposed a solution on a problem satisfactorily invisible until then was absurd. To blur a boundary was to impose one, make it recognizable. It was suddenly necessary to argue once more, to vie for position within a rigid hierarchy, to reopen old wounds and fight the fight of rightness and wrongness in full view of the facts, as stated, as experienced by religious men and scientists, as argued and fought over for centuries - in the living world. And now the dead also, whose pits and towers and torture chambers were illuminated not by 40W or 100W bulbs, but by the screaming incantations of those housed there, radiant in anticipation of whatever. Details didn't matter. Or hadn't.

Jones had made everything real. Now the fake was better than the original, subsuming it, a changeling reality, constantly devouring and disgorging itself, no longer sure of where or what it was, at which point in the eating or puking cycle, whether this was an accurate re-creation or a poor verisimilitude, ironically void of anything imitable, as the original was no more, usurped by a copy inferior inasmuch as it was born not a larva but an imago, and therefore had never been a pupa.

No place for a God here, ever. Jones' space was not infinite.

The missing chapter, those that belonged to it, had no role in such a macrocosm: a seeming contradiction. They had no role anywhere, as Byamol understood things. Or they hadn't. Circumstances had changed, opening an avenue for them, a passage through denial and negation that might eventually led to a divinity. God in person, tall or short or girlish, mannish in voice and proportion and yet inherently feminine, shaving face and legs and shedding tears of both joy and sadness, loving and uncaring of sinners...

Some kind stranger bought him another beer.

The demon attempted to focus, to identify his benefactor.

Thorp, un-shaded, the collars of his trenchcoat stained with ash and curled at the edges like old money.

'You look terrible.'

'I am terrible,' said Byamol. 'What made you suppose different?'

Thorp shrugged and tipped his Pilsener. He had some catching up to do.

'There's no justice in it,' Byamol whimpered. 'Jones always dealt direct with those beyond the grave.'

Whereas I found it necessary to engage a third party, interpreted the sometime collector of souls. Was the demon, in his cups, blaming him? He laughed and lit a cigarette. The image of Jenny Pith on a rooftop filled his mind. Found and lost, soulless Orangepeel, made warm then cold.

Her occupancy still disturbed him, the entity that had moved into her vacant shell a predatory unknown. She was alive yet. He sensed it, reading the ether, as yet attuned to fluctuations in the sublime.

But what was she? His initial attraction to her was surely, with hindsight, no coincidence. A suicide, she'd changed her mind. Skipping on a roof ledge, talking of friends who'd died, Jenny Pith had not taken that last step into oblivion, had forced him to question the nature of his own existence, making Thorp doubt his calling. She was the precursor, he thought, an avatar of change. And he'd fallen in love with her. Not surprising given his track record. He'd been gulled that day, dreaming of apple trees, awash in sepia tones; the future laid out for him like a picnic, with himself seated nearest the wine.

It came back to the Joneses. Their immortal kith and kin. Not a nuclear family by any stretch of the imagination, rather one whose members made a habit of forgetting all their yesterdays and recognizing only those allegiances that were present, in the moment. The future was something they craved, whereas the past was full of mistakes. Why remind yourself of them? So much opportunity to get things wrong! It made for short tempers and selfishness. They were spoilt, he thought. Even bored. Thorp, like many others, had been seduced by their immediacy, their sense of the present and all that might be squeezed in. They lived beneath the surface, were not worn down by the constant passage of time. Beyond and behind the fabric of history, they lingered, protected, under the very carpet whose weave depicted the events of centuries. Triumph and disaster in its pattern, but only sameness in theirs. The underlying. The desirous. For continuity, immortality, sameness was a damnation. To be forever excluded was their fate; neither living or dead. In that place of politics gone mad.

There he was, riding his bicycle along a country lane, circa 1916. Not a care in the world, the fact of a puncture approaching like the first rumble of an earthquake. The Kowolski's, Anna and John, passed him a few minutes later, Thorp walking now his rear tyre was deflated. They stopped, offered him a lift, and that was when he first set eyes on the succubus...

What man could resist? Her husband smiled and waxed his beard. She was a collector, he knew, whether it be Homo sapien or Lepidoptera. She'd deflowered princesses and lain with kings.

Her brother was civil at first; the perfect host.

'Do you play?' Wafting a racquet, Jones smiles, sips his champagne and tamps his cigarette.

Thorp has a week's leave from the artillery. What he lobs are explosives, but he supposes tennis balls aren't much different. They streak through the sky, blurred white projectiles against a pale grey background. He in khaki, taking quickly to a game requiring a discerning eye, where the monochromatic Thorp perhaps has an advantage. One Jones finds unreadable, convinced as he is of this guest's ordinary credentials. It is, after a few shaky opening games, a massacre.

Anna is beside herself, her brother having broken not one but two racquets and stormed off hugging a bottle of Bombay gin.

'How extraordinary! I've never seen him so...thrashed!' She throws her arms round his neck and sucks his tongue into her mouth. 'You do realize he'll never forgive you?'

Thorp shrugs. He finds it easy to fix his gaze on a moving object, judge its speed and trajectory.

'Well...' she adds. 'And handsome, too.'

He's not so good at billiards, or cards. Fencing? Jones appears set on his humiliation, and Thorp is too polite to make excuses; only Anna chooses then to step from her French lace pantaloons, twirling them provocatively round a finger.

The rest (as daughter Nancy would say) is history.

Byamol brought him back, opening a bag of crisps.

'Ready salted?'

Thorp shook his head.

'Please yourself...'

He tapped out a Woodbine.

'Those things'll kill you,' the demon said, laughing through fried potato slices. 'That and the drink.'

Thorp had never lacked willpower. So there and then, he quit.

'She will be impressed.'

'Who?'

'You know who.'

Yes, he thought, he did. Too late now though. The carpet was up.

Cherry appeared at their table, having spent long minutes in the ladies. The demon stopped munching. Somewhere she'd found a complete change of wardrobe and a manicurist.

'Ready?'

Thorp dropped his pack of Woodbines in the ashtray. He regarded her strangely, one eye flicking to Byamol, who looked not so much terrible now as kittenish.

'Come on then,' she harried. 'Let's be going!'

If there was a dialogue bubble over her head, thought Thorp, almost seeing it, it would contain the word MEN! in exasperated capital letters.

He got up and they left.

'I made a few calls,' she said. 'Called in a few favours.'

What wasn't she telling him?

'Where's your car?'

'Henry took it.'

'Hmm...'

A vein in his temple pulsed.

## Chaos Descending

Nancy expected to see the ocean any moment now. As a child the waves had frightened her. They looked so big and out of control, crashing one over another in an endless race to the shore. Needless to say she'd got over it. Swene had gone quiet. She began whistling as they crested the rise.

The sea was blue and green and white, ordinary, lit by a sun momentarily unencumbered by cloud. Rays of light poured in through the windscreen, shocking them both. Nancy swerved reaching for the visor, but there was no other traffic. She could have driven on the opposite side of the road, and thinking it did, drawing a puzzled stare from the puzzled man next to her. They came to a roundabout and she turned left instinctively, not wishing to circumnavigate such a random universe. Heading inland, following the river toward a rendezvous with (drowned in its own waters; existentially hungover or plain post-apocalyptic?) Palmersville, Nancy turned on the radio. Just static. Perhaps the aerial was broken. Electrical interference from overhead lines. The latest offering from the latest band. It didn't seem important, she could sing herself anyway, this time eliciting a smile from her puzzling passenger, who ran his palm up her thigh.

The first signs of human habitation came in the shape of burnt out cars, charred and black at the roadside. These were numerous, some still smouldering, paintwork only visible about the front and rear, as if the fire had been most intense in the passenger compartment, completely gutting the interior. Sprays of glass lay across bonnets and boot lids, pushed outward by the heat of flaming upholstery. Few were obviously crashed. Most appeared to have been pushed off the highway, nudged aside by other, angrier drivers.

Nancy's mood deflated at the sight of a bus-load of incinerated school children, teeth visible in skulls and eye sockets empty, seated in orderly pairs. Their gaseous consumption had been sudden and final, like each was primed, stoked, fuel for breakfast that morning. No time to scream, a split second of shock and fear before dying, roasted like turkeys too long in the oven. Packaged in aluminium, posed in grisly imitation, carbonised boys and girls in a burlesque of state education, being all alike, similarly uniform.

A motorbike cruised past in a sweeping overtaking manoeuvre, the figure astraddle naked but for a chemise skid lid. Boy or girl, she couldn't say. Two, three cars followed in quick succession, the last with red lights flashing. Slip-roads joined the main carriageway, and where there had been no traffic now there were vehicles nose to tail. The yellow Triumph was sucked along, through an underpass whose lights were mostly extinguished, a black tunnel from which they emerged squinting, road signs and direction indicators ablaze with spring sunshine, radiating a spectrum of colours; hues of meat, every shade of bacon, fresh and foul. The city was a mass of concrete and pedestrians, an urbanized amalgam of stone and flesh, as if a peculiarly gifted, light-than-air glacier had rolled over, instituting these geographic features. Nancy recognised her surroundings, but felt lost, unable to change lanes or even decelerate. Road users waved fists and roared expletives behind glass clear and tinted, leaned on horns and flooded her senses with full beam. Brake lights flared ahead of her like spattered blood on the windscreen, ahead of the lights the burning mass of a half dozen automobiles, some still pumping exhaust fumes, about which the traffic had to swerve.

'Oh, fuck,' muttered Swene, one hand braced against the dashboard.

Nancy engaged panic steering.

They clipped a postal van, which veered off into an oncoming lane.

A thick grey cloud hung in the rearview mirror.

'We need a place to park,' he asserted.

She growled, twisting her hands on the wheel. Why didn't he just shut up?

'There's a multi-storey near here...'

Nancy dropped a gear, put her foot down. The car lurched sideways to a chorus of horns, which she ignored, having learned the rules of the game.

'Over there!' directed Swene, stubbing a finger, his contribution to the mayhem.

Nancy though, was way ahead of him. She braked hard, spun the rear wheels and drove on through a barrier. Barely slowing, she corkscrewed up wrongly numbered levels, side-swiping shopping trolleys and generating dust devils, spun out onto the roof of a department store and circled nervously before sliding the TR7's shark nose under a tubular railing.

'Think we should get a ticket?'

'I don't see a machine.'

'No, me neither.'

They got out, shivering despite the impinging exhaust-pipe heat, the pervasive unease of the internally combusted once-living. They exchanged condemned looks, rueful, what-the-fuck half smiles, then loped toward a stairwell. People pushed past them on the landing, each carrying four of five large shopping bags.

'Must be a sale,' commented Nancy excitedly. She danced down the stairs and through the first set of double doors. Ready and willing.

Swene wished she'd slow down, fully aware as he was of the importance of momentum. They'd merged, bonded, become one; but that eclipse couldn't last, was a perspective thing. A trick of geometry. That they'd come unstuck, and soon, was inevitable. Necessary even. It was simply a matter of when. He nearly lost her behind a display of bedding, duvets and pillows, mattresses metamorphosing into sofa chairs and Welsh dressers, sideboards into stereo equipment, computers, TVs, each displaying a video image. Her face appeared on a phalanx of screens, large and small, Nancy's features smeared on one set and on another tightly focused. Here she was badly coloured, there pin-sharp, her head turning, eyes roaming, widening with surprise. It was all he could do to keep up, his own face displayed momentarily before slipping aside. She turned to wave from amid racks of CDs. A fight broke out behind her, an argument over a receipt. Guns were pulled. Swene dived for cover. Nancy though witnessed events erect, watching heads explode and chests disgorge, the combatants going at each other till only one was standing, sweat oozing, urine puddling, blood spraying across the floor. There was a moment's silence. The victor put her gun away and shopping resumed.

Swene was hauled to his feet.

'No rest for the wicked,' Nancy joked, enjoying this, not caring at the moment to question her taste in otherworldly entertainment. These were consenting adults, she supposed.

Damned ones. They were, for want of a better description, beyond geography.

A sales assistant's body was dragged away, legs and torso disappearing behind a counter. Pulled there by unseen hands, like a carcass into a cave.

They proceeded apace, utilizing escalators and stairs.

Stepping off, they found themselves among perfume and aftershave. Garishly made-up staff prowled, faces luminous above white cotton blouses and severe buttoned dresses, red skirts tight round thighs, black stockings and eyes, gold-rimmed, silvered, brooch'd and ringed. This was a dangerous place, a safari park of exotica, odours gleaned from hidden orifices and bottled, atomized...extracted jewels for girls and squeezed juices for boys. Alluring and sensitive to climatic change, the slightest drop in temperature registered with these circling harpies, who swooped as one to draw from veins.

Nancy pushed her breasts together and Swene bit his tongue, held his terrified penis via one trouser pocket and took her offered hand.

A concourse, a burger joint was visible the far side of this terrible maze.

Silently they argued over a route, deciding on a central path, dodging between Pestilence and Bestiality, fragrances wafted by fans, skirmishing with plastic plant fronds and shying from gilt-edged advertisements for lip colour. A turquoise victim of brushes homed in, floating shoeless on a carpet that squelched. And she wasn't alone. Other women, their wrists bent backward, smiled obscenely as they closed, the trap sprung and no way now to avoid a confrontation. Nancy and Swene were caught by a rack of eye pencils, two high chairs conveniently stationed, nearby a table bearing implements of facial torture and a battery of hand mirrors.

A make-over...

Rather than be reinvented, Swene wielded one of the steel-framed chairs after the fashion of a lion tamer. Nancy copied his example, and back to back they inched toward the relative sanctuary of the concourse.

Turquoise woman got on her two-way radio and the metal shutters began to close. It was a race against time.

Bellowing madly, Swene brought his chair round into the ribs of a gaudily painted teenage acolyte, clearing a counter of effervescent body-puff boxes with the follow through. The girl collapsed, spewing the remains of an unfortunate tuna and cress sandwich, some of which spotted turquoise woman's shoes. Nancy, aware of the moment, speared one chair leg up the short skirt of a particularly gruesome saleswoman, whose shock cracked her foundation and whose knees came together with a sound like eggs breaking, these combined acts affording them a breach through which they pressed, skidding on the fragrance-saturated carpet and rolling under the jerky portcullis with seconds to spare.

In the burger joint, customers threw milkshakes at one another and wrestled over strips of lettuce and globs of mayonnaise.

Swene and Nancy ran for the open air. Perhaps it wasn't wise to breathe it, especially with that brimstone haze, but they had little choice. Beyond the shopping mall, in full view of a twisted stomach-pain kind of sky, they had more room for manoeuvre. And they used every inch, ducking under bloated, hydrogen filled camels and diving over tiny, ambulant, swollen-headed babies whose fuses spluttered, whose brains and shit exploded moments later, further complicating the atmosphere.

'Couldn't we have stayed in the countryside!' bellowed Swene, scraping varicoloured entrails off his shoes.

Not a bad idea, she conceded. Nancy Kowolski, a lifelong city girl.

If only...

She crossed her ankles and fingers and closed her eyes. Everything went deathly quiet.

'Hey,' whispered Swene. 'Did you do that?'

Nancy, breath held, couldn't speak. She was imagining them elsewhere. Her father had taught her, the surrogate one. That it had never previously worked seemed unimportant now. The world, already close to melting, swept round the pair, cocooning them. It felt warm and safe, she thought. Like a womb. But she had no idea where they were going. Her car? Yes...no, it was missing. Taken.

## Countdown

The same numbers kept coming up. He grew familiar with fractions and decimals, indicators of chance, powers negative and positive, characters the orientation of which hinted at their place in formulae. Sometimes one value was uppermost, trailing an equals sign in its wake; sometimes another, one equally valid, the answer at that moment eating a tin of beans or sleeping childlike in an enlarged refrigerator icebox. Everything was black and white, outside his eyes, numbers entertaining ideas of which they themselves were the building blocks.

Owen didn't understand what was occurring. He and Mickey sat on a park bench, Owen wearing no shoes and Mickey with his T-shirt stretched and tied between his legs.

Not far away, rolling on the thin grass like a child's football, the round box pulsed and throbbed.

'What's it doing?' Mickey asked, shoulders hunched against the cold.

'How should I know?' Owen replied. 'It looks as if it's about to hatch.'

'You think it's an egg?'

'Maybe...'

'What do you suppose will come out of it?'

Owen refused to speculate. The same numbers did cartwheels and back-flips, made human pyramids.

'A baby world,' said Mickey. 'That would be nice.'

Owen's brain pounded in horror. If it was the creation of a world they were about to witness, then the mathematics he was experiencing took on a new significance. There could be no room for mistakes. And the program was being downloaded through his head.

'You gulped,' the man with no pants told him.

'Yeah - let's get drunk; it's ages since we did that.'

'Watch some videos, smoke some cigarettes.'

'Make obscene phone calls.'

'Eat cereal from the box.'

'There's never anything good on TV.'

'We don't know any girls.'

'Game of darts?'

'Nah, you always win.'

'I've lost my membership card.'

'Porn then.'

'All at Swene's.'

'Shit.'

'Ring him up.'

'He'll be at work.'

'Right; I forgot.'

'Hey, look over there.'

'Where?'

'By those trees. See?'

'What is that?'

'I don't know, but it's coming this way.'

'Maybe it's after the egg.'

'You think so?'

'What else?'

'Right...'

'It went straight past.'

'Must have been after something else.'

They got up off the bench, picked the round box from the hard earth, and walked along a concrete path toward some iron gates. It started to drizzle. Their escape from the whiteness was entirely the result of luck, Owen conceded. Or else they'd successfully called a bluff. It made no real difference at the end of the day. Somebody always got frightened. Simply a matter of whom, that was all. Finding themselves back out on the street, undamaged beneath a weathered awning, the establishment's name smeared in bird shit and sun bleached, they'd simply looked at each other. Had they succeeded in their mission? Owen didn't know and Mick didn't care one way or the other. His brain had shrunk. Owen's no longer had room for complicated personal issues. He wondered what Egon would have made of it.

He found money in his pocket and they shopped for appropriate attire, doubling up on footwear.

They came upon a corner shop that sold nothing but guns, teabags and peanuts, and armed themselves with the accoutrements of a battalion. A climax was imminent, the light told them, swirling round in 3D with strobe effects.

The nuts made them thirsty.

Occupying a booth in a pub, the two drank foul-smelling whisky and played cards with women whose tattoos shed tears and blood.

Knives were thrown across the room, amid much laughter, baying, heckling, screaming and protestation. Occasionally a patron fell down the cellar steps or unwittingly tripped into the fire, breaking bones that refused to mend, oozing pus that boiled from wounds.

It was Saturday night. The cards were marked. A tongue wound its way through Mickey's cranial space, in one ear and out the other.

Owen was nostalgic for bygone days.

The impending world jerked fitfully, radiating its magnificence by the jukebox in the corner. Perhaps it was an antidote, some almighty downer planet Earth, infested with a bad case of the wobblies, must needs swallow. In which case doctors O and M had, he hoped, succeeded in administering the dose.

Whatever, it didn't hurt to put a good slant on past events. Maybe future generations might appreciate their efforts.

Words like lickerish entered Mickey's vocabulary.

Owen sensed the end. It was closing in. The credits couldn't be far behind. Things, everything, was nearly over. Then to begin again under an assumed name.

Part _deux_.

This was the Last Chance Saloon. They'd played their full part. All that remained was the denouement...

In walked nine black-clad wrongbodies, graverobbers of the greyest ilk, pale and gaunt, bandannas tied over their noses, silverware hanging jauntily from hips, steely gazes freezing everything, heads turning like radar as they made a visual sweep. Safe for the moment in their booth, Owen and Mickey chewed matchsticks and squeezed tits. Breaths held, cards laid flat on the table, cigarette smoke and tanning oil obscured their presence; the latter a pungent cloud, the former a skunky mist.

It was bar-room brawl time.

John Wayne nudged up the brim of his hat.

'Ready?' queried Owen. 'Okay then; after three.'

Butch and Sundance let rip.

The wrongbodies, wrong-footed, took rounds in the head and chest, spurting liquids and solids in a dance of fractured steps. Lead poured forth in every direction, some of it catching our heroes, who fought on regardless, trigger fingers pumping in reflex, eyes aiming down barrels invisible through noise. A thick tide of sound came up to their necks, waves of its crashing into their ears, over rocky lobes and into caves filled with stalagmites, coastal features in flood. And the more they shot the more arse-freezing, corpse-buggering bad guys there were, streaming in through the swing doors, clambering atop their comrades, slipping and dying in a slowly sinking quagmire of guts. Owen was so full of holes most of the shots fired at him went straight through, filling the booth he and Mickey had left. Mickey was a ghost of his former self, sculpted anew, attacked as if with a chisel, the over zealous artist whittling him down till he was little more than a twig. But still the battle raged. The dead were manifold, causing the boards to sag. The weight of flesh and munitions splintered the beams supporting the pub floor. The destruction wrought on the walls and ceiling brought their inevitable collapse.

Everything was silenced, buried in dust...

That showed them, thought Owen, whose number was zero. He reached underneath him for the remote but it had slipped down the back of the chair.

Mickey belched.

'Let's go out.'

'Where?'

'Side.'

'Oh...'

Jones held the world in his hands. It was oddly shaped, distended and flaking. Perhaps it was broken. It was a world of contradictions. Some of them wonderful, some of them disgusting. He prised it open with his thumbs, stretched it over his head like a crash helmet. Wriggling his arms up into it, rolling his narrow shoulders, he slowly disappeared inside, kneeling and pulling the world down over his hips and eventually his feet, until there was nothing left sticking out but his tie. The yellow bone clip had come adrift, leaving the tie dangling from the Atlantic like a gargantuan black tongue. But soon the waves closed about it. Storms raged above, volcanoes erupted below, and Jones' necktie sank like a failed continent.

Still, he cranked the barrel-organ handle.

## Shibboleth

Luckily for Henry Eels, he remembered the words; but there was still a moment there when he wondered if he'd pronounced them correctly. If there had been an explosion he hadn't heard it. Felt it perhaps, like some internal fart. And here he was in no place with a bunch of people who by all rights shouldn't be meeting like this. The missing chapter, or representatives thereof. They didn't appear to have missed many meals. Not exactly front line troops. They looked like they were born to, if not in, those seats.

Hands were shook. He let out a breath. It was quite a relief, all told...but he still wasn't sure why he was here. Summoned? Nay...that last breath of his had invoked this assembly, manifested the trestle table with its embroidered cloth and serviettes. Those magic words had delivered him, spared him, got him out of jail free. It was his own doing and they didn't looked altogether pleased.

'How do you take your tea?'

'Uh, cream and two sugars.'

'Now...' The brothers grinned, arranging themselves after some fidgeting, smiling like alligators and raising an eyebrow each. Forced polite. 'You really must tell us all about your book.'

Henry swallowed, chewed his lip. 'It's a film - a documentary.'

'Oh?'

The level of expectancy was daunting. His excuse, when it arrived, had better be good.

'It isn't finished yet,' he confessed.

As a man they laughed, gut-wrenching guffaws and raucous, belly-wobbling convulsions, accompanied by much finger pointing, tonsil rattling and spittle, either ejected open-mouthed or dribbling chinward in foamy rivulets.

Blushing, Henry held tight to his cup. Would he have his membership revoked? If he'd breached the rules, used the words unwisely...

After several minutes the mirth dissipated sufficiently for another question to be asked, punctuated by dabs of handkerchiefs to various facial cavities.

'And...this documentary...what's it called?'

The humour among them was barely suppressed, boiling like a cartoon geyser under the surface. He was terrified to open his mouth, felt small and awkward in their presence. The man quizzing him, round-faced like a blackcurrant, had his lips pressed tightly together. So tight, Henry imagined he could see juice.

'Death and Romance,' he said, wincing like a schoolgirl before a whole room of headmistress types.

Their disappointment manifested in awful frowns, jowls drooping like basset-hounds, eyelids sagging under ton weights. Equally as humiliating as their previous jocularity, he somehow found this easier to handle. Whatever his excuses, it was unlikely they'd mitigate. He'd pushed the Big Red Button and was here to explain his actions. But the words had come to him in that instant. Surely that warranted his using them? Why else would he have remembered?

Saturation point, Mr Sponge.

'You'd better get on with it then,' he was instructed, eyebrows raised, lids hoisted, heads turned askance, teaspoons jangling on saucers, handkerchiefs soiled and inspected. 'Can't have you dallying. After all, a man's calling is his duty.'

'Yes,' agreed a much relieved Henry Eels, nodding. 'Thanks for the tea.'

A penguin wearing a pom-pom hat showed him the way out.

Chapter Eight: Some Sort Of Resolution To Crises Run Amok

'You know what happens to people when they die, Frank? They go to the butcher's shop to be chopped up. Old people become mince and sausages. The middle-aged are beef. Women, incidentally, make the best steaks. The younger adults are pork - that's bacon. You like bacon? Thought you would. Teenagers are lamb chops. Kids are mushed into those meat pastes; pates and the like. And chickens, Frank, chickens are babies with their heads cut off.'

Vernon ruffled the boy's hair. He reminded him of a young Pagan. The octopus, Rudi, sat nearby munching on a plate of Yorkshire puds. If he wasn't Cherry's son, and a tool for use in the maintenance of Vernon's business interests, he might have adopted him, particularly now that that other had gone. Pa Kowolski had reclaimed Pagan, much to the frustration of Valery, Veronica and Violet. Pagan though, tramping the streets like some murderous urchin, had a chip on his shoulder the size of a house. Vernon laughed. His wives liked this child, but he was more of a curiosity to them. They played at being aunts, which they most assuredly were not (in this version anyway; the truth being more complicated), spoiling him with presents and pinching his cheeks, but there was no escaping the fact that the son of sweet Cherry Molasses - sometime model, lousy actress - was the reincarnation - after what seemed aeons of committee hearings - of Guiseppe Guido Gonaldi, undoubtedly the world's greatest ever pizza chef. Naturally, he'd been paroled on the quiet. Vernon, however, had contacts even Jones would envy, deep in the foulest darkest reaches of the most torturous bowels of rat infested perdition. Within the Other People section, no less.

It was a coup. And Vernon was more than a little proud of himself.

## Stage Managed

Once more outside the hotel, with the Ventura nowhere to be seen, Henry scratched his head, decided he had nothing to lose, and wandered back in.

The city was a blur, a fast fading montage of buildings to his rear, its noise as if filtered through cushions, one clamped over each ear. Ileum held distant and at bay. He entered under a high marble portico, red-veined and glossy. To either side were pillars, singular, paired and in threes. No longer dark, the interior opened up like an air cavity in some exotic cheese. The floor was marble, deep blue and grey, carpeted in places by narrow vermilion rugs with long gold tassels either end. Worn through in places, he noticed, as if there was usually a long queue of shuffling feet approaching the reception desk, a black semi-circle of stone jutting out from the wall at the far end of this magnificent lobby. It was empty. Chandeliers hung in discreet bunches, like translucent grapes. Henry walked up to the desk and looked behind it, pulling himself over the green marble top, hinging his thin frame across its gold-painted edges. Nothing. The hotel was deserted. Entirely? he thought. Maybe there was a fire drill or something. There had to be guests; only there was no evidence of such, no paper evidence, no guestbook he could see, no memo pads or telephone directories. No telephone. No writing implement. Just the desk, which reminded him of a cheap ashtray.

And the inevitable door. Behind it, an upright rectangular crack. No handle.

Half a dozen elevators were ranked either side. Henry ignored them. Not wishing to be taken for a second ride, he clambered over the desk and faced the inevitable.

He walked down a long passage into an ante-room where burned a fire in an oil drum, newspaper on the floor and placards scattered, their legends succinct: ABANDON ALL HOPE...he read...THE DIE IS CAST...words painted in blood and phlegm, crudely scrawled on canvasses of stretched skin. Whoever had warmed themselves here had disappeared. Not long since, as the flames still licked through and sparks lifted from the beaten container.

Henry shivered, holding his nose against the smoke. He crossed the room of placards to a mesh fence, barbed wire coiled at its top, giving home to many volts. Beyond the mesh was a field, daisies poking cautious heads, and past the field a factory whose chimneys gutted, whose silence deafened, to one side of it a string of brightly coloured trucks. He had no way of guessing what was manufactured here. The trucks bore logos, but he failed to make them out. The words were too small, although he could see a smiling face.

Wait a minute. That face was familiar, it went with a tune in his head, the music he'd spent summer days chasing across busy roads into neighbouring regions, foreign parts little Henry Eels wasn't meant to know existed. Dodgy council estates where nobody ever washed and children ran the risk of being lost up chimneys. But, but...Mr Jolly's Ice-cream! That's whose face, one huge smile with two eyes and a curl of hair atop. Why so many secrets? Mr Jolly did look a bit sinister, come to think of it. Had his parents been right? What was in that frozen dairy product? Strange how everyone suddenly wanted it when it was hot. Hot as Hell, that particular summer, he recalled. Henry turned left and followed the fence to a gate.

From inside, a limousine approached, long and black with acres of mirrored glass and menacing chrome.

He stood like a beggar outside some rich mansion, hands in pockets and collar turned up against the cold.

The gate was twofold, like those in a safari park, the outer not opening till the inner had closed.

The limousine entered this cage, paused, then continued, exiting in a calm flow of steel. Rubber sucked the road, brake-lights bringing the sleek vehicle to a halt a short distance hence. One of the rear doors popped. A hand emerged, velvet gloved, and a finger wagged. Henry stayed where he was. The hand retreated, reappearing seconds later holding a video cassette and shaking it like a box of cat food. His whiskers twitched. A leg emerged next, high-heeled and long. The hand dragged the cassette up the thigh, laddering the stocking. Both hand and leg then moved back inside the car. The door closed and the sunroof opened, a sliding black panel. Henry watched, fascinated. The hand was extended. It waved. And the leg, dancing on air, lithe and inverted, both after a few seconds dropping from view.

The car reversed closer. Something shot from the roof a hundred metres toward the misted grey ceiling, what purported to be sky. It spun madly, taking his eyes while the limousine stealthily edged away. The object reached its nadir and seemed to hang a moment before tumbling back to earth, Henry sucking breath as he manoeuvred to catch. But he missed, slipping on a cigarette pack, and the head, as such it was, splashed face down into the tarmac.

The car stopped abruptly. Henry toed the skull, its blonde hair matted, rolling it over with his shoe.

Smashed beyond recognition.

He listened as the limousine's engine revved angrily. The door opened again.

Running for it, he instinctively new what he'd find. Spread and smeared across leather, the very limbs that had gestured, separated from their torso, which was held upright by a seat-belt, wearing a black cocktail dress and a spray of old man's fingers.

Henry rifled the various entertainment and drink cabinets, finding what he wanted in the shape of an instamatic. Held at arm's length, shoulder to shoulder with the dismembered corpse, he took a snap just as the car lurched forward, causing her neck to bubble and her breasts to jiggle, the leg with the laddered stocking to roll onto the lushly carpeted floor and the door slam shut.

Number seventy-seven.

Henry leaned forward and rapped his knuckles off the darkened glass separating them from the driver's compartment.

No reply.

The door-pads contained no switches, no buttons or levers for opening or lowering windows.

There was a TV, which he also failed to operate, and a radio. This issued cello music from hidden speakers, a sound big enough to fill an amphitheatre, huge swathes of tortured noise that raked up the back of his throat like a sneeze. Each chord was a unique and delirious virus, stirring his brain and liquefying his nasal tissue, clots of it dangling like pizza cheese, soaking his newly bloodied clothes, adding snot and his own peculiar odour to the already saturated environment of his travelling companion and her ingredients.

Accelerating, they struck a soft bump in the road, followed by something hard and metallic, which jammed under the front of the car. Whatever it was punctured the radiator and raised the grill in a snarl, like a lizard choking on a cricket.

The engine stalled.

He managed to push the door open. Its mechanism released, the steel and glass hung on its hinges like a broken pinion.

Outside, the sun shone. There was a beach, an esplanade with coin-operated telescopes, a boardwalk with litter and lifebuoys. The signatured remains of an old pillbox sat atop a reinforced concrete dune.

Henry squinted, taking in the fabulous light, the colours of ocean and waves, sand and flesh, decorative awnings, souvenir shops and umbrellas. Children ran along the shore toting plastic buckets and spades, wearing nothing but floppy hats. Parents in swim-suits walking after, stepping over sun-worshippers, spreaders of creams and ointments who held books over their faces, who loosened and tied bikini straps. He took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers. The beach curved away in either direction, a smoothly undulating crescent whose populace crawled and swam, sucked in guts and flirted, ate from wrappers and re-sealable containers, disrobed under towels and played sports with nets and goals of sand-castles. Wedged under the front of the limousine was a motorbike, petrol streaming round its fins and exhaust. He thought about the juncture of machines a moment before skipping down a flight of concrete steps. Their meeting seemed relevant in some arcane way, like star-crossed lovers here grabbing a few moments before they were separated forever.

Wriggling his toes in the fine mica, washed for centuries, pushed and dragged and moulded, Henry felt strangely disenchanted. The beach was a vision of things how they might have been, he reckoned, the good life built on these unsettling foundations. That he had turned his back on such an existence, supposing it banal, made it no less easy for him to reject its reality. If he was to walk along this sandy length he would no doubt encounter himself soaking up rays in the company of beautiful ladies, smiling grandly at passers-by, a picture of success, portly and satisfied. He'd feel jealous, and rightly. His present self would look like a failure. Henry walked over to the nearest stall, dressed as a giant sausage, and bought himself a hot-dog, strings of mustard adding to his shirt-front Jackson Pollock.

The girl serving showed plenty of cleavage. In this idyllic summer, she was most probably available.

A kid rolled toward him on roller-blades, shorts to his brown knees, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and blue-tinted sunglasses. He dangled a bag of goodies. Henry chewed with his mouth open, pretending not to notice. He felt like an undercover detective, adopting the pose in order to dissuade the pusher. But the kid just grinned, shaking the bag, offering it to him. So wiping his mouth with a napkin, Henry took it, waiting for the kid to roll away before looking inside.

In the bag was a strip of photos, the kind you get from seafront booths, fat lady and bald gentlemen in striped Edwardian swimwear, a crab nipping one hairy toe, a beach ball bouncing suggestively, in the background a lighthouse and a pair of lissom beauties. The faces pressed through paint and plywood were both female, one winking slyly, the other with her tongue stuck out, tasting the salt air like a python.

He knew who they were. Not their names, their true names, but their nature. They brought him two steps closer. Of the initial eighty, now only one thing remained.

The sound of a prop brought his head up. Henry shaded his eyes, descrying a rickety biplane, a woman wing-walking and a banner trailing. Words written large: HAPPY BIRTHDAY HENRY!

He felt a lump in his throat. How could he have forgotten? How could they have known?

The sun shook, jostling shadows.

Finally losing its balance, the bright orange orb crashed into the ocean, plip...dissolving like a vitamin C tablet.

Everything, every man, woman and child, fell silent. The night sky crowded in from either side, black drapes drawn across a firmament at whose heart was a conspicuous absence, a window that looked through you rather than you it.

The temperature dropped. He climbed back into his socks and shoes and rolled down his trouser legs.

He stashed the photos in an inside pocket, then fumbled around in the dark until he found a way out. Henry hadn't been in this game so long and not learned a thing or two. Playing the game meant bending the rules. He pictured a monkey hand-cranking an ancient projector - that was all it took to undermine the illusion and step outside the default view. Naturally, another view replaced it, another monkey. And so on, etc. An infinity of monkeys busily monkeying away, doing what monkeys do.

He was in his parents' living-room. There was the piano, the aspidistra, the urn. There was the portrait of his aunt, stern and gaunt. There was the antimacassar with the cigarette burns and the claw-marked feet. No sign of either his parents or the cat. He had last seen this room when he was six. It was no coincidence, he conjectured, them being in the hotel business. There were forty two rooms for rent beyond the half dozen they occupied, all en suite, most with a sea view.

Music came from next door, an old vinyl recording. The gramophone played in the library, a room he was forbidden to enter. Once, he'd opened the door a fraction, and seen his father naked, a chambermaid on his knee, holding a feather duster and a cake slice. He'd heard his mother's voice, talking calmly of jam sponges while changing the record, one of hundreds his father brought home in cardboard boxes, each in a square brown envelope. The scene, barely glimpsed, had frightened him, a disturbing vignette of adult life; what grown-ups did behind closed doors, deceitful and unkind, a face they held away from youngsters. Thenceforth Henry believed his parents to be damned, their deaths in a boating accident doing nothing to change his mind, reinforcing the image of corruption stolen that day. Listening to the music now made him queasy. Hadn't he gorged on Mr Jolly Lollies post funeral? He couldn't eat anything warm for weeks, spending hours peering into the walk-in freezer while the chefs hunched their shoulders and folded their lips, expressing sympathy for the boy the only way they knew how: Black Forest gateau. It made him sick. He felt sick again. But the room drew him strongly. He and it were connected. Anyway, it was just his beloved playing hard to get, part and parcel of his ensorcellment.

## In Fabulous Technicolor

'According to this,' said Nancy, 'the year is nineteen eighty-two.'

'Yeah?'

'I'm still at school!'

Swene had to think about it; just not too hard.

'Don't you see?'

'No,' he replied, more interested in the pictures than the dates. 'Please clarify.'

She scowled menacingly. He wasn't taking this seriously. She was supposed to be leaning on him, not the other way round.

'All that's happened hasn't happened yet,' she told him. 'We appear to be at some crossroads, a point in history - and we can argue about history later - where the probable and the possible hold equal weight.'

Swene needed a shave. They were in the office of a taxi firm, the office doubling as a waiting room. Judging by the prices displayed in the vending machine, this was an enclave of the past; there was even a Space Invaders. But who was to say what decade prevailed beyond the taxi firm's door?

A toilet flushed, the receptionist returning, straightening her skirt and sliding on heels toward a desk with a mike and a phone.

'Five minutes,' she said without them asking, lipstick smudged and teeth tobacco stained.

They could have caught a bus, only Nancy felt that left them exposed.

And returning to her apartment didn't? Swene had lost the argument, however, conceding the need for her to communicate with the world by fax and phone, via email, that if she was correct in her assessment of the current time-frame didn't exist outside of academic circles, like her apartment didn't exist, like all they would find was an empty warehouse, dank and dark, rats in the stairwell and broken glass in the yard.

He mentioned this, worried she was losing the plot.

'It's not important,' she answered. 'I just need to get home.'

A grid reference, he supposed. Those didn't change. Nothing altered up and down, east and west, left and right. What she sought was a compass point, an anchorage from which to orient herself and the rest of reality, a starting position consistent with her perceptual language, the nomenclature of Nancy Kowolski as understood by Nancy Kowolski and nobody else. He supposed he had his own. Nancy was tired of slaying demons, although she would never admit as much. She was nine years old in 1982, old enough to start asking awkward questions. As a joke Pa had given her a pencil and notepad, something he came to regret as she followed him about the house and garden, quizzing him over details of her sketchy past. It was her mother she wanted to talk about. The one subject Pa was reluctant to broach. She understood she was different from the other kids, yet all she got from her old man was the occasional oblique reference: she did this, she did that, she did another thing. And now? 'She went away, kid. She was always meant to be some place else.' Nancy chewed her lip and stamped her foot. Pa shrugged and rubbed his hands together now the garage extension was near complete. 'I'll take you on an adventure one day, Nance,' he promised. 'To Venus by steam train. You just see if I don't.' She guessed now was too late. Or was it? She just needed to get a fix. On her step-father, her sister...her mother even. And hold her breath. Tune in to that ghostly wavelength and follow it back when...

Static came over the mike. The receptionist waved with her nail file.

Another cab ride, thought Swene, I must be nuts. Was this any way to tackle life's problems? Galumphing around a dissolving universe one step ahead of an invisible, pyrotechnic nemesis.

Nancy was unusually quiet. The traffic too, slow-moving and torpid, afflicted by some peculiar automotive lethargy, as if driving through air the consistency of shampoo. The city slithered, moving gel-like outside the windows, its citizens open-mouthed with effort, their expressions smudged. The sky was pale green and orange, a sickly citrus beverage. Recognizable landmarks appeared alien, coated with a translucent skin, shops and homes and monuments like cadavers embalmed and painted with a preserving varnish, a necessary glue. Without it the city would fly apart, separating into layers, flakes of concrete and wood, flesh and steel crumbling like old bones or dried seed pods. Both fertilizer and plant, future growth from this reluctant medium, here adhering to the past, refusing to move, to put forth or even germinate. Perhaps the result would be fungoid, all soft velvet folds. Perhaps cactaceous, lush and spiked. Either might produce a cocktail of hallucinogenics.

The taxi deposited them by the river, Nancy paying with crushed paper money dug out from the back of the seat. Scrapyards dominated, each corrugated steel shed resounding with the toil of dismembering motor vehicles, pools of oil leaking out from under heavy roller doors. The water was pink.

A newspaper blew along the quay, wrapping itself round Swene's leg. He picked it up and smoothed the front page.

Missing Girl Found, it read.

He recognized the face.

He turned to show Nancy, but she was away in search of a future, a hundred metres distant and fading.

Swene let her go. He took off the bike jacket and unfurled his cape. He ought to catch up with Owen and Mickey, he reckoned. Maybe organize a Super Hero convention. Seemed apt somehow, given this super-violent, cartoonish landscape.

Hence:

## Revolutions Per Minute

At the end of the record, as the needle lifted, Henry opened the door. In the library were no books, the shelves, wall to wall, containing sleeved recordings, voices of the living, the once living and the dead. A child cranked the gramophone, its huge trumpet a metal orchid coiling shell-like to a point, hinged upward between musical interludes, orchestral pieces or monologues. The sounds this instrument made, brought forth, laterally reproduced, had haunted him when he was this child's age. The stylus in its spiral groove produced sound waves via a diaphragm which were amplified by the divergent horn, reverberating through the air, the plaster and paint, gnawing in his ear like tiny burrowing insects. Human voices, etched in plastic, crowded his skull, an elevator in which he was trapped. Henry had no choice but to listen. The melodies, happy and sad, longing and tragic; the discourses, arguments, rebuttals; they were catalogued in the library, stacked in alphabetical order, by category. Similarly in his brain, a panorama of loss and hope and anguish. Music, crackling, straining to be heard, made a museum of life and death in his head, its institution shaping his development. He was the curator, a post he'd inherited and subsequently neglected, the guardian of past and present selves, all of which might be replayed, all of which might be scratched.

Henry Eels was home, but not by choice. And the child? A girl of about four, she carefully selected a title, sliding the plastic disc from its cover and placing it centrally on the plate. Next she delicately lowered the needle and stepped back, no fear of loss on her face, staring at the skinny man as if poised with some truth. The seconds were longueurs, empty passages of silence before the pertinent facts, an eternity Henry used to contemplate ear-muffs. He had no wish to hear, but what he heard brought him to the conclusion of his quest. Her voice, frozen in time, singing to a piano accompaniment.

Epilogue

She checked her makeup in the vanity mirror. Outside the sun shone, impaling the world on tines of heat that stripped the clothes off people and burned their shadows into the pavement should they stand still too long. Black marks meant victims, people whose souls were dilute, thinned to this residue by the actions of a star high and close. Those souls would grow back in time, swelling like summer fruit, one day to fall or be plucked, landing in hers or others' buckets. Death herself, in person at the bedsides of strangers, those souls given over to the library by natural causes.

There was just too many for her alone to cope; thus the hired help. Not that the hiring and firing was ever straight forward. And those political animals were increasingly determined to flout her jurisdiction. Although to be fair they always shot themselves in the foot.

Hypocrites.

Puckering, the silent girl touched up her lipstick. Men, she knew, were enamoured of her; or at least the idea of her, which was probably more important.

Thorp though, was giving her funny looks.

He'd wondered at that knocking in the TR7's boot, she guessed, and taken a peek.

'Yes?'

deuce

